Laws of Play

San Diego GOP Chairman: Video Game Pirate?

According to a lengthy article posted at The Raw Story, San Diego Republican Chairman and head of the state party’s budget committee Tony Krvaric is co-founder of Fairlight, one of the world’s largest and oldest software cracking rings. Krvaric, known online as “Strider,” started Fairlight in 1987 with two friends, “Black Shadow” and “Gollum.” The group of Swedish high schoolers quickly rose to prominence among online bulletin board users for cracking the copy protection on Commodore 64 games that Krvaric would “borrow” from his job in a Swedish game store. After the games were cracked, Krvaric and his friends would post the software to the Internet where it would be downloaded by other users for free.

The Raw Story chronicles Krvaric’s cracking accomplishments and Fairlight’s history, which includes setting up offices in California, recruiting new crackers, and selling a variety of goods from game copying devices to nonperishable foodstuffs.

Krvaric has failed to publicly respond to the allegations, but an alleged internal communication by Krvaric has been leaked to the Internet:

“Apparently there’s a hit piece floating around on me, “exposing” my wild high school, teenage years where I was in a computer club where we swapped Commodore 64 games (similar to how kids swap mp3 music files these days),” he wrote Monday. “This was in the 80’s, on a computer that’s long since defunct!”

The supposed letter also stated:

“I’m sure glad they didn’t look in to my elementary school years, as there’s some really embarrassing stuff that I did in 4th grade…. BTW, I also heard a rumor that another fellow committee member (who shall remain unnamed) once made a tape copy of his friend’s favorite vinyl record.”

“I don’t know who is spreading this, but just wanted to let you know what’s going on out there. Likely it’s someone who wants us to take our eye off the ball in 2008, be it the democrats, labor or someone else. Either way, we’re not going to let them get away with it. Thanks for your leadership.”

A list of Krvaric’s Commodore 64 cracking accomplishments can be found here. For further reading, check out the full article on The Raw Story.