http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=83004

[ATMachine]

Technically the ban is closer to 8000 years.

I had a friend who once upon a time owned a leaked pre-release copy of Monkey Island 2 (one with 12 green verbs as in the original MI1). I do wonder how he came across it, living in Florida in the pre-Internet days...

[aries323]

I have followed this from the justadventure.com site where there is a link, in the other games forum, to the thread in the se7ensins.com forum about this.

In this thread scar (or maybe it was in the bungie forums thread? about this) said that he had 4 xboxes, and it was only 1 of them that got banned. So, he'll probably survive.

From what he said he got the pre-release Halo 3 epsilon from a friend who perhaps got it from another friend. Basically, the Epsilon is an invite beta demo of the game only. And he shouldn't have done what he did - that much is clear.

However, bungie and microsoft needs to make sure that this doesn't happen at all. Security measures haven't been near tight enough from what I can tell.
In the bungie and se7ensins.com people who apparently weren't invited to the Epsilon demo for Halo3 could see it in their downloads list. And being human, they couldn't resist the temptation.

As for Scar's ban, this is OK. However, I don't understand why bungie and MS don't ban other people that have done the same as Scar did?? And someone in Bungie or MS must be responsible for Scar's friend getting access to the Epsilon demo.

More generally, I have to say that MS and Bungie's basically say that when you buy an Xbox 360 and Halo 3, you don't have any rights as a consumer, unless these consumer rights are spelled out in the EULA. This is worrying, I think, since this means that (big) corporations just can create their own customer rights - which is in violation of consumer's rights laws in individual countries...

Basically MS and Bungie reserve the right to monitor everything you do on the Xbox 360 when you're online - when they feel like it. Brave New World and 1984 has long been here...

edit:

And no, it wasn't me - since I don't have an xbox 360 And let me say that what scar has done is both illegal? and immoral and unethical...