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Lara Croft to turn games players away from piracy

Lame slogan to defeat criminals, apparently

The European Leisure Software Publishers Association (Elspa) has recruited Tomb Raider star Lara Croft, she of the unfeasibly large pixellated paps, to fight software piracy. With a cry of "Don't play games with criminals -- it will all end in tears!", Lara will (apparently) strike fear into the hearts of 14-year-old boys everywhere and turn them away from the dark path of duplicating each others' CDs or buying dodgy copies from car boot sales. At least that's Elspa's goal. It claims 80 per cent of the games pirates it has investigated had links with other forms of criminality, including drugs, prostitution, porn and even terrorism. Indeed, it was well known that the late Carlos 'The Jackal' would punch out illegal copies of Manic Miner to fund his international terror campaign. Still, piracy is a serious business -- Elspa calculates that the UK games industry loses £3 billion annually through piracy, while the taxman lost £525 million last year, poor thing. ®

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