Starforce links warez on their forum

As you may know, Starforce is a copy protection scheme used to prevent illegal copying of intellectual property, manely used for game protection. There's a lot of controversy around the Starforce copy protection. Quite some users have reported malfunctioning operating systems, security issues, slow CD drive speeds, even to the point of physically destroying CD-Rom drives. Ofcourse the company claims their software is perfectly safe, in contrast users are reporting the above mentioned problems. Whoever is right, I do not know. What I do know is that usually, where there is smoke, there's most probably a fire. For more information what games are using Starforce, and how to remove the drivers it installs, I recommend that you visit the Starforce Boycot website.

A few weeks ago a game called Galactic Civilizations 2: Dread Lords was released. Nothing out of the ordinary you would think, except for the fact that this game doesn't use any copy protection whatsoever. It has a serial number, which you would only need when you want to download updates for the game, or when you want to access the online "Metaverse". This game has some great salesfigures, even claiming to be bestselling software at Walmart, without any copy protection.
This caused quite a stir on the internet, and quite some sites reported the good sales.

Now what happened is that someone had posted a link to such an article on the Starforce forum, to question wether or not copy protection increases sales. Here comes the shocking part, an administrator of Starforce replied with a link to a torrent website that had an illegal copy of the software, claiming thousands of people are downloading the game right now. To me this looks like some mafia practices... "Hey you don't use our copy protection, watch this, we'll help spread the illegal copies". Stardock, the creator of the game, made a statement about this on their website. The link was removed on both the Starforce forum and the torrent site it was linking to.

However, this leaves me with one question. Is Starforce a legitimate Russian company, or are they Russian mafia in disguise?