I suggest you try and make it so that pirated copies will not work, then try and get rockstar to support it.
Surely with their help, you could make a kickass mod, and ideally one day they could distribute the elusive version 1.0 witht he game, or at least put it on their web page.
Surely there's money in it for them, and a great game in it for us (ie, everyone else). MTA's the reason I bought the PC version of Vice City. Imagine how much Quake or Unreal would have made if they hadn't had multiplayer. Yet look how much money GTA has made, imgaine how much more it could be...
Has Rockstar acknowledged the existence of MTA in any way?
My other suggestion is a LAN-only version that makes use of high-bandwidth features (cops, peds, traffic) that are simply impractical on internet play.
