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No, please explain to me how preventing someone from playing "BACKUP games (and pirated games as a side effect)" is "evil". I really don't see the connection.

It may be disappointing. I may not like it. But murder is evil. Denying people their basic human rights is evil. Torture is evil.

It is hard for me to swallow that a law that prevents you from circumventing a digital copy protection scheme is "evil".

Perhaps I misunderstand the word evil? I don't believe I've ever actually looked up it's definition.

Unless you're talking about Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin, or the like; "evil" is a word best reserved for use by comic books and George W. Bush.

Let me paint you a picture of how the DMCA might not only be "un-evil" but perhaps justified:

1. Like it or not, these publishers have a *legal* right to the works they create, or fund the creation of.
   So, they publish these works. Unscrupulous people pirate them.
2. They ask "please don't do that". Shockingly, this doesn't work.
3. Console makers decide that the situation is untenable and decide they have to do something. They take manners into their own hands, and implement protection schemes to make it very hard to run unsigned code. This has a tremendous effect on diminishing piracy / bootlegs, and unlicensed games. Both of which the publishers and console makers consider to be a "win".
4. Smart people who don't like this, because they feel this trods on some kind of inalienable rights to run unsigned code on bizzaro hardware come up with ways to bypass these protections
5. An arms race has started. Both sides realize there is no way that the console makers can ever stave off the bypassers forever. But the console makers have a legitimate concern for the protection of their works. So they lobby to have legislation passed to not only digitally protect their work, but legally make it a crime to pick the proverbial lock.

While there are of course *significant* differences between physical and digital goods. This is no diffrent in this respect than the way shoplifting laws evolved.

1. Shops came. They had goods. They charged for these goods.
2. Some people tried to get around paying for the goods by sneaking goods out of the store.
3. Shopkeepers invested in cases and locks to keep goods secure from shoplifters.
4. Some shoplifters were not deterred. Determined to shoplift, they learned to pick locks, or find other more creative ways to circumvent the protections shopkeepers had implemented to protect their goods.
5. Eventually, as a society, we decided that just because you *could* bypass the protections, because you are smart / talented / sneaky / whatever; doesn't mean you should have a *right* to. Eventually as society progressed, this is formalized in law.

You can walk into Wal-Mart if you like. Pick the lock on the electronics case, and browse all you like. Don't steal a thing. It's still illegal to bypass this protection, regardless of the fact that you just wanted to read the package.

I Realize the biggest problem is that you purchase the console. So it feels like you should have the right to do whatever you wish to it. Well currently, the law disagrees. And if there was no reason for it to disagree, I'd be 100% behind you. But I see the other side of the argument. And to me, it's more compelling. To tell publishers that they can't do anything, and anything they do will have zero backing from the laws that are supposed to protect their copyright... that strikes me as unrealistic and wrong.

I'd like to see some links in this thread. Someone send me pictures of your backup games. In front of your pile of originals. Like so:

http://pyromosh.org/images/misc/show_me_the_backups.jpg

I believe that *someone* out there does this. But I'll be surprised if I get even one response. I really do believe that there's next to nobody that chips their co

If I remember correctly, Mythbusters had to use rotational speeds that were several times what a real drive will do. 300x or so?

One night my girlfriend were sitting at our PCs, which were right next to each other. We heard a very loud, very sudden bang or pop noise out of nowhere. Looked at each other, and looked around the room and couldn't figure out what that noise was.

When we couldn't figure out what that loud noise was, we forgot about it, and figured that if it was important, we'd find it eventually. So we went back to what we were doing.

She was starting up a game of StarCraft, and finally noticed that the game had failed to load, giving an error message about being unable to read the CD.

She tried again. It was then that it dawned on me what that noise might had been. I had certainly *heard* of optical discs exploding, but had not had it happen to me, nor anyone I personally knew.

Here's what was left, when I removed her drive:

http://pyromosh.org/images/misc/Broodwar_CD_explosion/

The drive was indeed hosed, as you might expect. But no shrapnel ever escaped the drive, nor even made a visible impact on the drive casing.

Graphical comparison

This is just obligatory.