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DRM-free games might be pirated, even to the same point as DRM games but the deference is that the DRM-free games didn't have to pay extra money for the tech behind the normal DRM. Things like Starforce aren't free, so in the end you might end up making more by just saving on the price of Starforce... or a company can learn to make a good game but doubt that will happen (remember even though games like Bioshock, Starcraft 2, Modern Warfare 3, ect... were pirated many more people bought the games because they were, you know, good games worth buying).

In some ways this is try, I think perhaps you are thinking primarily of application software, however...

Games software in particular are still neck-deep in particularly nasty DRM. Some protections go so far as to refuse to run if they detect drive emulation software - which I might add is not illegal or even immoral to have installed. So software you bought will refuse to install until you uninstall software it doesn't like (sometimes, simply turning off the emulation software isn't enough.)

Worse than that, one protection in particular - Star Force (http://www.star-force.com/protection/protection.p html?c=65) is so proactive in "managing" your digital rights that it has caused many legitimate consumers to be unable to run software they paid for due to the amount of false positives it generates. (Detecting perfectly legitimate software or hardware, many of which that would have nothing to do with piracy or a very lateral connection).

Star-force is so invasive and frustrating for users that some game companies (as I recall, the company behind Galactic Civ's was one) have spoken out against it's use.

And thats only games. High end applications is just as bad. How many people out there remember dealing with plug in hardware dongles? They are still used. A financial package in use at the company I work for requires one to be purchased for each user, and I recall 3DS Max required one some years ago when we used it in a classroom setting.

The software industry is pushing DRM as strongly as ever, they've just abandoned manual page checks (people photocopied manuals), and floppy disk sectors (no-one uses floppies) as useless. Especially these days - a lot of early rpg's used "journal entries", number paragraphs in the manual that the game would tell you to look up instead of displaying the text, as a form of copy protection. It may have been marginally successful then, but these days with incredibly cheap scanners and bandwidth making pdf swapping so cheap, it's not worth the effort.

For as long as there are people afraid they wont get paid, there will be people ready to invent the most horrendously invasive DRM's to frustrate the hell out of us.

What we need is a new economic theory for digital commerce, where the economics of scarcity can no longer apply. (DRM is simply a way of trying to force the scarcity economic model to work for a product, one of the fundamental properties of which is that it will never be scarce. We have plenty of bits ;) )

StarForce at work!

If you can prove and reproduce this, Starforce will pay you $10,000.

I remember seeing a note about this on star-force homepage.
They offered $10,000 reward and all-expenses paid round-trip to moscow to their headquarters, if you could replicate situation where starforce actually did some damage to optical drives.
The competition is over by now, apparently no one tried to prove it right, link here.

Since the company has demonstrated by its actions that it understands no language but that of the dollar, saying "Bad Starforce! Bad!" is clearly ineffective. Let's put it in terms they can get.

Can I ask everyone who's disgusted by this latest event and therefore swears to join the boycott and purchase no product with Starforce protection to say so?

*Raises hand*

Well, so was I, as well as tipping off their web host about a DMCA violation. But I wanted the address of the page with the link to the warez site. And I found it. And they removed the link. This is the article that shows up in the screenshot at the Galactic Civ site

Well, the StarForce Forum Administrator who made the post (with torrent link) is from Russia.

What he did might not be illegal over there.

Legalities aside, what he did is certainly extremely hypocritical considering later in the thread he points to the forum rules and says anyone else posting links to pirated materials will have their posts deleted.

http://www.star-force.com/forum/index.php?showtopi c=670&st=20#, if you want to see for yourself.

The forum admin linked to a torrent search of GalCiv II...that is utterly shameful.

But if I ever needed a tangible reason to not use Starforce products, this would be enough.

The damaging is probably bogus sice noone claimed the prize http://www.star-force.com/protection.phtml?c=261&i d=707

SF protection is really a pain in as*, Especially if you have multiple titles installed. One update and your neverend nightmare begings.

Well, personally I handled this case of corporate thuggery in the same manner as I handle all cases I encounter.

I added star-force to the list of companies I refuse goods and services from and sent an e-mail to their sales department: sales@star-force.com calmly informing them that I will no longer be purchasing star-force protected content, not for the merits or dismerits or their product, but because of their corporate actions.

At your own expense you arrive to StarForce headquarter which is placed in Russia, Moscow, Altufievskoe shosse, 5/2. Please arrange your visit with us beforehand and during working hours 10 AM to 6PM Monday through Friday Mo
http://www.star-force.com/gloss.phtml?c=272scowtim e.

First, the contest was, until very recently only $1000, not really a large bounty.
if you read their rules you have to travel at YOUR expense to moscow to demonstrate the problem. You then have to demonstrate in ONE DAY a problem with the DVD/CD drive which "Until it reaches the latter stages most people do not even realise it is happening."
The contest is a PR move with rules constructed to make winning impossible. The bashing has been on target and valid.

http://www.star-force.com/protection.phtml?c=83&id =692

Has anyone actually suffered from the instability described? Apparently, StarForce has a contest for this, offering $10,000 and a free trip to Moscow for proof.

Using your PC (the subject PCs hardware must be under warranty terms) or any StarForce office PC you demonstrate that:
- All the drives in the system are properly functioning prior to the installation of a StarForce protected product of your choice. A legal version of operational system must be installed and there must be no other third company products installed. StarForce experts have full access to the subject PC for verification of installed software.
- After the installation and start-up of StarForce protected product (the product itself must not be hazardous for optical drives) the CD or DVD drive in the subject PC is not reading CD/DVD discs or the drive is not writing CD/DVD discs.
- After this demonstration the subject Drive must be removed from the subject PC and installed into any other computer that has no StarForce protected products or drivers installed, that has a legal version of operational system and has no third company products installed. StarForce experts have full access to the subject PC for verification of installed software.

Should the subject Drive fail to read or write CD/DVD discs in the second PC, you will be acknowledged the Winner.

That last sentence means that you must make the software actually physically fubar you drive to the point it will not work in ANY SYSTEM without starforce protection. Everyone knows starforce isn't physically smashing drives with hammers; they are breaking drivers to the point one needs to reinstall Windows.

This contest will never be won.

As a side note, if you decide you want to try to win this contest anyway, you must foot the bill to fly to Moscow (the one on the other side of the planet) and show the folks in the office.

Perhaps your view is because you are not aware of the very extensive evidence that has previously been posted in highly respective technical forums in the past about this subject.

Read this from Tom's Hardware's Aaron McKenna:
http://www.tgdaily.com/2005/10/01/the_war_on_game_ pirates/index.html

Read the follow up letter by Starforce:
http://www.star-force.com/protection/protection.ph tml?c=256&id=658

Read Aaron's response letter to Dennis Zhidkov at:
http://www.glop.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=93

Ubi has received numerous emails from registered users of their games who have experienced this problem and are investigating them. Check their forums for more details on that.

Starforce regularly LOCKS and even deletes threads on their own forums whenever someone posts requesting for help with problems related to those discussed here, so they can keep up the pretense of not having any legitimate reports of problems.

I completely agree with Aaron's letter. When copy protection seeks to do modification to a person's system, regardless of what kind of "permission" they confuse the end user into giving them, then copy protection is going too far.

StarForce can be found here. Put your eye protection on first, the site might make your eyes bleed! They use the worst looking fonts I've seen in years!

StarForce can be found here. Put your eye protection on first, the site might make your eyes bleed! They use the worst looking fonts I've seen in years!

The StarForce forum allows you to post without making an account. Try http://star-force.com/forum/index.php and tell them what you think!

Here you go, click away! http://www.star-force.com/

http://www.star-force.com/computer_security/protec tion.phtml?c=77

I found this download page with lots of large downloads. Now to see if I can run them all on OS X simultaneously...

Even better -- they've got a contest to duplicate the alleged damage to CD/DVD drives as a result of their software. The contest is worth $10k USD, and a free trip to Moscow to demonstrate.

Dennis Zhidkov
PR Manager
StarForce Technologies
Altufevskoe shosse, 5/2
127106 Moscow, Russia
Tel +7 (095) 9671451
Fax +7 (095) 9671452
ICQ: 75-371-896
E-mail: denis.zhidkov@star-force.com
Http: http://www.star-force.com/

Check out http://www.star-force.com/protection.phtml?c=261&i d=707 for a claim that star force makes. They say if you can prove that their software causes the noted problems with dvd drives they will give you $10,000. Not that I believe they would actually pay you, or would expect anybody to travel to Moscow to do it, but it's pretty funny.

Wonderful .... IIRC there weren't many DVDs available for download in the days when you had to point your camcorder at the screen to "copy" it. DRM isn't about absolutes, something you still fail to realise, it's about making it awkward enough that nobody bothers making copies (and/or uploading them). In the case of smartcard DRM this basically means making it expensive enough.

I did your google search, smirking all the while. No surprise, it doesn't give the results you claim, and for the most part says exactly the opposite. It's full of instructions for cracking starforce protected games.

Most of those instructions either don't work, are specific to badly protected games or involve rewiring the internals of your computer - something most potential pirates are not going to bother with. There's no generic software crack for StarForce and never has been. Even if you could decrypt the game content, the crack would be the same size as the original game, posing problems for distribution.

Of course if you're not ignorant of the underlying engineering issues you wouldn't be surprised.

I have excellent knowledge of the underlying engineering issues. I've reverse engineered more than one copy protection system in my time in order to make it run on Wine, and I can absolutely believe the claims I read about StarForce. It's surprising that they managed it, but not too surprising. Of course how well protected the game is depends on how much effort the developers put in ...

There are various lists of uncracked games (or games that took a long time to crack), like the one here.

...is that the PC-version has been in stores for WEEKS, and it's STILL not cracked! I guess the new version of the protection "StarForce 3" was really hard to crack!

Perhaps you should try the the 'removal tool':

sfdrvrem.zip

Man at Computer: Hey...what the hell?
Dork Behind Him: What is the matter with you?
Chick: Looks like he ran afoul of Star Force's copyright protection!
Dork: Ha ha!
Chick: *snicker*
Man: Shut the hell up you two!
Dork: OMG YOUR MEGAHURTZ HAS BEEN STOL3D!!
Chick: All your CD-ROM belong to Star Force.

Among the groups targeted by Fastlink are well-known organizations such as Fairlight, Kalisto, Echelon, Class and Project X, all of which specialized in pirating computer games, and music release groups such as APC.

I've been downloading software, music and apps for the last eight years via FTP, IRC, newsgroups, and now Emule, but I've only heard of Fairlight and Class. Music release groups don't get a lot of publicity since it doesn't take much skill to rip a CD.

Fairlight generally releases ISO's, and Class releases rips (without movies and extra stuff). However, I haven't seen a Class release on www.nforce.nl in quite some time. So this bust must have been tracking a few years back.

There seems to be more prestige to release games these days since protections like http://www.star-force.com/ have been giving release groups more challenge.