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Macrovision Adopts Fade Anti-Game Piracy Technology

Posted by simoniker on from the my-CD-has-disappeared dept.

Thanks to the New Scientist for their report that Macrovision are adding Fade anti-copy protection, which "makes unauthorized copies of games slowly degrade", to their SafeDisc copy protection scheme for games. The technology, devised by UK publishers Codemasters, first debuted in Operation Flashpoint for PC back in 2001, and "affects gameplay aspects" in that title if it believes the game has been altered, including "reduced accuracy of some weapons, reduced weapon performance, increased enemy hit endurance and increased player injuries." The piece also claims that Fade works by "...exploiting the systems for error correction that computers use to cope with CD-ROMs or DVDs that have become scratched."

5 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. So what happens... by DJayC · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Great... but what happens when my legit CD gets scratched and the pattern mentioned in the article is altered, or no longer recognizable? This seems like a really great attempt, but I think this is going to start causing problems with people who own the legit CD. Also, I would assume the check happens at startup, so I think something similar to a no-CD patch may still be a workaround, so maybe they are playing this up a little too much. I'm interested to see how this holds up.

  2. So basically.. by OutRigged · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If one of my CD's becomes damaged, the game will start to screw up. If I try using a backup of said game CD to prevent this, the game still becomes screwed up.

    Of course they're going to replace damaged CD's for free right?

    --
    RaGe
    We're all just noise on the wires..
  3. What if it "believes" wrong? by Andy+Smith · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you want to check my posting history then you'll see that I'm strongly anti-piracy and supportive of pretty much *anything* that copyright holders do to defend their livelihood.

    But I disapprove of this technology.

    What if it believes a genuine installation of the game is in fact a pirated copy? What if it then sets about slowly punishing the person who has done nothing worse than purchase a game?

    This technology, a piece of software and therefore objective by definition, is attempting to make subjective, semi-human judgements. The only way such technology would be acceptable is if it was 100% reliable and fault proof.

    Do you want them testing it on your system?

    And you just *know* the next step will be punitive file deletions, hard drive formatting, etc.

  4. Read the article again... by DoctorRad · · Score: 4, Insightful
    New scratches won't affect gameplay. The point is that the 'fake scratch data' won't be copied verbatim by disc copying software[1], so the code knows the disc is a copy.

    Read errors caused by new scratches on an original disc will just get corrected as per normal. The 'fake' scratches will still be there, so the game will play fine.

    Matt...

    [1] Yet...
    --
    A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.

    --

    Save the Bottom Line
  5. Re:Pointless attempts? by BrookHarty · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What pisses me off, is I use no-cd cracks on games I buy. Then I dont have to change CD's, the games run faster, all the game is already installed, no reason to have the CD in except to make the game company happy.

    So now, theres a chance, if I use a no-cd crack, the game will play funny? What about if I want to use a virtual CDROM instead for speed? Copy protection like this is just an annoyance. Problem thou, only online games have CD keys that work well for copy protection, single player games have the most physical cd protections. Blah.