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Macrovision Adopts Fade Anti-Game Piracy Technology
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."
What's going to stop someone then cracking the main executable to bypass the degradation?
After all, cracks are the mainstay of copied games anyway.
(Never mind the mainstay of legit games when you don't want to have to fish out the play-disk each time...)
Tiggs
"120 chars should be enough for everyone..."
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.
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..
So basically if my game gets a scratch in it, the game becomes useless to me? That's great - take a medium with error protection and get rid of that error protection. One of the nice things about a CD is that if you get a scratch in it, the medium is supposed to be fault tolerant. Way to go guys!
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
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.
... to avoid making a demo version of the software?
I understand that they want to profit from piracy. Not against that. But problem 1 is that it's a challenge that will encourage crackers and problem 2 is that as long as they use the same generic program to protect it, there'll always be a quick crack. Meanwhile, they potentially step on the toes of those who have scratched media. You know, the legitimate customer?
If I thought I was going to be eaten alive by pirates, I'd consider a different approach. Maybe include something cool with the game, like a small pewter statue or something like C&C came with. Or, bundle some artwork with the game. I dunno. Here's the thing, as long as a game company produces a demo, I don't care about downloading a cracked version. I'll either buy it or I won't. But if their copy restriction is going to make my game self destruct, then who is to say I won't go find a cracked copy?
"Derp de derp."
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
If memory (and legal knowledge) serves correctly, if I buy a piece of software (or, technically the disc and the right to use the software), I am legally entitled by US law to make a working backup of the software. It would seem that this anti-piracy technology interferes with this right.
Also, what happens if the original disc gets physically scratched so that the "fragments of 'subversive' code designed to seem like scratches" can't be read but the rest of the disc is fine?
As another poster stated, any company that uses Fade should offer free replacement discs to legitimate purchasers.
You mean thats ilegal???? HU? Poor Pirates, what are going to be made ilegal next? Dogs? Cats?
DUKEY!
Actually, I have to admit that it's a pretty neat idea. Not some Nazi protection like Safe-Disc.
"The beauty of this is that the degrading copy becomes a sales promotion tool. People go out and buy an original version."
Now wait a minute, so then how does cranking the difficulty to an absurd levels and making the player screw up make people want to go out and buy it? I highly doubt that those who experience this will go out and buy it, most likely they will either get a good rip, program some hack, or just delete the game.
This technology will end up biting them in the butt. Just think of the reviewers for web sites, magazines, etc will think of your product when the game starts acting like crap on them. Those who use this also have to worry about not only those reviews, but the various sites that people can submit their own reviews and the word of mouth.
I wouldn't be surprised if any games that use this no matter how good they are will eventually end up getting a lot of bad reviews. Since this scheme will be common, similar reviews will look quite legit and not stick out like a fake or unfair review.
The last thing they want to do is to have this scheme affect their legit customers. Most people are not going to be pleased when a few years, months, days, whatever, when their legally purchased game or DVD ceases to function.
I've always liked the concept of turning pirated copies into a "superdemo" of sorts. My main concern, and the concern of most of the people here, appears to be that the copy protection does not degrade the performance for legal, purchased players. I don't think we should jump to any conclusions on this front. SafeDisk technology is uncopyable (cough) due to an inherent pattern in the disk, yet we have been using those for years. While all my reviews get bonus smileys if playing the game doesn't require spending 1/2 hour digging around for the CD, I can live with popping one in.
On the other hand, if by "data" they mean an unexpected pattern of 1's and 0's, any bitwise ISO will copy that straight. This seems like it will prevent people running the game from virtual CD drives, and not much else. Still, the technology is interesting, and if the copying of the superdemo is encouraged, it could be the most fruitful abuse of Kazaa yet.
The ______ Agenda
This guy addresses the "OMG SCRATCHED CD's" that are cropping up all over the rest of the replies to the story.
Please don't let this guy get overlooked.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
The "degradation" idea is interesting. The rest doesn't sound new.
If anyone remembers the old copy protections, the "subtle pattern" sounds very much like the deliberate damage of particular sectors on a floppy disk. A refinement was to use bit patterns for the sector data or the track format that the hardware of the time could not reliably read (iirc- a long series of 1 bits, you wrote the data encoded as nybbles with no pattern having more than two consecutive ones). The principle was simple: read the bad spots a few times, if you can read them, or read them reliably, the disk is fake. You could detect it during a raw nybble copy by reading the track multiple times and doing either a CRC (quick) or aligning and comparing the buffers (good) and looking for difference.
You could then try to write the same pattern or figure out how to circumvent the check, but at least one knew where on the disk the check would look.
well, even if you do make a copy by getting around the protection, you will never be quite sure weather today you are actually playing poorly, bad luck, or weather it detected that you have a copy. This could really drive you to get a real copy.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
But what exactly does this mean for all those copies they give out to the press to "review?"
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
It has been going on for YEARS. This is what Securom/Safedisc does. The only new thing is the FADE stuff.
The operating system on my non-Linux box has been progressively getting buggier. I wonder if if contains that copy protection code or something?
Wait, here comes Blaster again. Damn.
Seriously, that's all we need: more software that is packed to explode on the user. All you need is a scratch or two to start the fuse.
Back in the Commodore days there was a game that rattled the drive a couple times when it loaded. One rattle was a bad sector for copy protection (whoops, DMCA init in 5...4...3...). The other was an attempted format of the floppy. Sure enough, the write-protect tab eventually peeled off. My friend wasn't happy.
And we need this why?
I think the best copy protection mechanism is one that turns a pirate copy into a game demo. You can play enough to get hooked, then the copy protection system kicks in and waggles its finger at you like that fat guy in Jurassic Park.
If you really like the game by then, you'll go out and buy a copy. If you don't like it by then, or if you're a penniless thief, the developer never lost a sale to you anyway.
But this system makes a game slowly degrade over time. If it introduces bugs or other flakiness, the pirates who might be prepared to buy the game would think that the game is buggy, and forego buying the original because they think it'll be just as bad. There are people out there who will play pirate versions and then buy the original if they really like the game. Why would the developer want to ruin their reputation for quality with these people by using such a system?
Hmmm... Seems ok at first, then gets worse and worse as you get further into it... Sounds familiar; maybe Microsoft has been using this all along and everyone's getting pirated disks...
It's sad when choosing an installation directory on your own qualifies you as an "advanced user."
No matter what method is used to detect if a program is a pirate copy, making it work "degraded" rather than failing outright is a very good idea if you want to prevent piracy.
The reason is that it makes it much harder for the person trying to crack the copy protection to figure out if they did it. They have to have a reliable test to see if it is "degraded" and they have to wait at least as long as the test takes. Ideally the program should work perfectly for many minutes and then start to degrade. So even perfect detection of degradation has to wait many minutes.
The risk is that the cracker will instead go after the degradation instructions rathar than the actual copy-detection instructions, thus they have more chances to "fix" the software. However I think this is way offset by the increased difficulty of figuring out if you successfully cracked the program.
I would not be suprised if doing nothing but *claiming* this degradation happens may be the most effective copy protection of all. The crackers will be driven nuts trying to figure out if they have cracked it successfully or not!
In addition, I really suspect this has nothing to do with any physical degradation of the disk. They have (or claim to have) some method of detecting the original disk, like weird pits on the original CD. But I think it is unlikely these change over time or anything.
If this is half as good as the current protection implementations (SafeDisc's, SecuROM, etc.), it will just lead to another round of games people HAVE to crack just to PLAY their copies. It happens with many games currently (Neverwinter Nights actually REMOVED the copy protection in a patch because it caused so many headaches - given, they added it back in with the expansion). It's not going to stop anyone - guaranteed. A cracked copy will still be out on - or before - the release date. And as Lavarr Burton says, "But don't take my word for it..."
Autodesk had a lovely double protection system on one of their old DOS 3D Studio. The initially released crack allowed the program to be run without the attached dongle and was widely released and used. What the crackers had missed was the second level of protection, which caused people's models to slowly 'melt' every time they were saved.
Try something like the Daemon Tools game database, for example.
Seriously .. I had a pirated copy of Operation Flashpoint and I never had any problems with the game at all.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
I think that this increase in difficulty, instead of dissuading hardcore players, will in fact cause more to try it and see if they are affected. They may think of it as a challenge or perhaps a proper test of their skills. This idea may cause a new wave of piracy by people that would have generally not done so. Or, perhaps even stranger, cause people that have purchased the game to copy it and reinstall it in a legally-spurious manner in order to ramp-up the difficulty.
I read about the same technique being used in one of the "Spyro" games (on the Playstation?), where gameplay would degrade over time. This made it much harder to copy, because you needed to play it for a long time to tell if a copy was good or bad. In this case, the developers implemented the technique themselves.
Eventually, this protection was broken, but the article (in Game Developer Magazine) indicated that it delayed the release of perfect copies for a few weeks, which was a big chunk of the games' profit.
I think that macrovision has a lot to gain by using FUD along with FADE (ok, lame pun): Once this can get to the mainstream media, or even most gaming mags, you can be sure that this story turns from "ingame copy protection alters gameplay" to "pirated games don't work right".
Remember a few back ago when the BSA was warning people about viruses in pirated programs[*]? I have a feeling we are going back there. Once joe average hears about anti-piracy software messing up his aim, he'll start blaming pirated games for everything from grafic glitches to lag to not being able to get past level 2 because he cant shoot straight in a FPS anyway. Joe buys the original game. Mission acomplished!
[*]Also, [RI/MP]AA recently trying to dub p2p Peer to Porn
What's to stop someone from making an image of the CD, then baking it up to tape, and then breaking it out when ever their CD starts throwing craps? (me thinks this wasn't an entirely well thought out copy-protection scam)
Who cares about the ozone layer?...thanks to CFC's I can write my name......IN CHEESE!!!