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Games X Copy Stirs Backup Controversy
Thanks to GameSpy for its article covering the unveiling of a utility called Games X Copy at this year's CES show in Las Vegas. This commercially-sold gaming backup option claims: "You no longer need to fear losing your expensive PC game collection to scratches, skipping, or freezing... Now you can simply back them up and put the expensive original in a safe place, and the backup will play on your PC just like the original." The maker of this soon-to-launch utility, 321 Studios, has faced lawsuits previously regarding its DVD X Copy software, and a prominently marketed, gaming-specific backup product is sure to cause sparks - the GameSpy article writer comments: "No matter how much 321 Studios claims that parents with the most honorable intentions are its target market, it's easy to see where it would be the perfect item for unscrupulous gamers to copy software to give to or trade with their friends. It goes against everything the industry has been fighting against."
There are a few programs that do just this already.
Alcohol 120
Blindwrite
CloneCD
They all do pretty decent jobs making 1:1 backup copies of software. Granted, there are some copy protection schemes they have trouble with (I believe Alcohol 120 had problems with Safecast2 for awhile. Not sure if they've fixed it yet), but all of them are being actively developed and reasonably priced if you're looking for that sort of thing.
Game producers, music producers, movie producers, anyone distributing digital content, these people all need to realize the same fact:
If you can read it, you can *copy* it.
Period.
It's all just varying levels of difficulty beyond that. If people want it bad enough, it will happen (even of they have to run a wire to each pixel of their DHCPv4 enabled LCD or whatever). Any copy protection to be viable over the long term needs to be based not on media based protections, but on real cryptography. Smart companies know this, hence, Palladium.
There is already a 3.5mb shareware program that will copy any and all games. Google Alcohol 120%. CloneCD is crap, i've seen it fail on numerous games, whereas Alcohol 120% never fails to make a perfect copy. I doubt even this overpriced Game X Copy program will even match it. There were better free DVD copying programs around on the internet long before DVD X Copy came out. Google Gordian Knot, by the way.
Repeal the DMCA!
You realize that independent servers can bypass those serial checks, right? And that those servers can also allow the use of game executables that have the CD-check software stripped out? And, in fact, in a few increasingly rare cases, a really good image format and a virtual drive are all you need, the EXE won't be able to tell the difference anyhow!
Trust me. It's really easy for anybody to do.
If you want UT2k3 with no CD, go grab the V2225 patch, and install that. It removes the CD check from the install, and lets you play with no CD at all. Go Epic!!
I have no regrets, this is the only path.
My whole life has been "UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS"
I am a game developer, and I have to say, I hate SecureROM games. I hate CD keys, and I hate having to have the CD to play the game. I have 4 machines in my house, plus 2 laptops, and trying to keep track of all my game originals is difficult, much less remembering to take it with me when I want to play on a laptop. I can't recall the last game I have bought where I couldn't get a warez version before it was available in stores. People will copy the game, and people will not pay for it. There is little I or anyone else can do to stop it, and SecureROM primarily just pisses off legitimate users. As for your statement about CD keys making games "hard if not impossible to fake, and if you want to play online you basically need a legit key", I disagree. Call Of Duty, which has an online play mode and requires both the original CD and a CD key, has both no-CD cracks and KeyGens available. They have both been available since the game came out, and requiring a CD-key hasn't stopped anyone from playing it online.
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/117.html
Oh, look. Sorry, the right to make a backup of software is actually spelled out separately from fair use, which, I'll agree, is rather vague (though we do have case law to work on.)
In the end, all laws and infringements thereof are tested in court. Murder may be illegal, but you still go through a trial to determine if what happened fell under the existing laws -- what's your point? That you should fear to step out your door because something you say or do might later (in court) be determined to be illegal under some law you didn't understand?
Again, the right to make a backup of your software is explicitly given to you in our laws.
Regardless of the availability of lawyers who, like masters of other professions, should know best, you're still responsible for knowing the laws of the land yourself and taking responsibility or consequences (on either side) for the infringement of laws. Your lawyer can't replace you, and his knowledge can't replace yours. It's everyone's duty to know 'diddly.' (If, in fact, 'knowing diddly' is the opposite of 'not knowing diddly.')
What this has done is screw over customers like me who have problems running games with Securom. I own the game, but can't play it online anymore courtesy of Blizzard adding this new line of security. I guess maybe the exe can be hacked for cheating. If so, that's fair enough to add a CRC check to Battle Net, but if it's to stop people playing without a CD that's just retarded, especially when so many people routinely have problems with Securom.
Local CRC checks and the like will never work anyway. Whatever the EXE does to calculate the CRC to send to their servers can be faked. The only thing that sometimes works is a serial number that needs to be sent to the server to be authenticated against a DB of known serial numbers. Not just an algorithm that can match any one of a couple or a few million numbers.