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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.