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Copy Protection Firms Encourage Piracy?
Ars Technica has a reflection on the revelation that StarForce had linked to pirated versions of Galactic Civilizations II. From the piece: "It's not hard to see why the publishers use the stuff; after all, no one wants to spend a couple of years on a project only to see their efforts rewarded by flat sales and a robust pirate market. Still, in the quest for better protection, these copy protection schemes have grown in both sophistication and invasiveness. Some schemes now install their own hidden device drivers that monitor your computer's optical drive access, trying to prevent copying and other unapproved uses. (If this sounds familiar, it should. Game copy protection, after all, is just another form of DRM.)"
They sell a product that solves (or at least claims to solve) a "problem".
They have an interest in making that problem as large and as wide-spread as possible.
While this tactic might be unethical, they are certainly behaving legally- it's allowed for me to tell people where they can download software. Now all the makers of Galactic Civilizations need to do is link to where people can illegally download Starforce-protected games with the protection removed. Turnabout is, after all, fair play.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
GalCiv2 does have DRM of a type; you have to install StarDock in order to unpack the game data files. Think of it as almost like Steam.
You also need an official CD key in order to download patches and other additional content.
GC2 allows (and encourages) you to install a copy of the game on as many computers as possible. I even got instructions in the official IRC channel (irc.stardock.com #galciv) to make it easier to move the files between PCs.
The only other commerical game I can think of that has no real DRM is Falcon: Allied Force. The only time you need the CD is when you install a patch. There is no CD key and the game is huge online. If you ever wanted to learn more than the common person wants to know about the F-16 Fighting Falcon, grab Allied Force and a joystick.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
I'm not sure that copy protection encourages pirating but I won't install a bought game on my machine without a no-CD crack, etc. as well. The original games are safest when in the jewel case packed in the box on a shelf.
Trolling is a art,
The article speaks about the invasiveness and general irritation that DRM causes and I think when they state that DRM may be contributing to the problem of piracy, it's the same thing where legit Windows buyers have to jump through the Product Activation hoops and rigamarole. I know of at least one person who legitimately bought WinXP but installed a pirated version to avoid the hassles. Legitimate, law-abiding users pay the price.
I'm all for the Valve's Steam method of distribution. It's the wave of the future...
Fact: Anti-Piracy software developers are doing the same thing that regular software developers are trying to do: sell software.
Fact: Anti-Piracy software does not stop piracy.
Fact: Anti-Piracy softare adversely affects legitimate players.
Fact: Not everyone who pirates a game is a guaranteed sale/loss of a sale.
Fact: Pirated software is another model of distribution which helps create product recognition with your audience.
Partial Fact and Opinion: Many people, myself included, use access to pirated software as a tool for determining what games are worth our monetary support. I can not count the number of times that piracy has either
a) saved me from buying a horrible piece of software that marketting led people to believe otherwise, and
b) caused me to buy a game (many, many times) that I would have otherwise never looked at or had a chance to try in another form.
I wish everyone had this state of mind. Obviously that's not the case, but I also feel that the latter group of individuals also encompass the demographic that would not grant your title a sale even if they did not download the title. That is, they are usually either downloading it for the sake of downloading it, or have no access to the funds to purchase games regularly.
There are as many beneficial reasons to piracy as there are negative aspects. The lies given by anti-piracy software developers are underhanded scare tactics, and not worth a publishers time. I hope the majority of educated individuals agrees when they weigh the facts in.
I work on a computer all day. I rip all the music I buy so that I don't have to carry around loads of CDs or bother swapping them around all the time. Digital media is more valuable to me than physical media, but I will only buy CDs because a) I want some kind of physical master copy in case my hard drive dies or anything like that and b) I want lossless compression.
So what does the copy protection do? Lock the thing I value most away from me. If I'm lucky, I get crappy MP3s on a data layer. No thanks. You know what I do if I find out an album I want is copy protected? I download it.
The simple fact of the matter is that, where copy protection is used, anonymous pirates provide a better service than the music labels. And the sad thing is that this isn't due to the record companies falling short in some way, it's because they actively choose to harm their own product.
The reason they can get away with this is because there is no competition when it comes to media. I'm not talking about the RIAA cartel, I'm talking about the basic nature of copyright. If somebody owns the rights to a particular song I like, then no competition exists for that song. I either buy it on the terms the copyright holder chooses, I don't buy it at all, or I obtain it from a black market.
For a free(r) market to exist, with competition acting the way it should, artists should be legally prohibited from signing exclusive contracts. Reduce the record labels to investors and publishers instead of the people with all the power, because right now, the situation is upside-down.
Two words: Notebook, CD-Check.
There's a strong trend towards notebooks as the everyday computer of most people, replacing desktop machines. Once you have a notebook, you use the mobility. Whether you go into the living room for a comfortable surf or take it with you on the train.
And all these stupid CD-Checks force you to carry a bundle of CDs with you all the time? How stupid is that? Not to mention that they're all fooled, cracked, broken in less time than it takes them to write new versions.
Like I said before: If game developers would save the money for copy restriction stuff and instead pour it into writing better games, they'd probably sell more.
Those who pirate always have, always will. Mostly it's the kids who couldn't afford more than one game every other month anyways if they had to buy them. Most of the pirated copies would not have been sales with harsher laws, better copy restriction or whatever else to prevent copying. They would simply be less people playing the game, not more people paying for it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Penny Arcade news post on StarForce thugs
The comic will briefly be available here,
And later it will appear in its permanent location: Penny Arcade comic on StarForce thugs
(I wonder if they'll ever sort out their flakey software.)
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Honestly, the best way to stop piracy of all kinds (for all mediums) is to adopt a new marketing model. Consider digital distribution as a model ...
... at $1 per song people are still willing to hunt the music down and steal it ... at $0.25 why would you bother?
For the average game it will probably cost less that $1 (definately less than $5) per copy sold to deliver the game to the customer via download through the internet; at the same time you no longer need an expensive distribution network nor do you have to cut a retailer in on the sale. This means that the only people who have to make money on the sale of the product are the developer and publisher (and in the case of a console the licence provider); Publishers tend to take in the money at $5-$15 per title and then give the developer their cut (licence providers [like Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft] tend to get $5-$10 per title). This means that you could sell the average game for between $10-$25 and still make the same ammount of money. If you could buy the average new release for $15 why would you bother to steal it?
If you look at music
Antivirus software companies write viruses...
Microsoft codes venerabilities into Windows, then patches in the next major version of Windows, coding different venerabilities into it...
Congressmen ignore their constituents once they get elected...
More at 11.
So I played a lot of games, wich I bought. Still got a huge stack of CD's. The floppys were thrown out a few years ago as I figured if I ever wanted to replay one of them I would just download them.
Recently I haven't bought a lot of games. Why? Well I was starting to feel screwed. Hard. In the ass. By a big black guy.
While I am from amsterdam I still did not enjoy that feeling.
What was giving me that feeling? An increasing number of games that were to short, to buggy, to kiddy and just not worth the high price charged.
Lucasarts is for me the perfect example. Their early games were all near perfect. I had little doubt about buying x-wing and its expansions and sequels. Their adventures? Who needs a review when it got the lucasarts label?
Then came games like that horrible Monkey island with the moronic 3d interface that was a bitch to control. Yuck. Fun but ruined by some kind of need to use 3d in the marketing bullshit.
Worse was still to come. Forgot the title that was the galactic bit version of the current Empire at war release. Or howabout that RTS eh? The first one that was not based on the age of empire engine?
Crap games, that were buggy and just not fun to play and certainly not worth full price.
Even the x-wing series went downhill as it became less and less dogfighting and more and more missle dodging.
I feel less and less inclined to buy the new releases as I know that what awaits me is a poorlyb designed game riddled with bugs.
FEAR was great but is a 8 hour game really worth full price? Not in my book.
But there was anoter problem as well. That is copy protection. Why is it that the PAYING public has to mess around with game-cd's, impossible to read keys, non-working drives etc etc when the pirate can just download a far better game that just runs, with the update and isn't slown down by constant CD accessing?
An old sequel to elite, frontier something, took the absolute price in stupid copy protection. It stopped every 20 minutes or so to ask you to look up a word in the manual. Gee thanks, for that lovely experience. It was still BBS for me in those days but finally a friend gave me a cracked version of the game that skipped that stupid check. My first pirated game. Going from constant interruption to trouble free gaming by NOT paying 79,- guilders.
Current game protections would be like having a DVD that forces you to watch a 10 second segment warning you not to pirate the movie that ofcourse no ripper includes so only the persons who do not pirate see it. You would have to be completly insane to do that to your paying customers.
I still got money to spend, just that if I go to a game store today I just don't see that many games worthy of my money. The few that I still buy seem to insist on rewarding me for buying them by giving me a harder time then the people who pirate it.
Oh, and none of the copy protections work anyway. Empire at war has starforce and all you had to do for hassle free, free play was to wait till a proper group got around to crack it.
The game is indeed a current lucasarts game. CRAP. Worth about 3 euro in the store. Not 49.95
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Instead of "Copy Protection Firms Encourage Piracy" it might be more accurate to title it "Russian Software firm re-invents 2nd-oldest profession, extortion ala 'protection racket'."
Gee, mister, it sure would be a SHAME if your store BURNT DOWN. Perhaps if you were to share your profits with us, we would MAKE SURE something like that WOULDN'T HAPPEN. If you choose not to participate in our generosity, who KNOWS what MIGHT happen?
Sounds like someone could use an axe-handle across the knees.
-Styopa