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A History of Copy Protection
GamerGirll1138 writes to tell us Next-gen has an amusing walk down memory lane with their history of copy protection. There have been some crazy schemes over the years to ensure that you paid for your software, everything from super-secret decoder rings to ridiculous document checks. "With bandwidth expanding and more and more games publishers exploring digital distribution, there's little doubt that we're entering a new phase in the history of copy protection and those who would defeat it. What's more, the demand for games as a chosen form of entertainment has never been higher. All this considered, it's impossible to believe that the cat-and-mouse game of piracy and copy protection will not reach new levels of intensity, with new technologies deployed on each side, and that some of them will surely create new hurdles for even those who simply wish to purchase and play the newest games. Ah, for the heady days of the code wheel."
it doesn't treat me like some criminal. I don't want my software to stop working because I had no internet access, and I now have to go out of my way and call technical support. I don't want my software to install root-kits on my PC because it thinks I might be a pirate. I don't want copy protection to be less useful than the pirated version. And so on and so forth.
Quality product at a reasonable price.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
On the other hand I think this will eventually reach a breaking point and these normal people (who are the paying customers) will stop putting up with said crap. That will be an interesting development for sure.
The twitter monologues. Click on my homepage and be amazed.
With USB, computers today have more free ports than ever before and even my mom could add a hub.
Perhaps the time is ripe for the return of the Dongle.
Aw man, you mean that secret decoder was just a copy protection scheme? And I wasn't really saving the world? That's it! I was in support of RIAA/MPAA/BSA before but now they've just wrecked my childhood fantasy! I'm going to go poke an eye out and buy a parrot!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I remember the Ultima book back when a laser copy was expensive. The colors were pastels, which wouldn't copy on the copy machines of the day, so to pirate the game, you had to spend about as much in color copies as buying the darn thing. Course, I had a friend whose dad's office had a copier... ahh. smell the piracy.
meh
http://www.next-gen.biz/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10800&Itemid=2&pop=1&page=1
Amusing is sending those of us who actually RTFA to the LAST page of a 4 page article. This article is the straight man in a comedy duo, only without the funny man. That's sort of amusing in an ironic way.
Just think, without copy protection, we wouldn't have been able to distribute our viruses so easily. With all these kids trying to download cracks from any site that offered them, our bits have gone far and wide.
Thanks copy protection!
Oh man, I remember moving up from the Commodore 64 to the Mac LC. Because 90% of the C64 software we had was "Load 'n Go" stuff for $1 (literally!) there wasn't much worry about copy protection. I can't remember a single thing we had on that system that had copy protection. The Mac however did have some surprises. We actually sent our first copy of SimCity back to Maxis because we didn't realize that the Red Card with the weird symbols was important and that strange dialog box (I was like 10 at the time, gimme a break) at the start was also important. I thought it was broken because every time you started the game it would throw disasters at your city constantly. The tech support guys were apparently trained to treat anybody asking about the copy protection like a theif, and never bothered to tell us what we had to do either (hence the useless return). Luckily, I figured it out with the second copy (unpacking the box myself instead of letting my brother do it and finding the red card made a big difference).
Later on I played Chris Crawford's (I think that was his name) Patton Strikes Back. This one was interesting it that it let you run about halfway through the game, and then stopped and asked "are your papers in order"? It then directed you to a specific page in the manual and had you type in a specific word (third word on the second paragraph for instance). There was a slight problem though, the manual had apparently been revised a bit after the copy protection was put in place, so about 5-10% of the time, your game would be destroyed halfway through because it failed the copy check. That was after we got AOL and it was my first foray into piracy, as getting halfway through a tough game and then losing because the copy protection was buggy was a real outrage. This was the days before games released patches, so as far as I know unless you crack the thing there's always a chance of losing the war because of the copy protection.
I read the internet for the articles.
We should call it what it is - copy restricton. It doesn't protect your copy nor your ability to copy. I could understand if it were called copyright protection, but that's just not the case.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
Funny how any form of digital media goes from retail to electronic, only to be more protected, then only to be broken. It will only be a losing battle between publishers, users, & crackers. If you can see or use any product, someone can break the protection. The only sure way of non payers using a piece of software, don't release it (or create it for that matter)
DONT DONT DONT COPY THAT FLOPPY! http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4837609090332617729
A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking
Many of these schemes can't prevent copying data, like CSS, online authentication or dongles, so they try to prevent execution.
Even when used legitimately, a computer is going to make at least one copy of the program/data, first into main memory, then into the various levels of caches.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
A couple of problems with that.
First off, it's no big deal to snoop USB, which makes dongles pretty easy to crack.
You have to petition the USB folks so you get a unique vendor's ID, which is a pain. Plus, they are finite.
You'd have to get Microsoft to give you a digital certificate to make your dongle driver legit - also a pain. And you'd have to go through a driver installation just to load your software, more of a pain.
Finally, dongle bound software is just as crackable with a monitor. There has to be some code that goes out and checks the dongle, then returns "yes this is authorized" or "no let's not run". Just zap that bit and the dongle goes away.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
It was featured in a mag i saw and basicly said that it would "notice" if it was a copied disk....
You could play the game for awhile then "strange" things would start to happen. The example they gave was a pool game where the gravity would get lower and lower so slowly the balls would just float off the table....
did anyone see this actually come to light? Did i just imagine it?
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
It wasn't very effective as copy protection, but the game had an awesome add-in as it immersed you into the world of arcaheology and adventure:
Henry Jones' Grail Diary.
It was in a nice leather-like enclosure, and the paper had a parchment texture. There were lots of pictures with clips and notes addeds, all written by hand.
The copy protection part was a series of descriptions of the Grail according to various authors - which were referenced by Indy as he investigated various items.
BTW, in the LucasArts' adventure games, a trimmed down copy of the grail diary was included only for the copy protection. But it wasn't as good as the original.
As an Indy fan, I would buy the original Last Crusade game again *JUST* for the Grail Diary.
How about:
"Permission to use, modify and redistribute this program is hereby granted."
I'd like to see them violate THAT copyright license.
Vault Corp. what a product. Actually it was ingenious, even if your 5 1/4 disk wore out the little mark would register with the copy protection software. All you needed to do was swap out the back up disks with the original. I hear at Comdex a certain individual told a certain hacker what he would unleash with the next update a worm on anyone that broke the protection scheme. Company was closed about 6 months later.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
An extremely useless article even by slashdot standards, but I remember two copy protection schemes that sucked even more:
Lenslock - used by a few 80s home computer games. I'm fairly certain it might have been a UK-only thing. It was horrible. You had to fold this crappy bit of plastic a certain way and hold it over a part of the screen. If you were lucky, and your TV wasn't too large or too small, you might be able to make out the decoded letters which you had to type in.
And then one we used at work: Parallel port dongles. I used to work in electronic CAD and all the software used this, the result being you needed 5 or more dongles all plugged in at the same time to do any useful work. In the end we got someone in the workshop build a kind of "dongle motherboard" where you could plug in multiple dongles more conveniently than having them hang out the back of the machine, and more importantly pull them out to swap between machines.
Happy days ... No, actually sucky days. I'm glad I use almost completely free software now.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
...and completely without copy protection. I can honestly say that I have only gotten cracks for games I already own a full license to, but I would have never needed to if the games hadn't been virtually padlocked with a faulty key.
I bet a lack of copy protection would also lower the number of calls to tech support as well.
Unfortunately not. If you have no money when a reasonable product is offered to you and you can copy it for free, the reasonable price isn't going to prevent a copyright violation. When your competitors have higher prices and make even more people copy their stuff, the dam is broken and you stand even less of a chance to be paid a reasonable price. The ultimate copy protection is to stop giving the product and offer it's functionality as a service, which can't be copied, so it doesn't need copy protection.
I'd say the ultimate copy protection would be an awful, expensive product. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to be working for the music industry...
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
I remember copy protection from the days of 5 1/4 inch floppy disks, back when I'd have to boot off the game disk to play. The drive would start grinding like crazy before the game finally started. I never experienced problems but I recall hearing that the copy protection was taxing on the drive and could damage it.
This prevented someone from just copying the files on the disk directly. But there was an application that just copied the image and got around that nonsense.
Things haven't really changed. I don't understand why they just don't give up. This has been repeated many times, but it's true. All they're doing is inconveniencing consumers who actually paid for the product.
I think we're pretty reasonable.
The software can be downloaded and trialed for 30 days. After that time, it locks out. Could you set your system clock back 30 days? Sure. Do we really care too much? No. If you want to keep your system out of sync by a month just to avoid paying us, you are a doofus.
If you want a license, there are many types available. Our software views documents. You can license an entire web server to serve documents to our viewer, and it will view them. You can get a LAN license which locks to a hostname which allows you to install the software on a file server, and anybody running the software off that server is licensed. If you change hostnames, You can even buy a utility that allows you to embed a license inside a document, so that anybody with a free copy of the viewer can view that particular document.
The license is protected with some simple ciphering. Could it be broken? Sure. Could the host locking be broken? Sure. We don't really care too much. The license is there to keep people from accidentally installing the software on more than one file server. If you want to do it deliberately, you need to set both hosts to the same hostname. Or figure out how to hack the encryption. We don't delude ourselves into thinking this is impossible. To our knowledge, nobody has bothered. If somebody came up with a keygen and put it out on the Internet, we'd be pissed. But our response would probably be to switch to another cipher. If our software was suddenly so popular as to inspire some cracker to write a keygen, my first response would probably be "Cool beans."
None of the licensing mechanisms are onerous. It doesn't "phone home." It doesn't expire silently. If you want to extend your eval, we are happy to work with you.
We prefer to sell our software by providing quality. If it's not worth the $XXX to you, then either you don't have a legitimate use, or our price is too high. But we're not going to treat our legit customers like criminals just to get that extra 1% in licensing.
...is that the people who are described as the good guys in this article are the ones who want to control your computer, and even more they refer to those wanting to choose what to do with their own computers as 'crackers'
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
With the proliferation of USB ports on computers these days though could you have some weird hardware that a CPU couldn't emulate at speed? In the same way that software depends on graphics accelerators make it dependent on some weird USB hardware that's used for in-game-physics or text layout or something.
I mean it can't be the case that computers are fast enough to emulate everything, so these days couldn't we make custom hardware that a game required?
... of legit users. A while ago I wanted to play Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, never came to it when it was "new", but it wouldn't work on my new machine with Windows Vista. The fix was easy, download the no-cd patch (the one with copyright protection removed) and it works without a single issue.
Copyright protection software often abuses certain OS features which could be "fix" in a security update and thereby rendering the copyright protected software useless.
Copying video games from each other, we each had our disk of copy protection cracking software, some were better than others though. I had all the good games, moon patrol, Conan the Barbarian, Ms. Pac Man, Karateka, Serpentine, Q Bert, etc... Ahh, those were the days, 1 megahertz processors, 64 kilobytes of ram (that swapped back and forth) and cracking software when the teacher wasn't looking. Not bad for being in fourth grade (circa 1983)
Like arts? Like cheesy little Indie mags? Check out www.artwerkmag.com, and don't laugh at the bad coding please.
Some of the older copy protection schemes were actually quite ingenious. Leisure Suit Larry 3 was my favorite. There is a point in the game where there is a locker in a gym (called Fat City) with some vital items that must be retrieved to continue the game. What's the combination? Good question. It took my friend and I about 2 weeks to figure it out. In the instruction manual there are mock advertisements for products in the game and for Fat City. The combination to the locker ended up being the page numbers in the manual with the Fat City ads. No manual? Then you would never get passed this part of the game. Sierra did similar things with King's Quest, Police Quest, etc., but the LSL-3 scheme was pretty funny.
RmSnwBrdr, The one and only! "Life SuX! Get a F@#%ing Helmet!" -Denis Leary
I remember in the 1980s when game vendors started burning bad sectors into Atari 400/800 floppies on which they distributed their products. Their game's loader SW would try to read those sectors and abort if they weren't unreadable, thinking that pirates couldn't replicate them with just diskdup SW.
;) one bit (gotcha again >:P), but lots of honest people couldn't back up their games (which were sensitive to all kinds of transient EM, like paperclip collector magnets on desktops), and the vendors spent valuable time and money on worthless copy protection.
The Atari 810 floppy drive (the highest density storage available, like a 1TB HD is now, and the only game in town other than ridiculous tape drives, except for the extremely rare and stratospherically expensive 5MB Corvus HD) had a little potentiometer in its circuitboard controlling timing of the eletromagnetic signal waveform sent to the write head, that could be turned out of calibration to deliberately write a bad sector. So pirates would map the original's bad sector list, then copy the good sectors, then detune the pot, then write to the list of bad sectors - ruining them, then retune the pot and boot the copy.
Sure, that's pretty complex, voids the floppy warranty, and intimidates a lot of potential pirates. So instead, some people just stuck a disklabel to the edge of the target floppy, left the label sticking out of the drive, and grabbed that tab to jiggle the floppy while writing to each of the bad sectors - ruining them. Presto!
Besides, the pro pirates had the same mass floppy duplicators with the same programmable "write bad sector" circuitry that the original game vendors had, so the large, commercial pirates weren't fazed (pun intended
In fact, beating the copy protection was often more fun than the game. So around the world people were working to beat it, even if they never played the game again, but gave copies to friends just to show how ubergeek they were.
This cat & mouse game is in fact the exact model for all SW copy protection. It's become only a worse value waste for the SW producers, especially in content. They should use their only advantage, their earlier possession of the SW/content, to make big bucks at the first release, just like Hollywood does for movie premiere big weekends. Then let the pirates do their distribution work for free, and charge for support, customization, and subscriptions to upgrades. And build brands to sell their future releases.
Because "Don't Copy That Floppy" has been a losing battle, long before people would say "what's a floppy?"
--
make install -not war
I loved being the 7834th person to figure out how to crack Psygnosis titles back in the Atari ST days. Not that I cared about being able to copy the games, they were available anywhere, but just to figure out how to get around the hurdle.
Back then every game was like buying two games, one that they wanted you to play, and one that they didn't want you to play, the "figure out how to copy it" game. I was never really any good at the cracking-the-game game, but it was interesting and fun anyway.
I like music
Badly researched, inaccurate...
It misses out on huge chunks of anti-piracy techniques, introduces stuff like it was new ten years after it was first used and asfor 'typing programs into DOS' - WTF?
This has to be one of the worst articles a slashdot story has linked to for some time.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Strongly disagreed.
Copy-protection (akin to shrink/theft prevention) is a completely seperate issue from pricing.
Customers have every right to think a product is overpriced, and not make a purchase. Similarly publishers have every right to think their product is worth a certain price, and charge accordingly. They might price themselves out of the market if they get the pricing wrong, but they are still well within their rights to decide their price. There might be a tradeoff where a certain price point strikes an optimum balance between legal purchases and illegal downloads - but there's not been a proven case of that happening yet (though hopefully Amazon will prove to be just that for MP3s at least).
Ultimately this argument might work for something like music with is a 1-dollar or less purchase. But this same argument won't extend well to movies, games, operating systems etc. where even the break-even price point could be anywhere from $10 to $100. Comparing that against 'free' -- it's easy to predict what choice most people will make.
I think I'd enjoy playing Half-Life 2. But I won't install Steam. Same deal for Portal; looks like enormous fun. But I will not install Steam.
You seeing a trend here?
Valve is leaving at least $120 retail on the table. I am paying for entertainment. I am not paying for remote monitoring. I can look after my own machines, thank you. All Valve has to do is delete the Steam requirement, and they can have my money.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I feel less inclined to copy if I'm cheapskating over a reasonable price (when I say 'less inclined', I've never actually copied anything that wasn't abandonware, but feel more tempted to when it's something that I can't stretch to than something that I won't stretch to). If you're charging £15 I'll buy it, or I'll do without, I might even push that to £20 for something that had a good demo, but if you're charging £35 I won't buy it. *I* won't copy it either, but you still don't get a sale. The point is that with a reasonable price for the product you'll get the middle-ground people (who have some moral compunction against copying but lose it when they realise that you're trying to rip them off) to cough up. You probably get the same amount of money overall, I suppose the status quo lets you keep those pirate figures up.
Perhaps the point of a reasonable price as copy protection is that your average man on the street likes to see rip-off merchants get ripped-off themselves. If you had someone come to your door, offer to clean your windows for "two-fifty", and then ask for £250 when the work was done, not £2.50, would you have any problem with writing a cheque for £250 and immediately cancelling it, thus getting whatever work was done for free? I don't think that most people would, and it's getting those 'most people' to not see the game publisher as the rip-off merchant, and thus be willing to pay the price asked for what they're getting, that reasonable-price-as-copy-protection is aimed at.
If someone offers you a deal that is clearly a rip-off, do you just politely decline, or do you try to twist the deal so that you get to do the ripping off? Quite a lot of people would do the latter - that's the spirit behind quite a lot of piracy, and threatening people that they'd better accept your rip-off deal or else isn't going to make that spirit go away - not appearing to rip them off will. The fool and his money are easily parted - the rest of us don't like people who try to demonstrate the former of us by doing the latter.
FGD 135
They talk about StarForce but not the sony root kit that was just as bad.
rev1: fail
rev2: fail
rev3: fail
rev4: fail
rev5: fail
rev6: fail
current: seeing what happens (fingers crossed!)
One of the C&C Red Alert games...it would work out someone in a network play had the game copied (most of us were legit, but 8 people buying the same game is rare), but you wouldn't know immediately until everyone had at least a construction yard, power plant, refinery and barracks built for everyone, then without warning and for no apparent reason, everyone's buildings exploded at once like everyone had been nuked.
It would've been a good photo to take of everyone's expressions at that exact moment, because it certainly took us by surprise and convinced us to, er, try even harder to crack it. Which we did.
throw new NoSignatureException();
If you have no money when a reasonable product is offered to you and you can copy it for free, the reasonable price isn't going to prevent a copyright violation.
However such a person was never a "potential customer" in the first place. In the worst case senario the seller/publisher/etc has lost nothing. (The same actually applies even if someone had the money but would have either copied for free or done without it).
It's also possible for "pirate copies" to generate actual sales which would never have otherwise existed without any additional marketing cost.
You know I just used up my last mod point 5 minutes ago! LOL
OTOH, I wouldn't have been able to decide between Funny and Insightful, anyway...
...was the Leather Godesses of Phobos text adventure. The game came backed with several odds 'n' ends, among which was a comic book.
Towards the end of the game there was a sequence required to navigate through a maze of sewer pipes. The exact sequence of moves was detailed in the comic and was absolutely impossible to guess at--who would guess at stopping to mimic the mating call of a local crab species?
These 2 versions compete, and a copy protection has influence on how attractive each version is. Make it too cumbersome, and the illegal (free) version becomes more attractive. Make it weak, and it becomes extremely easy to create an illegal copy from an original. Make the original too expensive, and you make the illegal version more attractive.
For a small numbers product I can understand a cumbersome copy protection scheme. But why for a mass market product? If your product is good enough, then your potential market is everyone that is interested, and has the hardware to run it. If you price it ridiculously cheap, say production cost + $1 for a plain CD/DVD in jewel case, then who will bother to search on P2P network, download a full ISO (or multiple ISO's), and burn the whole thing (on discs that are cheap, but not free either)? Nobody. Time is precious, so people are willing to spend money to save time.
So the solution for software makers is easy: if the potential market for your product is big (in terms of number of customers), then:
- Provide your product in any form that customers desire: downloads via fast servers/BT, plain physical media, collectors boxes / limited editions that include extra goodies.
- Make your product easy to obtain. Read: get a copy through a 5-minute effort without leaving your home.
- Payment through any means you can think of, delivery as download via fast servers/BT, or physical media at near production-cost.
- Forget about copy-protection, since they reduce the value of your product, make the illegal version more attractive, and... increase your development costs (slightly perhaps, but still)
No matter how high the development costs, you will recoup those if enough people give you $1 a pop. Size your development budget according to an estimate of how sensational/desirable your product will be.From the article: "Perhaps the most notorious example of this method is Sierra's King's Quest III, in which lengthy passages of potion recipes and other information had to be reproduced from the manual. One typo, and you were greeted with a "Game Over" screen."
I never viewed this as "copy protection", as such. If it was, I thought it brilliantly played into the actual game.
The spot in the game is where you're creating a potion or magical item. You needed to follow the directions PRECISELY, or the spell would backfire. I remember typing VERY slowly and carefully, doublechecking everything. It really enhanced the experience of the game, for me.
If it was meant purely as copy protection, I thought it actually ADDED something to the game.
Adman
E-Books *should* have been the first victims of internet piracy, simply because they were the smallest, and all the content was just good ol' plain text. Ever wonder why it's a hell of a lot easier to get a pirate copy of a whole DVD than it is to get one of a non-Guttenberged E-Book?
.pdb e-book format, and I just haven't run across it despite having found dozens of ways of cracking movies and software.
One reason may be the incredibly elegant system of copy protection they used. You unlock the book with 2 pieces of information - the name and credit card number you used to buy the book. Now... someone might not think twice about throwing up a bunch of serialz out to the general public; but publishing their name and credit card number to a site that caters to thieves? Kinda loses it's appeal.
Maybe I'm missing something here. Maybe people don't mind that e-books cost just the same as their paper counterparts. Maybe computer geeks would rather lug around paper versions of Cryptonomicon than read it off their PDA's, or iPhones. Maybe someone's already cracked the
If so - let me know. I'd love to transfer my existing e-book collection into plain text, or possibly loan copies of some titles to people I wouldn't necessarily trust my credit card number with. I can give copies to my mum, and she could give the same copy to someone else - but she'd have to give them all my credit card info for them to read it which makes her much more discerning.
There are other little aspects to it as well - take a look at how e-books are sold to see why they aren't pirated and see if you think it could be applied to larger software offerings.
Back in the late 1980's, Data I/O Corp. first released their 'Unisite' line of memory/PLD programming hardware. At that time, they were deathly paranoid about having each and every customer pay their (probably exorbitant) fee of at least $1,400 per year for keeping the programmer's operating software up to date.
The initial scheme to handle this, and lock a single copy of the operating software to a single programmer, was to send a preprogrammed PAL (Programmable Array Logic) device with each update kit. This PAL had the security fuse blown during initial programming at Data I/O's factory, so it was impossible to copy.
In order to update the programmer, you were required to install the boot floppy for the update, install the PAL in the Unisite's DIP socket, and fire everything up. The theory was that the software validated itself against the PAL's programming (it was, in effect, a hardware key), installed itself, and then literally fried the PAL chip to keep it from being used again.
This whole scheme was rife with problems, primarily because the PAL chips were highly ESD-sensitive and the person doing the upgrade at the customer's end didn't always take ESD precautions. Bad PAL? Gotta beg Data I/O to send you a replacement. And Lord help you if your programmer happened to be far enough out of calibration that it couldn't read the PAL, or if the DIP socket was intermittent.
Data I/O abandoned this crazy scheme barely two years later. The next thing they tried was a simple "lock the floppies to the programmer" thing by writing an encrypted hash of the programmer's hardware ID to the floppy boot sector, and having the operating software check for it. This caused massive problems with customers who had cause to try and use older device algorithms from previous disk sets, because said sets lacked the hash check.
That scheme faded quickly into oblivion as well, and Data I/O has, as far as I know, dropped copy protection on the software for the Unisite. I don't know if they still do it for their other programmer lines.
Happy tweaking.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
Another horrible one was Lotus 123 for DOS, mainly earlier versions. That used to write to the master floppy when it installed to track where it had been installed. When you wanted to put it on another PC you had to uninstall it first and that would restore the master floppy ready for reinstalling elsewhere. It also wrote something nasty to the HD - an unmoveable file of some sort ISTR which probably made life interesting for defraggers.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
blind people have to hack e-books just to read them. Is this what you want? you want a e-book that works with your screen reader pay more.
I don't buy it. Starsiege Tribes was perhaps the best team-based multiplayer game ever made, released at a reasonable price and with no copy protection. And yet, during my entire college years, I think I only saw *one* legitimate purchased copy of the game (mine.) I did see hundreds of burned CDs of it, and God knows how many players online were playing from burned CDs.
Comment of the year
Even on tape loading systems were preventing people copying the games was virtually impossible, programmers used copy protection to stop other people ripping the code and graphics out of their games.
Quite a few Spectrum games did this. They tended to use encryption, only decrypting the part of the code that was executing. Of course the encryption was quite basic, so to make cracking harder undocumented Z80 op-codes were used, or undocumented features of the Spectrum hardware. Strange data formats on tape were popular too.
I used to chat with the author of an Amiga Spectrum emulator, and he was always finding odd games that didn't work properly because of the protection.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
We have an approach that appears to work for us. We have an EULA, that forbids distributing, then we give our customers the source code and trust them. It appears to be working. We even encourage our customers to modify the code and we will work our updates around their changes as much as we can.
If your competitors have higher prices, wouldn't that suggest that customers would gravitate towards you, who charge a reasonable price?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
...or for Microsoft
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
there is much more than just the development cost to consider...marketing/advertising, support, distribution, duplication, packaging, paying the rent and utilities, R&D for enhancements, return on equity for the investors, etc.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Thank god for soldering irons. As long as we got soldering irons we will still have a weapon to wield against consoles.
:P). On top of that the 360 is known to break every couple months.
But either way the most effective copy protection by any standards are consoles. PC copy protections will always be broken easily even some multi player games (namely steam games, quake, etc) have cracked servers that people with pirated copies of games can use.
Consoles on the other hand must be chipped. Right now the only console that can be effectively chipped is the Wii. Even still that is a pretty large barrier and at the most 1% of wii users are going to chip their wii because it takes some skill and has a lot of cost.
Personally I chip other people's Wiis and now with the wii-clip its pretty darn easy. But it isn't chepa and my cheapest chip costs 40 dollars just in parts (D2CKey and Wii Clip V1). And of course isn't easy to solder and sometimes you screw things up.
I have almost 150 bucks invested in soldering mats etc. It is just a rather hard pitch to mess with someone's wii. But anyways I digress.
The xbox 360 is near impossible and you can't play on the internet (kinda essential to 360 gameplay
Unlike the wii the PS3's and Xbox's warranty gets voided simply for opening it.
Basically I think in the Game Publishers are trying to make a shift to consoles which are pretty solid. Mod chips are not a very popular thing. 1 out of 5 kids will talk to you about a game they pirated but maybe 1 out of 80 kids you talk to will have chipped console (and 1 out of 1 thousand if its not a wii).
Businesses should only pander to their customers.
People who infringe on copyright law by failing to pay for what they use are not customers.
Therefore, a business should not consider those people at all. They should concentrate on making the experience for paying customers as excellent as possible.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
What? An article called "history of copy protection" without any word about protections used on C64, Atari and Amiga?
Nothing about interrupts-based and sync-based protections, encryption, memory fillers, etc?
Nothing about the Rob Northern jokes, that were funny toys for Atari crackers?
Fortunately, protections were not limited to PCs.
People who use to spend nights playing with MonST and ADebug would love to have at least one word about that in an article called "history of copy protection".
Yes, I'm getting old, but the Atari ST/Amiga days are still my best memories, the best time I ever had in my life as a computer geek.
{{.sig}}
FlexLM is a license manager that's been around for 20 years. You'll typically see it in corporate environments. It's horrible. It was twitchy and horrible back when it was introduced, and it's maintained that legacy of horribleness to this day. I have a full-license OrCAD installation on my laptop, and FlexLM regularly shoots itself in the head. This is an example where the DRM crap obstructs me from using the purchased product. It'll take me a couple of days to sort out which application scrogged the license file (several apps use FlexLM, and none play nice.) This is a regular occurrence, and it's one of the reasons I despise copy protection methods. I'm not using a bootleg copy of the product, yet I'm treated like I am.
As soon as the whole OS, including the hypervisor, is ran inside an outer virtual box, the whole point is moot, and the hyper visor can't trust the anti-modding hardware (is it real genuine functioning hardware ? Or is the hyper visor communicating with an anti-modding hardware simulated by the emulator, communicating with it using bogus crypto keys injected by the emulator, and that simulated hardware will OK whatever pirated software goes in ?)
The only thing that could stimulate some player to buy the game is packed in goodies. Making big game boxes filled with lots of useful items (maps) fan-service items (scale model of some ingame object) etc.
That won't prevent dork who'll never pay for the game anyway to try hard to find a way.
But that will make you sure that the fans will happily rush to bux the "collectors' edition" of the box. Specially if the goodies are somewhat useful.
The only problems are :
- This raises the costs of the distribution : Bigger boxes, more expensive to produce content (as opposed to simply 1 disc + 1 small leaflet telling that the manual can be printed from a PDF file + tons of ads). As if the creation of the game wasn't expensive enough.
- Difficulty to use : if some goodies plays a critical role in the game (as in maps, scrolls with spell formulas, etc.) it might be inconvenient for players on the road. Some gamers like to play games while on the move (in the plane) and they might have to lug around the goodies for each game. Or, worse, suddenly come to realisation that this critical puzzle can only be solved if they use that goodie that they have left at home / lost long ago / etc.
Games bundled with high-end gaming hardware are another solution, as gamer are likely to buy the hardware anyway, and the licensing cost for the game are small compared to the hardware it self. ATI bundling Valve products with some high-end radeon comes as an example. Even in the old DOS days this has been seen (there was a game that came with its own sound card which acted as a dongle. I think it was B.A.T.)
Disclaimer : I tend to like "Collectors' edition" and prefering buying those. Nevertheless I systematically download cracks for any game I legally buy - simply to avoid the inconvenience of the copy protection system (be it to avoid damaging the game media - this had already happened to me - or avoiding to install some StarFuck root-kit).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
This really sucks for me as I travel to and from Thailand all the time. What do they expect? I buy the orange box in every damn country?!
...you still have your Infotator.
... or a yipple?
Now, what color is a Dornbeast?
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
As my primary interest in ebooks was portability (and having them as a sound file does make them more portable) I did look into this. The blind have 2 options, last I checked.
1. Free books on tape for the blind. They send you a special player (in the 90's it was the huge yellow tape player) and all the books you want, free of charge, and no postage. I stopped using it because first, I really did feel bad utilizing this resource when for me it was mere convenience and second, they don't hire professional book readers to narrate them so the quality is pretty lackluster.
2. Microsoft's various PDA OS's have text to speech for ebooks built in. I didn't go this route because I long since learned there's *always* an easier way than using anything Microsoft makes.
Reasonable copy protection is fine, too. Ambrosia Software games require a license key to be unlocked. License keys are validated online and time-limited so they invalidate quickly in case they are leaked - but if your key expires you can simply enter your data in their registration program and they give you a new one. As long as you have purchased the game from them you can always request a new key.
The result is that I feel good about buying from them. Their copy protection scheme is reasonable, it's not much of a hassle (once games are registered they get a machine-specific file saying that they are - no further online checks neccessary) and if I should lose all my data I can just download the game again and request a new license key. That last part makes the scheme almost look like a service.
Very acceptable, very reasonable and not insulting like StarForce et al. Of course it might not work for high-profile companies as people would release cracks, but for small-to-medium sized companies I think this scheme is much superior compared to the nonsense other companies come up with.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Kind of OT, but does anyone remember how id software distributed a Quake demo disc that had most of their catalog on it? In order to actually play the games you had to call a number and purchase the key for the game you wanted, but a program called qcrack was floating around unlocked them all. Of course, I was only 12 or 13 at the time, and hunting down qcrack on my friends AOL account to get free games was almost as cool as hacking the Pentagon :)
Yes, but, ... In an environment of unlimited tolerance of piracy why buy? Why become a "customer" when being a pirate offers 100% (or sometimes 110%) of the benefits?
If the software needs constant hand-holding support, it was written wrong to begin with. Selling support is an insult to the intelligence of the customer. That is like a logic bomb waiting to go off. It says basically that you will be unable to use the product unless you keep paying for support which you will desperately need.
Online games hold really the only answer where you have to pay for the subscription in order to use the game, no matter how you acquire the game itself. This is probably how most applications are going to go in the future - the web connection is essential and the only thing you have to pay for. Without the web connection to the "online" part the product is useless. It does indeed make piracy irrelevent.
Oh, how correct you are.
I do some admin work for a small software shop. They employ a registration code key system. I keep tabs on support emails to make sure they are getting through to the support system. Maybe half of all support questions are key related. Seriously.
"My new key didn't work."
"I lost my key and need to reinstall."
"I lost my key and need it to order an upgrade."
The list goes on and on. Such a waste of man hours. Rationally, they *know* the system probably isn't worth the time lost for coding the system to begin with and supporting it. However, inertia keeps them using it. I keep waiting anxiously for the day they tell me they'll be doing away with it.
Method of processing duck feet
That's exactly what they want you to think.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
Ahh.. copy protection. Cracking TRS-80 Microchess on cassette as a teen, where the game instructions loaded directly into screen RAM via a custom cassette loader. Nirvana.. Later on, one Mits Hadeshi (SP?) posted a letter to Kilobaud magazine that his backup method of choice for computer cassettes was ... a Sony.
No, the ultimate copy protection is...
;)
Spiradisc, bitches!
Who cares if you have to boot the game five times until it loads.. because, when that thing caught, it loaded fast!
I have an old copy of SimCity that used the same method. There were a bunch of cities along with populations, and on startup, the game would ask you to provide the population for one of the cities from the four-page or so black-on-red list.
My copy of Super Tetris, on the other hand, had a bunch of trivia questions in the manual. You were asked a question, and told to flip to a specific page for the answer, which you would type in.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Sorry, but this is utter tripe. Free always wins over any cost. Free is here today, and here to stay. Nobody with an Internet connection and any sense actually pays for music, movies or software anymore. Why should they? It is all available for free.
It makes perfect sense. One day Bill is a guy that believes he is perfectly honest and would never, ever stoop to pirating a game, music or a movie. Then there is a product that is way beyond his disposable income that he simply must have. The advertising has worked it charm and Bill wants this product, whatever it takes. He finds a place to download it for free or someone tells him where to get it for free.
Yes, the dam is now broken. Bill suddenly realizes he has been living as a pauper in a world of plenty. Everything he has ever dreamed of possessing is available for free. The one web site he found leads to another and another. Bill spends days downloading everything he can find that he ever dream of owning.
Bill is now a convert to the pirate way of life. It happens every day.
Seriously. They are a company that seems to think that copy protection isn't necessary to make money. Their Impulse program is like Steam without the suck. No DRM, no encryption, etc. Mostly older titles and indy stuff they sell, but there are some real gems in there. Sins of a Solar Empire is a current retail game and is just great. Think Homeworld crossed with Master of Orion. Well worth the money. Heck, you can even buy it retail and then register the serial, and Impulse will happily install it if you lose your disk. Depths of Peril is also great. Graphics are a bit dated but the game is top notch.
At any rate if you want games without the bullshit, and what to support a publisher who believes in that, well then these are your people. I've been real happy so far (I own 8 games from their library). If you see a game you like, I encourage you to buy it through them. The more people that support the model, the more developers that'll realise it's a good idea and release games on it.
http://totalgaming.stardock.com/
College students are probably not a typical demographic. They generally have little to no extra spending money (at least I didn't). As such, for such a technically savvy and reasonably intelligent market, their time is disproportionally less valuable than their money, and copying games would seem to be fairly attractive proposition. I wonder how many of those same college students will purchase games legitimately after they get decent paying jobs. In addition to obtaining extra spending money, I think having a job also creates more sympathy with the game developers trying to earn a living from software sales. I've heard from many people that claimed to have downloaded lots of warez in their younger days, and then started purchasing games legitimately when they got older.
Not defending the rampant copying or anything - just an observation...
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Maybe you're right, or maybe you're wrong, but the point is that I was refuting the statement that good products at reasonable prices aren't pirated. It's a blatant lie from my experience.
Another example: there was a study shown shortly after the Macintosh version of Halo was released showing that over half of the copies in circulation were pirated. Halo is a game of proven quality on Xbox and PC, and was released at an average price for video games.
It's one of those nice Slashdot fictions "we like piracy, therefore let's pretend there's no actual piracy problem." But it's simply not true.
Comment of the year
Copying Windows and Office is obsolete. These days, you just throw on Ubuntu and OpenOffice.
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
I was largely speculating about a particular demographic, not arguing with your overall conclusions. I certainly won't dispute that illegal game copying and distribution is rampant - the evidence is overwhelmingly there to see. It seems probable that it's largely responsible for the shrinking / marginalization of the PC gaming market. Why else would MMOs be the only (comparatively) significant genre left, which co-incidentally also happens to be server-based, and thus much more difficult to pirate?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
That could be the worst article on copy protection I have ever read. Nothing like doing a "history of..." article and starting roughly 10 years late. If I were a betting man I'd guess that copy protection started back on the Commodore 64 by cleverly placing errors on the media itself. The executable would force the drive head to go directly to the sector on the disk where the error was located for verification, and if it was there, the loading process continued. What was neat about this was that there were different [i]types[/i] of errors - I don't remember all of them, but the wrong kind of error would result in the program to halt loading. Of course, C= owners hated this. The sound that the 1541 drive would make as it was forced to read the error was an awful grinding sound. Some people believed that this could physically harm the drive, however I myself never experienced that and I played a hell of a lot of games. This was first circumvented by a Canadian - a man I have never met but was legendary in his home town. He's now a project manager at Microsoft I believe. His software - Super Hacker - was the first disk duplication software for the C= 64 that could copy the errors. Ha, I still get a laugh that it would take approximately 90 MINUTES to copy one 170K 5.25" disk using Super Hacker. Believe me, being a pirate in those days was a lesson in patience. As technology evolved, so too did copy protection. Half tracks, extra sectors, etc. became common place. They were easily reproduced with a bit for bit disk copy programs that started to hit the market. Copy protection has a fascinating history. From a pragmatic point of view, however, it has never made sense to me why vendors spend so much money on copy protection when it INEVITABLY will be broken. I would love to know the actual success rate of hackers vs. copy protection schemes.
"Quality product at a reasonable price. ...and completely without copy protection. I can honestly say that I have only gotten cracks for games I already own a full license to, but I would have never needed to if the games hadn't been virtually padlocked with a faulty key."
and you are in the minority. Quality products at a reasonable price still get copied to bittorrent. And what is a reasonable price? Most games don't cost more than $50 or $60 (which is VERY reasonable)..but still get copied all over the Internet. Why would a company want to make it easier for you to get their commercial product for free?
"I bet a lack of copy protection would also lower the number of calls to tech support as well."
Yeah, it will. But I think a company would rather have a few extra support calls than fewer sales.
I did a quick ctrl-f at the level I browse at and didn't see anyone mention Monkey Island and only one person mention King's Quest (didn't RTFA). Those are the first games I had experience with copy protection.
:P
I remember my cousin had the Secret of Monkey Island and I loved playing it at her house. The stupid wheel though was a hindrance from taking it home. I think my dad ended up photocopying every combination but that seems like there would have been a lot of permutations. Either way, a family friend eventually gave me Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge and I was able to experience the monkeyness at home until I bought the collection on CD-ROM a few years later. Curse of Monkey Island is still one of my favorite games of all time.
The other game was King's Quest IV: Perils of Rosella. You had to type out certain words straight from the instruction booklet. We didn't own this game so we had a photocopy of the book. Eventually we lost that but I was able to remember a specific word or two from the book and just tried those over and over again until I got into the game. That game pissed me off though, I am not a fan of King's Quest these days.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
...the people which will copy your software for free, would they buy your software otherwise ? I have got the feeling that most of the time the answer is a loud : NO. When i was younger we casually copied a lot of software which needed decoder ring/manual or whatnot (dutifully de-constructed, copied, and reconstructed) would ANY of us swapping those soft have bought it ? No. Maybe we would have bought 1 , maybe 2 , but not the quantity we copied. So the question is : is it worth the effort to try to implement protection (which cost money in addition to your additional investment) when in the first place those which can't copy then don't buy it ? And is it worth the effort when anyway nowadays many protection are an hassle for the user (can't use some benign software like process explorer) and anyway the ISO is available for download 1 day after ? I would like to see a study of this, although it is difficult to compare games as once a protection is in/not in and sold, you can't compare the same game with a different situation. Some have no copy protection whatsoever (I think sins of an empire?). I really want to see a study with hard evidence on whether protection brings anything.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
My first crack ever on PC ! My original stopped working, so I used debug.com to see what was going on. I traced it back to a certain zone it was loaded (and it was overwritting INT 3 I think, and JMP on the INT table at the palce where INT 3 was which was a simple JMP there too back to the program, in a vain attempt to break down any attempt to debug. HAHA.). This zone was simply XOR'd with a number which was added a 3 after each byte. Once decoded this was a special INT 13 which was tested for a value. A CMP with a JNE somewhere to exit the program. First step was to calculate the offset, get the number it was XOR'd against, then transform those into 3 NOP XOR'd, go into the oringinal ULTIMA.COM and replace the original byte with the XOR'd NOP. And thus I could continue to play AFTER my original stopped working. I loved such protection scheme, and I asked the other kids to give me their game, and I would crack them. I would not really care for the game, just for the THRILL and adrenaline of finding out how it was done , and beat it. Later on, when i was older, I just copied the manual/decoder ring. Bah.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I remember Locksmith on the Apple ][+. I used to get a magazine that I think was called Nibble.
Organization: alphabetical, sometimes numerical or messy
Make a Batch , pipe date, time in a variable, Save date Set to a fix date , start software, and after the end, batch check time and use saved date back (or date+1). Works really fine. You only needed to do it once, and could use with many software. Nowadays soft are a bit more clever than check the date.
RR Tycoon 1 had some of the best copy protection for back in the day. You got a book with 40 or so train engine types which were used in the game. After so many turns, the game would ask you the name of the engine it popped up. If you got it right you could continue, or if you didnt get it right, you were limited to 2 trains the rest of the match. It meant for you to keep that instruction book in good condition and not lost....
~DF
That's a short-term argument. If people get your product for free, they have an economic advantage over the honest people who pay even just the reasonable price. In the long run this continuously lowers what is considered a reasonable price to the point where the price reflects just the advantage of buying over copying. While pirates have had entertainment at their fingertips and on their MP3-players for more than a decade now, honest people still need to jump through DRM hoops for some entertainment. That's a negative buying advantage! The conundrum is that not using DRM would probably not have changed the situation much, because people still would not be able to afford filling up their iPods legally. So what? If they can't afford it, then the iPod is not going to be full, right? No. The fact that people can and do get the product for free skews the price, because the honest people don't want to be left behind the "thieves." After all, the reasonable price for a product in unlimited supply is zero. The only marketable good here is the convenience of getting a file through legal channels, but that can't cover the cost of creating the products in the first place.
I've never understood copy protection at all. I certainly don't understand mediocre copy protection, i.e. "master" floppies that can be copied with Rawwrite before you use them for the first time, "type in this from the manual" types, CD-checks that could be bypassed with virtual images (even as far back as the DOS days with a suitable TSR), or anything that could be disassembled and changed within about five minutes. It makes the company think they are professional when in fact it just shows them up, and embarasses and annoys their customers.
Proper copy protections are normally highly-complex dongles etc. but they are completely over the top for most software and every time I've bothered to look, I've never had a problem finding a crack. I've installed high-end CAD programs that need such dongle but they were still a royal pain in the bum. If I'd have had more PC's to install them on, I would have found a way around it for convenience.
Even today, some modern educational software still uses stupid primitive tricks - I had to copy a master install floppy only the other day and, because most of the computers don't even HAVE a floppy anymore, automate the install process by emulating a floppy drive from the image. The program even went as far as double-checking that the floppy was writable etc. and the "copy protection" was to slightly change the wording of the license.txt on the floppy! If it was written a certain way it was "already installed somewhere", if it was written the original way it was "installable"! And you have to use the same floppy to uninstall it. Fortunately, my healthy skepticism of copy-protection methods forced me to make a raw image of the disk before it had touched any other machine.
Another one required per-PC serial numbers to be faxed/emailed to the company, which would fax/email an activation code back. For a network of PC's. With NO way to do the entire network, or to use one program on all PC's. Another (fairly famous) piece of software wouldn't let you image computers once it was activated because the program would just deactivate, even with an "educational site license". Stuff that.
I complained no end of times to the companies, who have absolutely no idea how modern network deployments work, but they refused to help except to keep sending stupid codes or floppies that did exactly the same thing. So in the end, I used my own method. It's part of being a network admin, sometimes, you have to find ways around stupid programming, whether it's hard-coded paths, stupid permissioning, or poor copy protection. Needless to say that we've stayed within the licensing terms at all times but guess which software we're not going to upgrade/buy ever again?
One of my personal pride-and-joy moments when I was younger was removing the CD-check from a copy of Desert Strike / Jungle strike. It was fantastically exciting to have the knowledge to do that, which I did by tracing assembly instructions by manually decoding the machine code, and a copy of Ralf Brown's Interrupt List. I never distributed it (no doubt a million other people did the same much earlier) but I've kept the instructions/cracked EXE even until today. It was a simple crack, nothing more than a check to make sure a certain drive was a CD drive provided by MSCDEX or similar, but for the time, I was very chuffed at having done it without any help. I played that game a lot more when I didn't have to keep inserting the stupid CD for all of 5Mb of data, and swapping it to play the other game.
Worms Plus was particularly easy, IIRC, because you could just emulate a CD. I had a DOS utility (forgotten the name now) that let you specify a folder and it would make a "virtual CD" appear with that folder on it. It worked for an awful lot of games, and still worked under the early versions of Windows.
Even as far back as the Spectrum, just about any game was copyable if you had a decent tape player and at worst, you had to type in a short BASIC listing or use a copy utility to copy just
In the UK, there was a software company who employed no copy protection at all. The games released by this company were sold for just 9,95 euro. This company sold many games until it sold itself to a big software company. That was also the end of no-copy protected games by that company. The new games released were again sold at the price between 49,95 and 59,95 euro (these are the average starting prices of games sold in the Netherlands). If these companies would just stop investing so much money is protection and try to lessen the price of games (and other software products) then he sales would go up, and the "il"legal downloads would go down.
Dark Lord Azagthoth
I wont buy from Ambrosia Software. Don't get me wrong, I like them, I think that they are good guys, but their copy protection scheme all but guarantees that when they go out of business you are completely screwed. Couple this with a crazy high price point for any of the old games I'm interested in and I just have no interest. If you told me that EV Nova could be bought for $10 with no copy protection they would have themselves a sale (I've played the demo and it looks very cool).
However I know that they have in the past had a hard time making a profit and if they go under I have no guarantee that anything I purchase will work any more.
Back in the day, MS DOS was easy to copy, and easy to make duplicates of the boot floppy etc. Easier to find copies of MS DOS than trying to buy DR DOS out here in NZ.
Then came Windows 3.1, again easy to copy, even when OEMs used codes on the CD's as the system never checked for duplicates.
Piracy didn't seem to kill of these OS's at all. It just meant that everyone had a copy and could install it, and write software for it.
Now it's so hard to get vista working and Genuine (dis)Advantage was such a hassle (even though I had legit media and keys) I've ditched it and gone with Linux. Never looked back, and haven't actually visited a wares site in years 8)
If I'm just using the software at home, it's not making me any money so is not worth me spending hundreds of dollars on it. No company is loosing a sale because of it as I wouldn't buy it anyway. However at work, the systems do generate revenue. All the software is licensed (holy shit - $60K for MSCMS/Sharepoint - eeek!)
.
DRM really isn't such a problem for steam etc at the moment - but what happens if valve fold, and whoever owns the license doesn't maintain the DRM servers for people to log in to? I still play games that are 20 years old, will valve be hosting DRM servers in 20 years? Are we so controlled by corporations that they will decide what we play, and when? Unfortunately the answer would appear to be yes...
Goddamned right! The most pissing copy protection I ever saw was many years back in a Chuck Yeager airplane game. Every time you loaded the game, they played some bullshit scenario where you had to go to the fairly large "training manual" aka the user manual and hunt down the answer to some dumbshit question like, "what is the maximum thrust for the plane you are flying?" The next time, it might be "Will this plane survive a 10G pullout?"
Total horseshit. Yeah, I could have run it through an editor, written down all the questions, then listed all the answers, but it wasn't worth all that much trouble.
Give you game away for FREE and charge 1$/month for your game for server access fees. Pratically every game should be multiplayer by now, shouldn't it?
Well, except Zelda. And Metroid. And... well, ok, not all games should be multiplayer after all.
If Blizzard thinks they're raking in the dough now, imagine if you could get WoW for free (with all expansions packs free too) and they only charged 1$/month.
Nobody would ever think "I'll cancel my subscription because it costs too much".
I'm sure someone has said it on this thread already, but it's worth repeating: copy protection is useless.
Let's assume there are two types of users: pirates and customers.Pirates are going to crack their software to get around the scheme, so once a crack is out, game over - the copy protection is now useless at deterring them.
Customers will either tolerate the restrictions the scheme imposes or crack their legitimate copies to get around the copy protection. The company does not derive any benefit from customers vs. having no protection at all, since they paid for the software anyway. In fact, they're harmed by the decision to use copy protection, because the group of customers that goes looking for a crack will realize that if they're going to need to use a cracked copy anyway, there's no reason for them to pay for the software in the first place.
To summarize, it does next to nothing against the pirates, while harming the legitimate consumers and possibly turning several of them towards future piracy. The only legitimate purpose it may serve is deterring casual piracy, but there's nothing stopping these people from cracking the protection either.
Many many years ago a major US company (who should've known better) tried to sell us a copy protection scheme for our new software product. It used fancy 5.25" disk writers (yeah, that dates me) to write a very special sector .. one with a pattern that could NOT be written by a standard floppy drive.
All we had to do was encode a simple test (they gave code samples) in our program (or a loader), to test that specific track and sector. If it failed, it was an original. If it read, it wasn't.
It took me about 15 minutes to write a little hack (assembly language of course) that hooked into the BIOS's disk read routines. If someone accessed that specific track and sector, it would always return a disk error. Bidda boom bidda bing.
I sent the source code and a sample loader (175 bytes long as I recall, TSR loader and all) back to the company, suggesting they should perhaps reconsider their product design.
Never heard from them again. Silly rabbits.
The find-words-on-certain-page-in-the-manual form of copy protection is just a minor hindrance for computer games...but there was even a NES game that had this. At a point maybe 30%-50% through the game StarTropics, you're asked for a 3 digit code from the manual (to activate the submarine, iirc). Well I discovered this years ago when I rented it from a video store. Of course the rental didn't include the manual, so anyone who actually got that far in the game within the rental period was stuck. This was back before the web, so you couldn't just do a quick web search; no, you were really truly stuck, not even hints magazines would have that code. Years later I found the code...007.
The benefit for legitimate buyers is easier access to patches; if you register your game with a legitimate key (which you can do on as many machines as you like), you can use a simple tool to automatically download the latest patch and lots of new features. With a pirated version you need to get each patch by hand. It's not much, but it does give the legitimate customer more value than the pirate.
Ofcourse it's also important to continue supporting your game. As soon as you stop releasing patches, new features and new content, the pirates catch up and the automatic update becomes useless.
Just do an only validation of a serial #, and allow its use one time only. Legit customers can install with their legit serial, while the pirates will resort to using pirated software.
You can't force a pirate to buy something they don't want to. You just can't.
You're telling the GP that while they aren't making much money, they won't lose anything to piracy. But when he makes more money, there's going to be pirates taking it.
You're forgetting: they are still making MORE money than they did.
So why cry that you're making 10x as much when 100x as many people are using it?
As far as software is concerned, one of the effective techniques of copy protection is bloat. Want a copy? Get a new hard disk and CPU upgrade. So buy a new computer with bundled software.
What I'm doing on my 2 Gb computer with dual core is marginally more featuresome than what I did with my 4 Mb 486. Sure, I do more in less time, but not really more complicated, most of the time, aside from games and media playback. However, task manager tells me I need 200 Mb of RAM to write code. It seems I don't have enough disk space left now to run the next edition of the development environment.
As hardware prices come down, bundled software is more economical to pay for in a new-computer purchase. So, software makers using this technique of "copy protection" do profit, though there wouldn't be any protection on a downgrade version.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Don't know if anyone posted this, but I recall the gold box collection of Forgotten Realms games back in the day (it had Secret of the Silver Blade, Curse of the Azure Bonds, and one other I can't recall) that I had bought used at a computer show.
But Azure Bonds and the other had a paper decoder ring that had you a series of different runes on the top ring and their equivalent in English. Seemed pretty kewl and added to the atmosphere of the game (though it could have gotten tedious, but I wouldn't know as I was 10 at the time and those games were fricken difficult).
The best was Secret of the Silver Blade, where it would have you look up a word on X page, paragraph X, line X. Of course, it would always ask me to goto a page that wasn't in the book, so I never really got to play the game. But I doubt it would've been a different experience.
Damn those games were hard.
Clever and witty sig.
Ask Stardock. They sold lots of extra copies because they advertised no copy protection. I have a copy myself. :)
The cesspool just got a check and balance.