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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."
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
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!
DONT DONT DONT COPY THAT FLOPPY! http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4837609090332617729
A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking
by "so on and so forth", you of course mean a pony, right?
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
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.
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();