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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.
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)
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
But with USB there's absolutely no way I can tell the difference between a dongle, and a bit of software that attaches to the USB chain. Or a single uber-dongle that emulates an number of other dongles after cloning from the original/loading a saved config. With parallel/ADB/serial dongles it was at least moderately hard, but with USB it's trivial.
At the very least the USB dongle would have to do something sort of calculations to provide authentication using a cryptographic authentication system. Certainly you could build dongles with appropriate computing power, they quickly become expensive. And you still have to deal with the possibility of simply cracking the game to bypass the check and skip to the "yep, authenticated" portion -- the USB device would have to provide some bit of data that was necessary to execute the machine code but different from use-to-use, which is a non-trivial problem all on its own.
Not to mention that no one would just use the USB block device driver -- they would all require that you install slightly different, conflicting drivers to read their USB dongles.
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.
...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?
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
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.
You know, you can play your games in offline mode, where STEAM doesn't snoop on you all the time. That's great for single player games like Portal. Online games, ok, you can't exactly play them in offline mode. Now, at the very least, you can play half the games you mentioned.
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
This works fine for things that aren't too popular. Once you get something that is "popular" is when the pirates, crackers and reversers decide to attack.
The problem with this scheme is that it works fine when people respect you and your product. Having something popular and suddenly 90% of the potential users will find a warez copy that somebody bought with a stolen credit card. And there is a keygen or whatever it takes to use the product without paying.
Mostly, it is respect and there is damn little of it today. So companies try to force respect and that doesn't work either. Offering a good product at a realistic price doesn't work when people want to make it into a political statement.
This might not be the most popular response for our crowd here, but... either find & buy a second-hand copy of the software, or get over it.
It's true that buying second-hand raises the problem of "How do we know they've destroyed all their copies of the program, when they sell it?", but I don't pretend to have a solution to that.
However, if a company doesn't want to sell a particular product anymore, or doesn't want to sell it to _you_, then... you're out of luck. No company has an obligation to sell a particular customer anything. Righteous indignation on the phone may get them to change their mind, but it's still their mind that has to change in the end - you're not making the decision for them.
It's just a tough break - and an example of how freedom to act operates.
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.
> You're fine as long as you buy the game from the region you say you're in.
That's exactly the same stupid reasoning that's used for the #$^%&£! DVD region codes. If I buy a DVD on my vacation in the states, I can't watch it on my player at home, without going through some extra hassles.
Vendors should have no right to put ANY export restrictions on stuff they sell. If they want to play in globally, they should accept their customers may want too...
Completely off topic, but it is just another example of pseudo globalization - basically where the corporation gets to use the rest of the world to suit its motives, while not allowing the consumer the same opportunities. You can be damn sure that Valve has used cheap developers, manufacturing, and other benefits of the third world - all at the expense of Western workers. But when it comes time for the consumer to take advantage of the cheaper products in those same third world countries - forget it, our license forbids that...