Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
The trick there was bleach. Bleach would strip the color off the paper but not the ink. So it would turn a print that was for example, grey ink on dark red paper (which would B&W copy to a sheet of black paper) into a tannish/reddish/white sheet of paper, and black lettering, easily photocopied.
Anyone remember MordorCharge?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
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!
I'm sure there's nothing unusual about that. The very first thing I do when I buy a game, even before installing -- and preferably before buying, too -- is to stop off at gamecopyworld and/or gameburnworld to make sure that there's a crack that I can apply to my legitimate (and patched) copy. It's a trend that will only continue.
I've already had experiences of electronics shops pointing to me to instructions on how to "crack" a DVD player to make it multi-region, how to unlock phones, and so on. I'm sure it won't be too long before we see game shops doing similar things; games will catch up eventually.
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 I doubt, unfortunately. As the article shows, people have been putting up with copy-prevention schemes since the advent of commercial computer software (in fact the article doesn't start nearly early enough). Some of those schemes have been much more burdensome than present-day ones -- though they're getting worse again, with "activate every time you start the game"-type schemes.
...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 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.
I admit I didn't read the article, but for every new and ridiculous height publishers go to for copy-protection, there a new and ridiculous height that crackers go to, to break the protection and then they put the results on bittorrent.
I think it's another case where the law woefully lags behind technology. There need to laws (urgently) protecting consumer rights when copy-protection is applied, just like there's the DMCA which helps publishers go after people who circumvent their protections (helps a little too much).
The point being, once the law makes it clear what copy protection can and cannot do, then at least the publishers have guidelines to work with and can go to town with copy protections but still not trample on our rights.
I especially think the "treating us as criminals" arguments is given way more weight than it's really worth. I mean, does anybody have a better idea about how to validate s/w as being legally purchased other than using some product activation mechanism (whether it works over the phone or net?)
I realize all copy protection in some manner treats you like a criminal. I start having issues when it becomes obtrusive to my ability to play a game or use some software.
I think STEAM is fine. Even if I have no Internet access, I can still play the game as long as I have installed the game.
I think CD keys are fine. It comes with the game. If I lose the key, that's my fault. The game still theoretically works. The CD key also doesn't force me to go out of my way in some fashion. I don't have to pick up a phone to call someone. My keyboard is right there and all I need to do is type it in.
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?
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
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
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
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}}
Making copies isn't the hard part; designing the game in the first place is. But they'd rather charge for copies than for the labor of game design... probably because they want to "strike it rich" if the game becomes a runaway hit. Instead of being paid for the amount of work they put in, like everyone else, they want to be paid based on the number of people who end up enjoying the game.
If only the rest of us got that luxury! Maybe barbers would like to be paid based on the number of people who compliment you on your haircut. Maybe auto manufacturers would like to be paid based on the number of trips you take in your car, or the number of passengers you carry, instead of a fixed amount up front. But would it really be worth passing a bunch of laws enforcing those business models? It doesn't matter that it's an infinite good either, and that at $10 per copy, every sale after 10 million is profits. They are still entitled to think that they are providing you with a product/service that is worth at least $10 and that is what they ask you to pay them for it. And we are still entitled to think that what they're providing isn't worth $10, and find someone else who'll provide it for less - whether that's a used game store or a torrent. if a customer isn't willing to pay that price, they shouldn't buy the game. I'd say if a publisher isn't willing to have their work copied, they shouldn't release it. Pouting because people copied the information you made available to them is like pouting because you built an igloo in the summer and it melted. Information is copyable, and water is a liquid above 32 F: these are facts of life.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
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?!
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)
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.
The BBC micro had a number of variants of this, mostly to stop people converting the tape versions of game to run from floppy disc.
For the most part they were trivial, but the best one used the 1MHz timer. The decryptor code was positioned immediately below the encrypted game code and ran in a (nested) loop. It XORed itself (including addresses it used for indirect loads and so on), the timer and to-be-decrypted data along with a few constants. When things magically came right the loop terminated and the very next thing in memory was the first instruction of the now-decrypted game code.
Because the 6502 CPU only ran at 2MHz you had to figure out where in the (usually 2-6 cycles) fetch-execute cycle the, say, LDA instruction would read the hardware timer if you wanted to hand decode this. And of course the length of that instruction varied based on whether it was crossing a 256 byte page boundary or not (doing an indirect load) and so on. You couldn't move the target data because that would change the addresses being used for loads and stores and thus the progress of the decryption, you couldn't copy the code elsewhere and change it to update both copies because that would change the length of the loop and throw the timings off and you couldn't mess with the timer speed because it was fixed in hardware and, well, you get the idea.
Clever fellow who came up with that one!
Graham
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.
I seem to remember Autocad doing something like this. They used the dongle to decrypt a look-up table used in geometric transforms. If the LUT wasn't decrypted, subtle and cumulative errors would be introduced into the design which would only become noticeable after a week or two of use.
If used correctly, dongles are pretty damn hard to defeat. Ideally you use them to decrypt hunks of both your data and executable, then hide the significant decryption data amongst a blizzard of dummy calls to the dongle.
...rather than by restricting competition... Copy protection should not restrict competition. Current DRM-schemes (for example iTunes, WM-DRM) do indeed restrict competition. They should not, by law be allowed to do that. Now do you understand the sort of laws I'm talking about? Ones that mandate interoperability guidelines, for example? But it represents the same loss of revenue, doesn't it? No, it doesn't. As you said, the original owner now no longer has a copy of the game. If the game is so awesome that you want to keep playing it forever, you have to be willing to forego your $25 trade-in fee. In your 'better' world the publisher does not get rewarded for making such an awesome game -- in other words, it deprives the publisher of their just rewards. I think you've got it backwards. Copyright does enforce a business model -- the model of doing the work first for free, and selling copies later -- and it does that by restricting our rights.At the risk of turning this into a flamewar, I suggest that you have a misplaced sense of entitlement. You feel the whole business world should bend over backwards to provide everything to you for free, unless they can find some way of providing you an add-on service that you absolutely can't circumvent. This is utterly irrational on your part.
You have rights, but so do publishers. A solution is necessary that protects both your rights and theirs. Zero-DRM protects our rights at their cost. DRM allowed to roam free, protects their rights at the cost of ours. DRM, with proper legislative oversight/guidelines can protect the rights of both parties. The DRM exists; the legistation does not -- and the courts or government need to desperately step in and do something about it. I can't believe you have a problem understanding this.
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.
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.
A lot of these speccy games that used randomly generated lookup codes (either in a book or lenslok) could be beaten by poking the frame counter to zero before loading the game. Random numbers on the speccy were generated from the frame counter - it was pretty much the only source of entropy on the box[1]. So if you did:
POKE 23762,0; POKE 23763,0; POKE 23764,0; LOAD "" [2]
then, since interrupts were disabled during LOAD, the random number generator would always pick the same one (or possibly two in edge cases) 'random' example. So you only had to copy this one down to pass to your friends along with your C60 cassette.
I'm not sure if other sources of entropy were available. I vaguely recall the Z80's IR register looking rather random, and maybe you could get noise out of the cassette input... Happy days...
Barry
[1] The real source of entropy they relied on was the time between the computer starting and the user typing LOAD "".
[2] I looked this up - I don't remember it being 3 bytes, but the internet doesn't lie.
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 am slightly colour blind, so if there was no one else in the house to tell me what the colours were I couldn't start the game.