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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."
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.
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.
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?)
Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across the entrance to the Underworld that they used, and found myself able to trace LB's path all the way to the great chamber where his fallen companions still lay. Without that miniature walkthrough, and one page in the manual, with one line of musical notation, written as apparently nothing more than a window on Britannian culture, I'd have never been able to finish the game.
Unfortunately the later games abandoned that completely. The documentation checks were all at the beginning of the game, and all referred to the bestiary, or lines of latitude and longitude on one of the included maps. What had once been pleasantly immersive (and a dirty, dirty trick on a cheap pirate) turned into a challenge and response to prove that you were the heroic Avatar. Kind of says something about the shift in the relationship between player and developer.
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
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?!
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