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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.
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.
DONT DONT DONT COPY THAT FLOPPY! http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4837609090332617729
A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking
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.
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.
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 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 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
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
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.
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?!
That was the ProLok disk. It had a spot on it that had been heated with a laser, enough to fuse some of the oxide. The result was a small amount of disk space that could be read but not altered. The copy-check consisted of writing all zeroes to that area; verifying all zeroes; writing all ones; and verifying all ones. A disk with the laser spot would always produce at least one compare error.
The routine was hidden inside a really lame obfuscation scheme. It would read a section of encrypted code from the disk, XOR it byte by byte with a byte selected from a table, and store it in RAM. Then it would select another byte from the table and do the XOR again. And again, thirty or forty times. Each cycle would begin by altering the single-step and breakpoint interrupt vectors to point to an exit instruction.
If you went to the trouble of tracing your way down through all that, you were rewarded with a delicious irony: the ProLok disk was, itself, a copyright infringement. In order to do the write/read checks they had to insert hooks into the BIOS -- but that was not so easy in the small-RAM days when the BIOS executed directly from ROM instead of being shadowed out into RAM. Vault had to make its own BIOS, and did it by (drum roll) copying IBM's (rimshot). And they made an absurdly lame attempt to cover it up: they took some 800 bytes of the IBM Fixed Disk BIOS, added their hooks, then went through it and interchanged logical-shift-left and arithmetic-shift-left instructions wherever the MSB and carry were guaranteed to be zero (meaning both instructions did the same thing). So, disassemblies of the two BIOSes would look a LITTLE different...
Oh, the crack? A two-byte change on the disk, probably a back door they forgot to remove. Compuserve was the central clearinghouse for cracks in those days, and picked it up within a week.
AFAIK Vault's only client was Ashton-Tate, who used it on dBase III. The president of Vault was a guy with a law-enforcement background and a SWAT team mentality who fancied himself a mighty crime fighter, and when he was embarrassed by the quick crack, he boasted they were developing ProLok Plus, which would punish crackers by physically damaging the machine. Business customers were enraged, Ashton-Tate dumped Vault (which was expensive because they owned a one-third interest in it), and Vault was no more.
rj
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