And, in the future, publishers will have no customers. The industry can only sell what the consumer will buy.
Pay-per-play is not a new concept; this was what people used to do in arcades. The whole point of home entertainment was that you DIDN'T have to pay-per-play.
I have a certain amount of cash I spend on entertainment. If I have to pay a dollar every time I die in GTA4, then does that mean Rockstar will be rolling in cash? No, of course not, it just means I'm not going to play GTA4, or at the very least, a lot less of it.
You mean, the one that starts with "The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."?
Lots of speech is illegal in Canada; child porn, hate speech, English writing in Quebec, and, of course, most dastardly of all; car pooling.
First, the regulations that exist are not there to stop carpooling, they're there to ensure bus and taxi services are safe. This isn't some theoretical problem, either, as a number of people were killed in an unlicensed and uninsured van in southern Ontario a few years back. (Would they have been alive if the service vehicle had been through a safety check, or if the operator of the vehicle was properly licensed? I don't have those details, and I can't find the article I was reading about it this morning). The problem is that the regulations are very broadly defined, and a lot of car pooling falls under them.
The Ontario government has been actively working to fix the laws for a while now, so they don't apply to car pool services (http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2008/09/02/ot-carpool-080902.html). But, how to write a law which covers a taxi, and doesn't cover car pooling? Tough to get right, but they are working on it.
Second, the site in question, PickupPal, was being used by a couple of companies in southern Ontario who were selling rides from Ottawa to Toronto, and the reverse direction (a 6 hour drive), putting multiple people into vans. So, essentially, running a bus service. This is a far cry from car pooling, and obviously these companies should fall under the bus regulations. Should the government be fining PickupPal, or fining these unlicensed bus services directly? Hard to say without knowing all the details involved.
PickupPal, though, called the ruling a victory, so they're obviously happy with it.
That's not true at all. A second hand game does not have full value.
The original Halo was $60, and Halo 3 is a far better game than Halo, so if that were true then Halo 3 should sell for way more than the original Halo. Yet Halo 3 does not sell for $200. Halo is no longer worth $60, because the original Halo has graphics and multiplayer gameplay that look pretty dated compared to the state of the art.
If your requirement is "I need my disks to be encrypted", for example, and your requirements go no further than that, then you may find your vendor of choice decides to encrypt your disk by XORing it with "TheSuperSecretPasskey". Technically encrypted, but not very useful.
Think that's unlikely? That's how some eBook DRM schemes work.
In the US and Canada, there's something called FIPS 140-2 which describes in painful detail exactly what constitutes a "secure system", including what crypto algorithms may be used (right down to the RNGs). The idea is to make it so your typical government employee can distinguish between something that is actually secure, and something which is snake-oil secure, without a doctorate in math.
Likely the requirements in this case are coming from something like HIPAA, which I'm less familiar with, but specifies exactly how patient information should be treated.
AFAIK, the reason new cameras can get away with USB instead of FW is because the new cameras don't store their data on a DV tape, but on a hard drive or other random access digital media.
A tape drive really only plays at one speed, so to get data off that tape, you need an interface that can cope with real-time speed. If you want to transfer 10 minutes of data off the tape, you need to do so in 10 minutes. With a hard drive, this restriction goes away; you can leisurely transfer that 10 minutes of data at any speed you want; you can take 15 minutes, or 20, or really whatever your customers will put up with.
Call me cynical, but I have a hard time seeing how something that makes your former customers hate you, organize online rallies against you, and stops people from buying your product is a "big win".
Steam's offline mode works like this (or, it did, last time I tried it many years ago): You connect to the internet, and you get a "pass" that lets you play your game without being connected to the net for the next little while (say, 7 days). Once it runs out, you have to get a new pass. Unfortunately, this doesn't work so well when you can't connect to their authentication server in the first place (unless you psychically anticipate the server going down.:)
Removal of the "DRM" from Valve's game, should they ever go away, is a possibility. However, this isn't a good solution for two reasons:
1) A lot of games sold on Steam aren't written by Valve. For these games, Valve would obviously need permission from the game's copyright holder. These rights holders may not be keen to have copy protection stripped from their products, especially if the products in question are recent releases.
2) If Valve goes out of business, then it is questionable that they would have the resources to create such a patch, and even more questionable that they would have any reasonable means to distribute it.
You don't just have to provide a serial number to download the update. You have to provide it to INSTALL the update.
If you buy a game from their online store, and then you burn a backup to a CD, and then Stardock goes out of business, and you buy a new PC and you're thinking you're going to install their game from your backup, you are sadly mistaken. In order to install it, it needs to activate, so if their activation servers ever go down, you're still screwed.
If you buy the box version, you could install the 1.0 version from CD, but you could not install any updates you'd downloaded, because the updates require activation.
What are you talking about? How is it supposed to install a ring 0 driver that lets the game company connect to your machine and delete all your pirated software?:P
Well, assuming you're a twisted marketing/accounting guy...
As with most DRM schemes, I think there's an ulterior motive here, and I think that's to kill the second hand market. Most people are unwilling to buy games with activation second hand, and most stores are unwilling to even take them for trade or sell them.
Remember, the difference between Digital Rights Management and plain old copy protection is that DRM is about restricting your rights, and in this case they're taking away your right of first sale, plain and simple.
"Completely free of DRM" is a stretch; there's an activation step for downloading any patches for any of their games. Ditto if you buy their games online.
But, their activation doesn't have a finite limit on the number of installs, rather it limits you based on the rate of installs. They don't publish the numbers or details, but essentially they're only going to stop you from activating if you activate WAY too many times in a month. I wish they were a little more transparent in terms of defining exactly how it works, but it isn't too bad. It's WAY better than "3 activations per purchase" (or 2 for Microsoft games).
Steam hasn't always been so perfect. When HL2 first came out, I already had a Steam account, but I signed up for a new account since HL2 came with all the games I had in my first account.
I forget exactly when this was (I think it was near the XMas rush after HL2 came out, I don't think it was when the game first came out), but one of Steam's authentication servers died under the load of all the new users signing up for HL2. The result was that all new accounts (including my "second" account) could not login to Steam (although my old account worked fine). It meant that lots of people who had purchased HL2 couldn't play it for two or three days, which kind of sucked.
I do like Steam, but I'll buy a game on CD (with a good old fashion disk-in-the-drive copy protection system) if it's available rather than buy on Steam.
I don't have any real problems with Steam, though. One day when Valve goes out of business, life will get a little interesting, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
I imagine Steam would be a lot less fun if I was on dialup.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm OK with copy protection. I'm just not OK with product activation. I've had my share of problems with bad copy protection schemes as well, but very few of them involved many hour long waits with product support when the scheme was operating correctly, which is what inevitably happens here. This is faulty by design, so to speak.
Where "multiple machines" equals, at most, three. Not three at the same time, either, three total, ever. Hard drive crashes? You eat an activation. Upgrade your graphics card? Spore says "Hey, this isn't the same machine I was installed on," eat another activation. In a surprisingly short period of time, you find yourself on the phone with EA, begging for more activations so you can reinstall the game.
Now, imagine it isn't just Spore doing this, but every piece of software on your computer. Do you REALLY want to spend hours on the phone with various tech support companies in India every time you upgrade part of your computer or buy a new computer?
I'm not defending copyright infringement at all, especially on something so non-essential as a game, but it's been quite clear to me that accepting some amount of pirating and SAVING money by not having to pay for (or develop) the technology that only pisses off your honest customers is probably a pretty good way to go.
Saving money on not developing the DRM, *AND* earning money because I'll buy your game! (Well, assuming your game is any good.) This is one place where I, and obviously many others, are unwilling to put up with DRM, and adding DRM to your game means lost sales. This is a fact, and you can't just ignore it.
Chrome looks nothing like any other Windows app. All the familiar metaphors and mechanisms people are used to using in their other applications are missing in action, which makes interacting with Chrome a very unintuitive process.
The "menu bar" is still there, it's just inexplicably found in a "drop-down icon" in the upper right corner.
There's no application icon in the upper left corner. Since I usually close my applications by double clicking this icon, I find it's absence really annoying.
The first thing I had to do in Chrome was fix up my proxy settings. So, "Tools->Options".... uuhh... Where's the menu bar? Oh, there's a little wrench icon in the upper right? Maybe there? Here we go. "Options". Now proxy settings will likely be "Under the Hood". There's a button marked "Change Proxy Settings". When I click on it, I get taken to the Windows "Internet Properties/Connections" page... What does this have to do with proxy settings? Obviously I don't want the "Setup an internet connection" button. The "Dial-up and VPN" window is probably not useful. Try "LAN Settings..." Ok, this is starting to look like proxy stuff. Seems my "Proxy Server" is set incorrectly (I didn't even know Windows had this page. All the windows apps I use have proxy settings configured manually.)
Now, I'm a professional software developer, so navigating my way down through that wasn't too bad. I was left feeling a little lost for a few moments, but I got there in the end. Imagine someone less familiar with computers trying to pull this off.
Ok, task 2. I want to bookmark a site. Bookmarks->Add Bookmark? No... There's a little "star" icon next to the URL bar. They introduced a star in Firefox, so lets try that. Ok, I've bookmarked my page. Now I go to another page... Lala... Now I want to go back to my bookmark... Ok... Let's try the little "Page" icon in the upper right... No, nothing about bookmarks. New tab shows me a bookmarks bar across the top, but what if I want to get to a bookmark from another page? I'm not going to open a tab every time I want a bookmark. Little wrench? Ahh... "Always show bookmarks bar".
Again, confusion and hunting to make it do what I want it to do. These are not the hallmarks of good usability.
Pretty and unique interfaces are cool, but they are almost always a bad idea, from a usability perspective. (And, usually from an accessibility perspective too).
I misread this as "30 years of Lego Mining". Brings to mind visions of people hard at work, in secret underground Danish mines, toiling to harvest bricks for the children of the world.
Very true. When he said "I turned to the white people on each side of me, and asked them if they were going to say something to the person," all I could think was, why would you do that? Why would you expect other people to go say something if you're not willing to go say something?
Maybe racism is so bad in Missouri that it wouldn't be safe for him to say something in that situation? I've never been there, so I can't really say.
Basically the idea is that if you open up a JPG, and then save it, the overall quality of the image deteriorates in a non-linear fashion with repeated saves. So, if you resave the image at 95% quality, and introduce a known error, then compare that against the original, the deterioration in quality should be homogeneous throughout the image. If not, the image is a composition from multiple sources. Check out slides 42 and 43 in the linked PDF file.
You can get around this, but you need to be VERY careful. Ideally you'd want to start out with raw images, and do all your manipulation saves/loads in some lossless format. Any kind of painting or blending in the image would have to be done carefully, as well, as it would be easy to produce a region of superior quality pixels that would show up in this kind of analysis.
First, a "you need to connect to the server every time you play" scheme is exactly what Steam does. I actually kind of like Steam. So long as Valve stays in business, all of the games on Steam (except Bioshock, of course) can be installed on as many machines as you like; you can suffer as many hard drive crashes as you want to, you can upgrade your machine as often as you want to. The only restriction is you can only play on one machine at a time, which isn't so unreasonable as all that.
I admit, when I bought Civ IV, I bought the retail box copy so that I could swap the disc between my machine and my wife's, so we could both play at the same time. I'm an evil pirate.:P The number of times we've actually done that is pretty low, though, as we're both busy professionals.
That aside, there are a few problems with this idea, although none of them are so dire that they can't be overcome.
First, putting some of your logic on the server means that customers on dialup, and customers with poor net connections are going to suffer from lag. Lag in a single player game is kind of unacceptable. Maybe you can pick logic that doesn't need to be updated "in realtime" (the price of arrows at the market in a game with a free market economy, for example).
Second, putting logic on the server means you need have the added expense of maintaining and running this server. If you ever decide to stop running the server, then no one can play your game anymore, and this is going to turn some people away from your game. The more complex the logic you want to move out of the game engine, obviously the more powerful and more expensive this cost is going to be.
Third, if you want to stop pirates, you have to move some substantial logic out of the game and onto the server (see the last point about expensive servers). Why? Because otherwise the pirates will just re-code the logic and add it back into your game, or else write an open source version of your server.
Simple: I can take my console disc, and put it in a friend's console and play at their house. I can spill pop on my console and watch fire come out the back, and I can go buy another console and put my disc in the new console and play the game. Most importantly, I don't have to ask anyone for permission when I install my console game, so a downed or overwhelmed sever is not going to stop me from playing. In short, I own the console game, whereas I'm "renting" with DRM.
In actual fact, I would draw a distinction between "copy protection", which is designed to stop you from making copies of a game, and "DRM", which by definition is designed to limit the rights you have.
I got Flight Simulator X as a gift from my in-laws two years ago. It comes with a maximum of two product activations. I'm at that limit right now; so if I want to upgrade my computer in any significant way, or reinstall windows, or if my hard drive crashes, then I either have to call up Microsoft and beg them to give me more activations (which I find distasteful), buy a second copy of the game (which I find extremely distasteful), or I have to pirate the game I already own. As a result, I find myself being very careful not to reinstall windows, and I find myself second-guessing hardware upgrades and putting them off.
Ever since I received Flight Simulator X, I have been very careful; I will *never* buy a product with product activation, for any reason. For the most part, this means I miss out on games rather than pirating them, because I only have so much free time. So, no Bioshock, no Mass Effect, nothing from Microsoft. Not playing Spore is going to suck big time, because I've been looking forward to it, but unless they change their minds about the DRM, I'm just not going to touch it.
As a hobbiest photographer, I'd love to pick up Lightroom, since I played with the demo and it's fantastic. I've been putting some serious thought into whether I should buy a Mac and a copy of Aperture. If Adobe got rid of the product activation, it would obviously be a no-brainer. As a professional software developer, it's tempting just to write my own image management software (if I were still in University and had tons of free time, I'd have done it by now); I'm sure there's other people who feel the same as me, so I'm sure Adobe's insistence on DRM is going to net them some open source competition eventually, too. Actually, I take that back. Too late.
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And, in the future, publishers will have no customers. The industry can only sell what the consumer will buy.
Pay-per-play is not a new concept; this was what people used to do in arcades. The whole point of home entertainment was that you DIDN'T have to pay-per-play.
I have a certain amount of cash I spend on entertainment. If I have to pay a dollar every time I die in GTA4, then does that mean Rockstar will be rolling in cash? No, of course not, it just means I'm not going to play GTA4, or at the very least, a lot less of it.
You mean, the one that starts with "The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."?
Lots of speech is illegal in Canada; child porn, hate speech, English writing in Quebec, and, of course, most dastardly of all; car pooling.
TFA is a little one-sided.
First, the regulations that exist are not there to stop carpooling, they're there to ensure bus and taxi services are safe. This isn't some theoretical problem, either, as a number of people were killed in an unlicensed and uninsured van in southern Ontario a few years back. (Would they have been alive if the service vehicle had been through a safety check, or if the operator of the vehicle was properly licensed? I don't have those details, and I can't find the article I was reading about it this morning). The problem is that the regulations are very broadly defined, and a lot of car pooling falls under them.
The Ontario government has been actively working to fix the laws for a while now, so they don't apply to car pool services (http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2008/09/02/ot-carpool-080902.html). But, how to write a law which covers a taxi, and doesn't cover car pooling? Tough to get right, but they are working on it.
Second, the site in question, PickupPal, was being used by a couple of companies in southern Ontario who were selling rides from Ottawa to Toronto, and the reverse direction (a 6 hour drive), putting multiple people into vans. So, essentially, running a bus service. This is a far cry from car pooling, and obviously these companies should fall under the bus regulations. Should the government be fining PickupPal, or fining these unlicensed bus services directly? Hard to say without knowing all the details involved.
PickupPal, though, called the ruling a victory, so they're obviously happy with it.
Last I checked, Toronto was a single municipality.
That's not true at all. A second hand game does not have full value.
The original Halo was $60, and Halo 3 is a far better game than Halo, so if that were true then Halo 3 should sell for way more than the original Halo. Yet Halo 3 does not sell for $200. Halo is no longer worth $60, because the original Halo has graphics and multiplayer gameplay that look pretty dated compared to the state of the art.
Especially when we're talking about security.
If your requirement is "I need my disks to be encrypted", for example, and your requirements go no further than that, then you may find your vendor of choice decides to encrypt your disk by XORing it with "TheSuperSecretPasskey". Technically encrypted, but not very useful.
Think that's unlikely? That's how some eBook DRM schemes work.
In the US and Canada, there's something called FIPS 140-2 which describes in painful detail exactly what constitutes a "secure system", including what crypto algorithms may be used (right down to the RNGs). The idea is to make it so your typical government employee can distinguish between something that is actually secure, and something which is snake-oil secure, without a doctorate in math.
Likely the requirements in this case are coming from something like HIPAA, which I'm less familiar with, but specifies exactly how patient information should be treated.
AFAIK, the reason new cameras can get away with USB instead of FW is because the new cameras don't store their data on a DV tape, but on a hard drive or other random access digital media.
A tape drive really only plays at one speed, so to get data off that tape, you need an interface that can cope with real-time speed. If you want to transfer 10 minutes of data off the tape, you need to do so in 10 minutes. With a hard drive, this restriction goes away; you can leisurely transfer that 10 minutes of data at any speed you want; you can take 15 minutes, or 20, or really whatever your customers will put up with.
According to Apple, the new touchpad has software definable buttons for extra functionality, such as right-clicks.
Can you configure an area of the touchpad for middle clicks, as well? Can I finally get a decent laptop with a three button touchpad?
Call me cynical, but I have a hard time seeing how something that makes your former customers hate you, organize online rallies against you, and stops people from buying your product is a "big win".
Steam's offline mode works like this (or, it did, last time I tried it many years ago): You connect to the internet, and you get a "pass" that lets you play your game without being connected to the net for the next little while (say, 7 days). Once it runs out, you have to get a new pass. Unfortunately, this doesn't work so well when you can't connect to their authentication server in the first place (unless you psychically anticipate the server going down. :)
Removal of the "DRM" from Valve's game, should they ever go away, is a possibility. However, this isn't a good solution for two reasons:
1) A lot of games sold on Steam aren't written by Valve. For these games, Valve would obviously need permission from the game's copyright holder. These rights holders may not be keen to have copy protection stripped from their products, especially if the products in question are recent releases.
2) If Valve goes out of business, then it is questionable that they would have the resources to create such a patch, and even more questionable that they would have any reasonable means to distribute it.
You don't just have to provide a serial number to download the update. You have to provide it to INSTALL the update.
If you buy a game from their online store, and then you burn a backup to a CD, and then Stardock goes out of business, and you buy a new PC and you're thinking you're going to install their game from your backup, you are sadly mistaken. In order to install it, it needs to activate, so if their activation servers ever go down, you're still screwed.
If you buy the box version, you could install the 1.0 version from CD, but you could not install any updates you'd downloaded, because the updates require activation.
Steam suffers from the same problem, obviously.
What are you talking about? How is it supposed to install a ring 0 driver that lets the game company connect to your machine and delete all your pirated software? :P
Well, assuming you're a twisted marketing/accounting guy...
As with most DRM schemes, I think there's an ulterior motive here, and I think that's to kill the second hand market. Most people are unwilling to buy games with activation second hand, and most stores are unwilling to even take them for trade or sell them.
Remember, the difference between Digital Rights Management and plain old copy protection is that DRM is about restricting your rights, and in this case they're taking away your right of first sale, plain and simple.
"Completely free of DRM" is a stretch; there's an activation step for downloading any patches for any of their games. Ditto if you buy their games online.
But, their activation doesn't have a finite limit on the number of installs, rather it limits you based on the rate of installs. They don't publish the numbers or details, but essentially they're only going to stop you from activating if you activate WAY too many times in a month. I wish they were a little more transparent in terms of defining exactly how it works, but it isn't too bad. It's WAY better than "3 activations per purchase" (or 2 for Microsoft games).
Steam hasn't always been so perfect. When HL2 first came out, I already had a Steam account, but I signed up for a new account since HL2 came with all the games I had in my first account.
I forget exactly when this was (I think it was near the XMas rush after HL2 came out, I don't think it was when the game first came out), but one of Steam's authentication servers died under the load of all the new users signing up for HL2. The result was that all new accounts (including my "second" account) could not login to Steam (although my old account worked fine). It meant that lots of people who had purchased HL2 couldn't play it for two or three days, which kind of sucked.
I do like Steam, but I'll buy a game on CD (with a good old fashion disk-in-the-drive copy protection system) if it's available rather than buy on Steam.
I don't have any real problems with Steam, though. One day when Valve goes out of business, life will get a little interesting, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
I imagine Steam would be a lot less fun if I was on dialup.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm OK with copy protection. I'm just not OK with product activation. I've had my share of problems with bad copy protection schemes as well, but very few of them involved many hour long waits with product support when the scheme was operating correctly, which is what inevitably happens here. This is faulty by design, so to speak.
Where "multiple machines" equals, at most, three. Not three at the same time, either, three total, ever. Hard drive crashes? You eat an activation. Upgrade your graphics card? Spore says "Hey, this isn't the same machine I was installed on," eat another activation. In a surprisingly short period of time, you find yourself on the phone with EA, begging for more activations so you can reinstall the game.
Now, imagine it isn't just Spore doing this, but every piece of software on your computer. Do you REALLY want to spend hours on the phone with various tech support companies in India every time you upgrade part of your computer or buy a new computer?
As more and more people get bitten by DRM, that "small population" is rapidly growing.
I'm not defending copyright infringement at all, especially on something so non-essential as a game, but it's been quite clear to me that accepting some amount of pirating and SAVING money by not having to pay for (or develop) the technology that only pisses off your honest customers is probably a pretty good way to go.
Saving money on not developing the DRM, *AND* earning money because I'll buy your game! (Well, assuming your game is any good.) This is one place where I, and obviously many others, are unwilling to put up with DRM, and adding DRM to your game means lost sales. This is a fact, and you can't just ignore it.
Chrome looks nothing like any other Windows app. All the familiar metaphors and mechanisms people are used to using in their other applications are missing in action, which makes interacting with Chrome a very unintuitive process.
The "menu bar" is still there, it's just inexplicably found in a "drop-down icon" in the upper right corner.
There's no application icon in the upper left corner. Since I usually close my applications by double clicking this icon, I find it's absence really annoying.
The first thing I had to do in Chrome was fix up my proxy settings. So, "Tools->Options".... uuhh... Where's the menu bar? Oh, there's a little wrench icon in the upper right? Maybe there? Here we go. "Options". Now proxy settings will likely be "Under the Hood". There's a button marked "Change Proxy Settings". When I click on it, I get taken to the Windows "Internet Properties/Connections" page... What does this have to do with proxy settings? Obviously I don't want the "Setup an internet connection" button. The "Dial-up and VPN" window is probably not useful. Try "LAN Settings..." Ok, this is starting to look like proxy stuff. Seems my "Proxy Server" is set incorrectly (I didn't even know Windows had this page. All the windows apps I use have proxy settings configured manually.)
Now, I'm a professional software developer, so navigating my way down through that wasn't too bad. I was left feeling a little lost for a few moments, but I got there in the end. Imagine someone less familiar with computers trying to pull this off.
Ok, task 2. I want to bookmark a site. Bookmarks->Add Bookmark? No... There's a little "star" icon next to the URL bar. They introduced a star in Firefox, so lets try that. Ok, I've bookmarked my page. Now I go to another page... Lala... Now I want to go back to my bookmark... Ok... Let's try the little "Page" icon in the upper right... No, nothing about bookmarks. New tab shows me a bookmarks bar across the top, but what if I want to get to a bookmark from another page? I'm not going to open a tab every time I want a bookmark. Little wrench? Ahh... "Always show bookmarks bar".
Again, confusion and hunting to make it do what I want it to do. These are not the hallmarks of good usability.
Pretty and unique interfaces are cool, but they are almost always a bad idea, from a usability perspective. (And, usually from an accessibility perspective too).
I misread this as "30 years of Lego Mining". Brings to mind visions of people hard at work, in secret underground Danish mines, toiling to harvest bricks for the children of the world.
Very true. When he said "I turned to the white people on each side of me, and asked them if they were going to say something to the person," all I could think was, why would you do that? Why would you expect other people to go say something if you're not willing to go say something?
Maybe racism is so bad in Missouri that it wouldn't be safe for him to say something in that situation? I've never been there, so I can't really say.
You might not be able to tell, but a mathematician probably can.
Basically the idea is that if you open up a JPG, and then save it, the overall quality of the image deteriorates in a non-linear fashion with repeated saves. So, if you resave the image at 95% quality, and introduce a known error, then compare that against the original, the deterioration in quality should be homogeneous throughout the image. If not, the image is a composition from multiple sources. Check out slides 42 and 43 in the linked PDF file.
You can get around this, but you need to be VERY careful. Ideally you'd want to start out with raw images, and do all your manipulation saves/loads in some lossless format. Any kind of painting or blending in the image would have to be done carefully, as well, as it would be easy to produce a region of superior quality pixels that would show up in this kind of analysis.
First, a "you need to connect to the server every time you play" scheme is exactly what Steam does. I actually kind of like Steam. So long as Valve stays in business, all of the games on Steam (except Bioshock, of course) can be installed on as many machines as you like; you can suffer as many hard drive crashes as you want to, you can upgrade your machine as often as you want to. The only restriction is you can only play on one machine at a time, which isn't so unreasonable as all that.
I admit, when I bought Civ IV, I bought the retail box copy so that I could swap the disc between my machine and my wife's, so we could both play at the same time. I'm an evil pirate. :P The number of times we've actually done that is pretty low, though, as we're both busy professionals.
That aside, there are a few problems with this idea, although none of them are so dire that they can't be overcome.
First, putting some of your logic on the server means that customers on dialup, and customers with poor net connections are going to suffer from lag. Lag in a single player game is kind of unacceptable. Maybe you can pick logic that doesn't need to be updated "in realtime" (the price of arrows at the market in a game with a free market economy, for example).
Second, putting logic on the server means you need have the added expense of maintaining and running this server. If you ever decide to stop running the server, then no one can play your game anymore, and this is going to turn some people away from your game. The more complex the logic you want to move out of the game engine, obviously the more powerful and more expensive this cost is going to be.
Third, if you want to stop pirates, you have to move some substantial logic out of the game and onto the server (see the last point about expensive servers). Why? Because otherwise the pirates will just re-code the logic and add it back into your game, or else write an open source version of your server.
Simple: I can take my console disc, and put it in a friend's console and play at their house. I can spill pop on my console and watch fire come out the back, and I can go buy another console and put my disc in the new console and play the game. Most importantly, I don't have to ask anyone for permission when I install my console game, so a downed or overwhelmed sever is not going to stop me from playing. In short, I own the console game, whereas I'm "renting" with DRM.
In actual fact, I would draw a distinction between "copy protection", which is designed to stop you from making copies of a game, and "DRM", which by definition is designed to limit the rights you have.
I got Flight Simulator X as a gift from my in-laws two years ago. It comes with a maximum of two product activations. I'm at that limit right now; so if I want to upgrade my computer in any significant way, or reinstall windows, or if my hard drive crashes, then I either have to call up Microsoft and beg them to give me more activations (which I find distasteful), buy a second copy of the game (which I find extremely distasteful), or I have to pirate the game I already own. As a result, I find myself being very careful not to reinstall windows, and I find myself second-guessing hardware upgrades and putting them off.
Ever since I received Flight Simulator X, I have been very careful; I will *never* buy a product with product activation, for any reason. For the most part, this means I miss out on games rather than pirating them, because I only have so much free time. So, no Bioshock, no Mass Effect, nothing from Microsoft. Not playing Spore is going to suck big time, because I've been looking forward to it, but unless they change their minds about the DRM, I'm just not going to touch it.
As a hobbiest photographer, I'd love to pick up Lightroom, since I played with the demo and it's fantastic. I've been putting some serious thought into whether I should buy a Mac and a copy of Aperture. If Adobe got rid of the product activation, it would obviously be a no-brainer. As a professional software developer, it's tempting just to write my own image management software (if I were still in University and had tons of free time, I'd have done it by now); I'm sure there's other people who feel the same as me, so I'm sure Adobe's insistence on DRM is going to net them some open source competition eventually, too. Actually, I take that back. Too late.