Software protection scheme may boost new game sales

[Sunder]

Yawn...  This is no different than any of the copy protection schemes
employed in the 1980's on then popular home computers such as the
commodore 64.  

Hindsight is 20/20 and recalls, all of these were broken within weeks if
not months.  "Nibbler" copiers and other programs were quickly built that
allowed the breaking of all of these systems.  All sorts of "error"
sectors, duplicate tracks, half tracks, extra tracks, extra sectors,
non-standard sized sectors, tracks written at different speeds, erroneous
checksums, hidden data, and other sorts of weird bits were employed.  All
were broken.  None survived the ages.

In the end, the companies that employed copy protection only managed to
piss off customers who lost their only copy of the software, and created a
market for the copiers and crackers.  The crackers won, the software
companies lost.  

Few of the companies of that era are still in business today.  CEO's,
Vulture Capitalists, and others who have an interest in such schemes would
do well to invest some time in learning about that time, and the results,
for their investments, and dollars will go the same way... the way of the
brontosaurus, the trilobite, and the dodo.

Let them try, if they wish to burn their money.  As far as I'm concerned,
I'll vote with my wallet as usual and only run open source, free software.  
If the moronic kids at whom these titles are aimed have the $50-$70 per
title to waste on self destructing, flavor of the month games, they are
certainly free to spend that money to their heart's desire.


Not a dime from my wallet will wind up in their pockets - except perhaps
indirectly:  the next time I buy my next burger, "no, I don't want fries
with that, no, I don't want to supersize it," my $5 eventually makes a
small contribution to the salary of the burger flipper, which in turn is
applied to the purchase of said game.  :)



I've not read the said article just yet, but from that direct quote "as
the copy degrades..." I can already see the trouble with this scheme:
their copy protection already fails them.  They allow copies to be made
and rely on the fact that the CDR or whatever media, will eventually
degrade, because their "code looks like scratches..."  Riiiiggghtt.....

If you can make one copy, you can make many, and you can certainly store
the ISO in compressed form on a normal CD to make more copies
later.   CDR's are what? $0.20@ these days?

Hell, you can even get one of those virtual CDROM programs to mount the
CD's as if they were CD's, and store the ISO on a hard drive, or DVD-R
instead. Hard drives are already in the 250-500GB range these days.  So
their scheme is already flawed and doomed from the start.

It seems to me that people that engage in treating their customers like
theives to begin with lack a vital ingredient for making money: common
sense.


----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------

On Sat, 11 Oct 2003, Steve Schear wrote:

> Companies are using a new software protection system, called Fade, to
> protect their intellectual property from software thieves. Fade is being
> introduced by Macrovision, which specializes in digital rights management,
> and the British games developer Codemasters. What the program does is make
> unauthorized copies of games slowly degrade, by exploiting the systems for
> error correction that computers use to cope with CD-ROMs or DVDs that have
> become scratched. Software protected by Fade contains fragments of
> "subversive" code designed to seem like scratches, which are then arranged
> on the disc in a pattern that will be used to prevent copying. Bruce
> Everiss of Codemasters says, "The beauty of this is that the degrading copy
> becomes a sales promotion tool. People go out and buy an original version."
> (New Scientist 10 Oct 2003)
> 
> <http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994248>

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