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Subject: Re: pircay

Author: Vincent Vega

Date: 17:16:11 10/09/00

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On October 09, 2000 at 17:50:04, John Merlino wrote:

>
>CM8000 IS DEFINITELY going to require a CD at all times, thanks to a mandate
>from "on high". Those in charge of these decisions seem to feel that copy
>protection is rampant (apparently, even more rampant than ever before), and that
>Chessmaster (and all other products) will lose HUGE amounts of sales due to
>piracy. Whether this is true or not will never be known, of course. But, there
>it is.... There will be copy-protection on both CDs, and the program will not
>run unless you have a CD drive in on startup (or can produce one when asked at
>startup).
>

I think this is a bad decision.  For legitimate users, having to put in a CD
will be an inconvenience and may create some bad will when it comes to upgrading
to the next version.  This should be pretty important to Mattel, as Chessmaster
is a very good brand name.  Hard-core pirates will not be hurt at all - whatever
copy protection scheme is used, will be broken in at most a week and the cracked
program will be available to them on the Net.  "Casual" pirates will be stopped,
but they would also be stopped by a simpler copy protection requiring the CD
just during the installation.

Software piracy is quite impossible to fight today, but it could be virtually
eliminated in the future if the users go along with it.  Future programs could
require Internet connection and some server processing during every run.  Some
multi-player games already do it today, but for other types of programs
requiring an active Net connection is harder to justify.



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