Author: Russell Reagan
Date: 20:46:16 09/21/02
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On September 21, 2002 at 23:04:05, John Merlino wrote: >This is a very sticky situation. You DO have a legal right to make a backup >copy. Conversely, the program publishers have a right to (attempt to) prevent >piracy, and this is usually done by adding copy protection to the CDs. A lot of good the copy protection did. It took me 15 seconds to find it on a file sharing program. The ONLY people your company is hurting are the ones who legitimately purchase the software and who lack the knowledge needed to bypass the copy protection. No matter how advanced, complex, and intricate the copy protection is, there's always some person out there who is talented enough to break it in a relatively short period of time, and it only takes one person to do that and share it on some file sharing program, and it's loose. That will happen regardless of the copy protection. So the copy protection does absolutely nothing to prevent that. So what effects of the copy protection are left if it does nothing to prevent piracy? It means that the good people who buy the software and try to do a CD copy with their standard CD burning software get screwed. Lose your CD? Sorry, buy a new one, or you could download it from the guy who cracked the useless copy protection a day after it was out. There are people who just want to see if they can break the copy protection, others want to "screw the profiteers", and there are even online cracking groups who compete to see who can crack this kind of stuff the fastest (it's not a matter of if they can, pretty much whether or not they can do it in a matter of hours, or if it will take them more than a day). This is the same stupid logic that people who say we should take away all of the guns use. The bad guys don't get their guns from Walmart, but someone gets shot by a gang member and then everyone waves their hands in the air and wants to take away all of the guns. Then the bad guys continue getting their supply of sub-machine guns on the black market and the situation is worse than it was originally because no one thought about the effects of the decision. >This fight is well over 10 years old, and I don't expect it will ever truly end. If "this fight" is chessmaster specific, ok. But this issue is a lot older than 10 years. >Anybody remember some games that were put on floppies that had actual physical >deformities (bad sectors, or even pinpoint holes!) built into the floppies so >they could not be copied? Too young, but I read about it in books. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?) that didn't work, just like the CM9000 CD protection didn't work. Russell
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