Author: Alastair Scott
Date: 02:20:58 09/22/02
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On September 21, 2002 at 23:04:05, John Merlino wrote: >On September 21, 2002 at 21:13:37, Rick Terry wrote: > >>I am a Registered owner of Chessmaster 9000, I would like to make a backup copy >>for personal use, is this legal? If so can someone send me a email on which >>program to use to copy this CD? I am currently using easy CD Creator 5 Platonium >>but it fails to copy a installable CD. Help please! > >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. > >This fight is well over 10 years old, and I don't expect it will ever truly end. > >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? As you say, this is a very difficult issue and is subject to contradictory law. In the US, I believe you are allowed to make backup copies (as you say). However, if that fails by "conventional" techniques, any attempt to reverse-engineer the protection mechanism would be against provisions in the DMCA! See: http://anti-dmca.org/ In the EU, there is no DMCA or equivalent (yet) and, again, you are allowed to make backup copies. Quite what would happen if someone took one of those making protected media to court over this issue I have no idea, but it'll happen sooner or later; I feel that the DMCA will eventually collapse because of such contradictions. In the end the market will decide, and I have a feeling protection will die once again. I remember all the old-fashioned methods of protecting floppy disks - 'funny formats' (not 720K or 1440K), hidden sectors, bad sectors, bizarre sector geometries - and they all eventually failed, as well as stranger methods such as 'code cards' - a grid of coloured squares which, when looked at through a combination of filters, turned into different coloured squares whose colours had to be typed in before the game would start ... Someone I know who worked in the games industry at the time said that the return rate was 20 or 25 per cent; many of the disk protection methods were assuming tolerances in disk drives that just did not exist. That rate of return, in the end, crippled quite a few companies. Alastair
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