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Subject: Re: Do I have a Right to a Backup Copy?

Author: Paul

Date: 07:08:00 09/22/02

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On September 22, 2002 at 09:35:30, Albert Silver wrote:

>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?
>>
>>jm
>
>The first floppy versions of Mchess and Mchess Pro were like that. I remember
>because the idea that a $150 program could go down the drain due to a
>demagnetization issue had me quite nervous, and I tried to make a back-up to
>protect against that. No luck though. Fortunately, nothing happened to the
>diskette either.
>
>                                       Albert

This makes me remember one of my floppy incidents.

Genius (don't remember which version) had a protection scheme where you could
only install it 3 times; you moved a copy from the floppy to the HD as it were,
and you could also move it back to floppy by de-installing, but if something
happened to the copy on HD, you simply lost a copy.

That happened to me twice, so one day I only had one copy left. At that time I
was writing a backup utility to copy HD partitions sector by sector, and that
utility came in quite handy here!

I just installed the last copy of Genius on a small partition, made a backup of
the partition using my utility, de-installed the Genius copy, restored the
backup of the partition, de-installed Genius again, etc ... so after this I was
back up to my original 3 copies ... never tried to create more than 3 copies on
the floppy though :)

groetjes,
Paul



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