What is the point of copy protection on software? It doesn’t prevent piracy or protect the intelctual property of software. All it does is drive up the cost of the vendor. It’s a waste of both time, and money, and I think it should be given up on.
I have never known a copy protection system that hasn’t been broken. According to the laws of computing, there is in fact no secure system. Think of all the CD’s that have been made, all the billions of dollars spent on copy protection over the last 20 years, and think of the waste it has been.
For example, Window’s XP touted an authentication system to prevent piracy. You have to call in and activate your liscense for it to work properly. After 30 days of not calling, WinXP would shut down until you did. That’s all fine and dandy, but if you think back to when XP was released, it was leaked early. XP was released in October 2001, but “The Devils Own” version of it leaked in September, a full month before it was released. The version had a cracked authentication system, so you never did have to register. Think of all the man-hours that went into Windows Authentication, all the flak Microsoft got from it, and ask yourself if it helped. How many thousands of users pirate the software, and did that physical copy protection system work? No, it failed miserably.
Now Microsoft has the Windows Genuine Advantage program. Basically, if you have a CD key in a certain pool of ‘pirated’ keys, you can’t get all the updates for Windows. Funny thing is, they decided to use javascript to check for keys, and with 24 hours of releasing another form of copy protection, it was cracked. What sense does it make to add more stovepipes and kinks to a system. If we gutted copy protection, how much more smoothly would our programs run? How much cheaper would they be?
I remember buying a copy of Vampire: Bloodlines and being pissed when the Half-Life 2 engine wouldn’t let me start the game with Clone-CD installed. Now granted, Clone-CD can be used to make copies of game disks, but the engine totally blacklisted it. I was further agrivated because I had to uninstall Clone-CD to play the $50 game I just bought. Needless to say, I never did buy the actual version of Half-Life 2. If I had trouble with a liscensed game, I didn’t want to play the orignal engine game. Valve, you lost cash because of your insistance on facist security.
I don’t think a game or an application exists that can’t be cracked. Sites like Megagames, GameCopyWorld, and ANDR provide files to allow people who pirate the software to use it. Have an illegal copy of the latest game? No problem, go to a site, download a file, and you can play. It takes about 30 seconds to circumvent the copy protection. If it takes that long, why even waste the time to include it? I would rather have the CD’s cut by the $2 per unit it took to liscense the copy protection scheme.
Another evil about copy protection is that it won’t work on some obscure CD-ROMs. Sure , that Mad Dog CD-RW at Best Buy seems like an awesome deal, but if you buy a copy of Doom 3, wouldn’t you be mad if it didnt work, because the firmware in the drive didn’t jive with the scheme Doom uses to protect itself? You can’t return the software because it’s open, so you have to buy a new CD-ROM to play it with. Sure, this doesn’t happen often, but read the fine print on the game box next time. This website tells what protection is used on what, and has some horror stories also you can read.
For all its promised protection of income, copy protection doesn’t hold up to it. More often than not, it is just more memory that is used, or the inconvience of having a CD in a drive to play a game. I play tons of games, and it makes me mad having to switch out CDs everytime I change my mind of what I want to do. Even without copy protection, there is still the legal protection of a copy right, and violation of the Terms of Use to fall back on. Also, copy protection imedes on fair use, and the right to create a backup for personal use. That’s a very bad thing.
I know we will never ever see the end of copy protection. As time goes on, the systems get more and more advanced, and more and more intrusive. The future hold only more ‘speedbumps’ for the systems , and more frustration for the end user. More frustration….for me.