Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Copy protection and music software

Author:Brian Carnell
Posted:8/10/2000; 10:39:22 AM
Topic:Copy protection and music software
Msg #:19635 (In response to 19618)
Prev/Next:19634 / 19636

Dave wrote:

The other side of the story about copy protection is that we knew that when we took the protection off a lot of people who were paying would not pay. We were selling total end-user software and the bump of copy protection kept a lot of people honest. The people who were clamoring for removal of the protection were the professional users in corporations.

But don't the people who aren't going to pay just get around the copy protection anyway?

The place where copy protection still reigns supreme is in computer games. Pretty much every game sold today has some sort of copy protection scheme, usually centered around the CD (it's a lot of fun to do a 1.5 gig install of a game and then *still* be required to have the CD).

OTOH, it takes about 10 minutes of web searching to find a download that will break the copy protection. The sites that supply the cracks are aided by the fact that the copy protection schemes tend to cause a lot of problems to legitimate users.

When Blizzard released Diablo II, for example, they used a CD subchannel protection scheme which creates a ton of problems for people trying to run the game with a DVD drive or with the latest very fast CD drives. They actually have a FAQ on their site that describes the problem and says "We have no known solution to this problem at this time."

Of course there are half a dozen sites with cracks, and with the speed information travels on the Internet it seems kind of a waste of time and money to bother with copy protection because if people really want to, they're going to be able to pirate the software anyway.

There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:56:02 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.