More Stupid Copy Protection That Does Nothing

Found on Techdirt on Monday, 12 July 2004
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This certainly isn't a new or unique story, but Broadband Reports has yet another story about ridiculous and pointless copy protection. The copy protection scheme, called Starforce, appears to be mainly used for protecting certain PC games from being copied. Of course, like so many copy protection schemes it does this by assuming all legitimate customers are criminals. Not only that, but it installs itself without letting you know (not even in the EULA), hides itself on your PC, slows down the PC, causes all sorts of other problems and errors, and is nearly impossible to remove -- even after the protected application has been removed. In other words, it's just as bad as some adware/spyware out there -- except that it's screwing things up for legitimate customers who actually went out and bought the games in question. As the article points out, every one of those games is available in a cracked version online, so this "copy protection" scheme doesn't actually prevent copies. It only serves to anger legitimate customers. Why is anyone using this product on their software?

No wonder people are not too happy if they are treated as criminals by default. Many said this when the idiotic "copy protections" for audio CDs came out. Now they try the same (obviously wrong) strategy with games. Now, there are expensive music/game CDs which tamper with your hard/software, in some cases crashing the whole system, because the releasers assume you are a criminal. Then there are the same versions, available for free without said "copy protections", because the releasers assume you like the content. And the industry still wonders?