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A History of Copy Protection
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Jun 09, 2008 04:30 PM
from the you-can-never-have-too-many-secret-decoder-rings dept.
from the you-can-never-have-too-many-secret-decoder-rings dept.
GamerGirll1138 writes to tell us Next-gen has an amusing walk down memory lane with their history of copy protection. There have been some crazy schemes over the years to ensure that you paid for your software, everything from super-secret decoder rings to ridiculous document checks. "With bandwidth expanding and more and more games publishers exploring digital distribution, there's little doubt that we're entering a new phase in the history of copy protection and those who would defeat it. What's more, the demand for games as a chosen form of entertainment has never been higher. All this considered, it's impossible to believe that the cat-and-mouse game of piracy and copy protection will not reach new levels of intensity, with new technologies deployed on each side, and that some of them will surely create new hurdles for even those who simply wish to purchase and play the newest games. Ah, for the heady days of the code wheel."
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I have no issues with copy protection if... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I have no issues with copy protection if... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I have no issues with copy protection if... (Score:5, Insightful)
So you have problems with any copy protection, as long as it exclusively relies on "trust". Because of course copy-protection must raise hassels. There is some method of verifying you can run the software, and such methods can never be 100% accurate (there are lemons/shorts/ruination/reformats/internet outages/etc).
The only other alternative would be a locked down OS (far moreso than Vista) with some sort of anti-modding hardware and a hypervisor. Even that would only mostly work, but it would work well enough to eliminate any other inconviences.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I realize all copy protection in some manner treats you like a criminal. I start having issues when it becomes obtrusive to my ability to play a game or use some software.
I think STEAM is fine. Even if I have no Internet access, I can still play the game as long as I have installed the game.
I think CD keys are fine. It comes with the game. If I lose the key, that's my fault. The game still theoretic
Steam is not fine (Score:5, Interesting)
This really sucks for me as I travel to and from Thailand all the time. What do they expect? I buy the orange box in every damn country?!
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Re:Steam is not fine (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Steam is not fine (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly the same stupid reasoning that's used for the #$^%&£! DVD region codes. If I buy a DVD on my vacation in the states, I can't watch it on my player at home, without going through some extra hassles.
Vendors should have no right to put ANY export restrictions on stuff they sell. If they want to play in globally, they should accept their customers may want too...
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Re:I have no issues with copy protection if... (Score:5, Insightful)
If I lose the key, that's my fault.
No, it's a deliberate game breakage by the vendor. It's crippleware. It's only human to lose things, particularly things as ephemeral and meaningless as a license number, and to pretend it never happens is dishonest. Your game will die.
The game still theoretically works.
"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." ~ Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut/Yogi Berra.
Ownership is, by definition, the right to control. If the vendor controls it then you don't own it.
---
DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
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Re:I have no issues with copy protection if... (Score:4, Insightful)
If I can do that as a one man company, why can't all games companies?
Because the smaller the company the more they tend to care about not annoying their customers.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I have no issues with copy protection if... (Score:5, Informative)
Several months later, after swapping a bad CDROM drive and upgrading RAM, the license key no longer works. So I call Maplesoft, again, and go through the same stupid hassle. The tech FINALLY gave me a machine-agnostic license after all the other crap she tried didn't work. If I had known, I would have asked for one in the first place.
Adding insult to injury, I had some outrageous charges on my phone bills because I didn't realize calling Canada carried "international calling" surcharges.
In the end, I didn't find Maple as useful as I expected. So the moral: I'll be more careful about spending money on proprietary software in the future.
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Re:I have no issues with copy protection if... (Score:5, Interesting)
I admit I didn't read the article, but for every new and ridiculous height publishers go to for copy-protection, there a new and ridiculous height that crackers go to, to break the protection and then they put the results on bittorrent.
I think it's another case where the law woefully lags behind technology. There need to laws (urgently) protecting consumer rights when copy-protection is applied, just like there's the DMCA which helps publishers go after people who circumvent their protections (helps a little too much).
The point being, once the law makes it clear what copy protection can and cannot do, then at least the publishers have guidelines to work with and can go to town with copy protections but still not trample on our rights.
I especially think the "treating us as criminals" arguments is given way more weight than it's really worth. I mean, does anybody have a better idea about how to validate s/w as being legally purchased other than using some product activation mechanism (whether it works over the phone or net?)
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Re:I have no issues with copy protection if... (Score:5, Insightful)
Strongly disagreed
It doesn't matter that it takes 1 cent to press a disk. How much did it cost to make the software, and how many disks did you sell? If your development cost was 10 million dollars, and you sold 10 million copies, you would have to charge at least $10 per disk to break even -- simple math.
It doesn't matter that it's an infinite good either, and that at $10 per copy, every sale after 10 million is profits. They are still entitled to think that they are providing you with a product/service that is worth at least $10 and that is what they ask you to pay them for it. Easy example is a $50 game that you spend one month playing for about an hour a day -- it's not an unreasonable price to ask -- if a customer isn't willing to pay that price, they shouldn't buy the game. If consumers show a trend of "getting the game by hook or by crook", then the publisher will add copy-protections.
It's really that simple -- it comes down to simple human nature. As long as there exists theft / shrink / infringement (whatever you wanna call it), there will be copy-protection. It's up to the govt./courts to step in and define our (consumer's) rights clearly to make sure our rights don't get trampled on by these copy-protection mechanisms.
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Re:I have no issues with copy protection if... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I have no issues with copy protection if... (Score:4, Insightful)
Via Steam I've bought legit copies of Half Life 2 and the 2 episodes after having started playing a pirated copy because I decided I actually wanted to throw them some money for a quality game. I know Steam has some kind of protection, but it completely stays out of my face. I don't have to type anything in or remember to not lose a CD key... it just downloads and there it is.
Other companies that make you jump through more hoops in order to access games that interest me less, and don't respond to criticism - instead doing the whole "faceless corporation" thing... they can go take a long walk off a short pier. Fuck them. If I can bypass their protection then I will, because I god honestly do not care about them.
So yeah, if you want people to not pirate your games, make it so they want to pay you (There was another article I saw before about ways to add value beyond the media/content itself so that you're actually offering a better product than the free pirated copy, doing things that way works too). If you try and make it so they *have* to pay you, it won't work and they'll hate you and pirate your stuff just to spite you. The End.
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The ultimate copy protection: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The ultimate copy protection: (Score:5, Interesting)
...and completely without copy protection. I can honestly say that I have only gotten cracks for games I already own a full license to, but I would have never needed to if the games hadn't been virtually padlocked with a faulty key.
I bet a lack of copy protection would also lower the number of calls to tech support as well.
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Re:The ultimate copy protection: (Score:4, Interesting)
The result is that I feel good about buying from them. Their copy protection scheme is reasonable, it's not much of a hassle (once games are registered they get a machine-specific file saying that they are - no further online checks neccessary) and if I should lose all my data I can just download the game again and request a new license key. That last part makes the scheme almost look like a service.
Very acceptable, very reasonable and not insulting like StarForce et al. Of course it might not work for high-profile companies as people would release cracks, but for small-to-medium sized companies I think this scheme is much superior compared to the nonsense other companies come up with.
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Re:The ultimate copy protection: (Score:5, Funny)
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The real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand I think this will eventually reach a breaking point and these normal people (who are the paying customers) will stop putting up with said crap. That will be an interesting development for sure.
Re:The real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The real problem (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure there's nothing unusual about that. The very first thing I do when I buy a game, even before installing -- and preferably before buying, too -- is to stop off at gamecopyworld and/or gameburnworld to make sure that there's a crack that I can apply to my legitimate (and patched) copy. It's a trend that will only continue.
I've already had experiences of electronics shops pointing to me to instructions on how to "crack" a DVD player to make it multi-region, how to unlock phones, and so on. I'm sure it won't be too long before we see game shops doing similar things; games will catch up eventually.
That I doubt, unfortunately. As the article shows, people have been putting up with copy-prevention schemes since the advent of commercial computer software (in fact the article doesn't start nearly early enough). Some of those schemes have been much more burdensome than present-day ones -- though they're getting worse again, with "activate every time you start the game"-type schemes.
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Captain Goodnight and the Islands of Fear (Score:4, Funny)
Ultima - color book (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Ultima - color book (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone remember MordorCharge?
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Single page link, that starts at beginning. (Score:5, Informative)
What's amusing (Score:4, Funny)
Just think, without copy protection, we wouldn't have been able to distribute our viruses so easily. With all these kids trying to download cracks from any site that offered them, our bits have gone far and wide.
Thanks copy protection!
I still hate copy protection schemes (Score:5, Interesting)
Later on I played Chris Crawford's (I think that was his name) Patton Strikes Back. This one was interesting it that it let you run about halfway through the game, and then stopped and asked "are your papers in order"? It then directed you to a specific page in the manual and had you type in a specific word (third word on the second paragraph for instance). There was a slight problem though, the manual had apparently been revised a bit after the copy protection was put in place, so about 5-10% of the time, your game would be destroyed halfway through because it failed the copy check. That was after we got AOL and it was my first foray into piracy, as getting halfway through a tough game and then losing because the copy protection was buggy was a real outrage. This was the days before games released patches, so as far as I know unless you crack the thing there's always a chance of losing the war because of the copy protection.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I had the same problem with Pirates! on the Amiga. I think inputting names to pirate photos was the copy protection scheme that occured at the start of the game. If you failed to enter the correct names, the game would be ultra-hard with lots of English frigates and Spaniards hunting you while your crew would mutiny. I never figured it out but managed to do quite well at the game never the less.
My favorite copy protection scheme was Simon the Sorcerers. It had a set of sprites, hats, cats, brooms and so on
Copy Restriction (Score:5, Insightful)
Execution Restriction (Score:4, Insightful)
Even when used legitimately, a computer is going to make at least one copy of the program/data, first into main memory, then into the various levels of caches.
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DONT - DONT... (Score:4, Funny)
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Score:4, Interesting)
Henry Jones' Grail Diary.
It was in a nice leather-like enclosure, and the paper had a parchment texture. There were lots of pictures with clips and notes addeds, all written by hand.
The copy protection part was a series of descriptions of the Grail according to various authors - which were referenced by Indy as he investigated various items.
BTW, in the LucasArts' adventure games, a trimmed down copy of the grail diary was included only for the copy protection. But it wasn't as good as the original.
As an Indy fan, I would buy the original Last Crusade game again *JUST* for the Grail Diary.
Re:Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across the entrance to the Underworld that they used, and found myself able to trace LB's path all the way to the great chamber where his fallen companions still lay. Without that miniature walkthrough, and one page in the manual, with one line of musical notation, written as apparently nothing more than a window on Britannian culture, I'd have never been able to finish the game.
Unfortunately the later games abandoned that completely. The documentation checks were all at the beginning of the game, and all referred to the bestiary, or lines of latitude and longitude on one of the included maps. What had once been pleasantly immersive (and a dirty, dirty trick on a cheap pirate) turned into a challenge and response to prove that you were the heroic Avatar. Kind of says something about the shift in the relationship between player and developer.
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Ahhh, holes burned in disks (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Ahhh, holes burned in disks (Score:5, Informative)
The routine was hidden inside a really lame obfuscation scheme. It would read a section of encrypted code from the disk, XOR it byte by byte with a byte selected from a table, and store it in RAM. Then it would select another byte from the table and do the XOR again. And again, thirty or forty times. Each cycle would begin by altering the single-step and breakpoint interrupt vectors to point to an exit instruction.
If you went to the trouble of tracing your way down through all that, you were rewarded with a delicious irony: the ProLok disk was, itself, a copyright infringement. In order to do the write/read checks they had to insert hooks into the BIOS -- but that was not so easy in the small-RAM days when the BIOS executed directly from ROM instead of being shadowed out into RAM. Vault had to make its own BIOS, and did it by (drum roll) copying IBM's (rimshot). And they made an absurdly lame attempt to cover it up: they took some 800 bytes of the IBM Fixed Disk BIOS, added their hooks, then went through it and interchanged logical-shift-left and arithmetic-shift-left instructions wherever the MSB and carry were guaranteed to be zero (meaning both instructions did the same thing). So, disassemblies of the two BIOSes would look a LITTLE different...
Oh, the crack? A two-byte change on the disk, probably a back door they forgot to remove. Compuserve was the central clearinghouse for cracks in those days, and picked it up within a week.
AFAIK Vault's only client was Ashton-Tate, who used it on dBase III. The president of Vault was a guy with a law-enforcement background and a SWAT team mentality who fancied himself a mighty crime fighter, and when he was embarrassed by the quick crack, he boasted they were developing ProLok Plus, which would punish crackers by physically damaging the machine. Business customers were enraged, Ashton-Tate dumped Vault (which was expensive because they owned a one-third interest in it), and Vault was no more.
rj
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Article sucks, but I remember two ... (Score:5, Informative)
An extremely useless article even by slashdot standards, but I remember two copy protection schemes that sucked even more:
Lenslock [wikipedia.org] - used by a few 80s home computer games. I'm fairly certain it might have been a UK-only thing. It was horrible. You had to fold this crappy bit of plastic a certain way and hold it over a part of the screen. If you were lucky, and your TV wasn't too large or too small, you might be able to make out the decoded letters which you had to type in.
And then one we used at work: Parallel port dongles [wikipedia.org]. I used to work in electronic CAD and all the software used this, the result being you needed 5 or more dongles all plugged in at the same time to do any useful work. In the end we got someone in the workshop build a kind of "dongle motherboard" where you could plug in multiple dongles more conveniently than having them hang out the back of the machine, and more importantly pull them out to swap between machines.
Happy days ... No, actually sucky days. I'm glad I use almost completely free software now.
Rich.
Re:Article sucks, but I remember two ... (Score:4, Interesting)
POKE 23762,0; POKE 23763,0; POKE 23764,0; LOAD "" [2]
then, since interrupts were disabled during LOAD, the random number generator would always pick the same one (or possibly two in edge cases) 'random' example. So you only had to copy this one down to pass to your friends along with your C60 cassette.
I'm not sure if other sources of entropy were available. I vaguely recall the Z80's IR register looking rather random, and maybe you could get noise out of the cassette input... Happy days...
Barry
[1] The real source of entropy they relied on was the time between the computer starting and the user typing LOAD "".
[2] I looked this up - I don't remember it being 3 bytes, but the internet doesn't lie.
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Grinding disk drives. (Score:4, Insightful)
This prevented someone from just copying the files on the disk directly. But there was an application that just copied the image and got around that nonsense.
Things haven't really changed. I don't understand why they just don't give up. This has been repeated many times, but it's true. All they're doing is inconveniencing consumers who actually paid for the product.
My company's strategy (Score:4, Interesting)
I think we're pretty reasonable.
The software can be downloaded and trialed for 30 days. After that time, it locks out. Could you set your system clock back 30 days? Sure. Do we really care too much? No. If you want to keep your system out of sync by a month just to avoid paying us, you are a doofus.
If you want a license, there are many types available. Our software views documents. You can license an entire web server to serve documents to our viewer, and it will view them. You can get a LAN license which locks to a hostname which allows you to install the software on a file server, and anybody running the software off that server is licensed. If you change hostnames, You can even buy a utility that allows you to embed a license inside a document, so that anybody with a free copy of the viewer can view that particular document.
The license is protected with some simple ciphering. Could it be broken? Sure. Could the host locking be broken? Sure. We don't really care too much. The license is there to keep people from accidentally installing the software on more than one file server. If you want to do it deliberately, you need to set both hosts to the same hostname. Or figure out how to hack the encryption. We don't delude ourselves into thinking this is impossible. To our knowledge, nobody has bothered. If somebody came up with a keygen and put it out on the Internet, we'd be pissed. But our response would probably be to switch to another cipher. If our software was suddenly so popular as to inspire some cracker to write a keygen, my first response would probably be "Cool beans."
None of the licensing mechanisms are onerous. It doesn't "phone home." It doesn't expire silently. If you want to extend your eval, we are happy to work with you.
We prefer to sell our software by providing quality. If it's not worth the $XXX to you, then either you don't have a legitimate use, or our price is too high. But we're not going to treat our legit customers like criminals just to get that extra 1% in licensing.
The irony... (Score:3, Insightful)
We Copied That Floppy (Score:5, Informative)
The Atari 810 floppy drive [wikipedia.org] (the highest density storage available, like a 1TB HD is now, and the only game in town other than ridiculous tape drives, except for the extremely rare and stratospherically expensive 5MB Corvus HD) had a little potentiometer in its circuitboard controlling timing of the eletromagnetic signal waveform sent to the write head, that could be turned out of calibration to deliberately write a bad sector. So pirates would map the original's bad sector list, then copy the good sectors, then detune the pot, then write to the list of bad sectors - ruining them, then retune the pot and boot the copy.
Sure, that's pretty complex, voids the floppy warranty, and intimidates a lot of potential pirates. So instead, some people just stuck a disklabel to the edge of the target floppy, left the label sticking out of the drive, and grabbed that tab to jiggle the floppy while writing to each of the bad sectors - ruining them. Presto!
Besides, the pro pirates had the same mass floppy duplicators with the same programmable "write bad sector" circuitry that the original game vendors had, so the large, commercial pirates weren't fazed (pun intended
In fact, beating the copy protection was often more fun than the game. So around the world people were working to beat it, even if they never played the game again, but gave copies to friends just to show how ubergeek they were.
This cat & mouse game is in fact the exact model for all SW copy protection. It's become only a worse value waste for the SW producers, especially in content. They should use their only advantage, their earlier possession of the SW/content, to make big bucks at the first release, just like Hollywood does for movie premiere big weekends. Then let the pirates do their distribution work for free, and charge for support, customization, and subscriptions to upgrades. And build brands to sell their future releases.
Because "Don't Copy That Floppy" has been a losing battle, long before people would say "what's a floppy?"
The Arms Race (Score:3, Interesting)
Back then every game was like buying two games, one that they wanted you to play, and one that they didn't want you to play, the "figure out how to copy it" game. I was never really any good at the cracking-the-game game, but it was interesting and fun anyway.
DO NOT WANT (Score:3, Interesting)
I think I'd enjoy playing Half-Life 2. But I won't install Steam. Same deal for Portal; looks like enormous fun. But I will not install Steam.
You seeing a trend here?
Valve is leaving at least $120 retail on the table. I am paying for entertainment. I am not paying for remote monitoring. I can look after my own machines, thank you. All Valve has to do is delete the Steam requirement, and they can have my money.
Schwab
Boy, I could have written this a lot faster (Score:4, Funny)
rev2: fail
rev3: fail
rev4: fail
rev5: fail
rev6: fail
current: seeing what happens (fingers crossed!)
Kings Quest III (Score:5, Interesting)
I never viewed this as "copy protection", as such. If it was, I thought it brilliantly played into the actual game.
The spot in the game is where you're creating a potion or magical item. You needed to follow the directions PRECISELY, or the spell would backfire. I remember typing VERY slowly and carefully, doublechecking everything. It really enhanced the experience of the game, for me.
If it was meant purely as copy protection, I thought it actually ADDED something to the game.
Adman
No mention of e-books? (Score:4, Insightful)
One reason may be the incredibly elegant system of copy protection they used. You unlock the book with 2 pieces of information - the name and credit card number you used to buy the book. Now... someone might not think twice about throwing up a bunch of serialz out to the general public; but publishing their name and credit card number to a site that caters to thieves? Kinda loses it's appeal.
Maybe I'm missing something here. Maybe people don't mind that e-books cost just the same as their paper counterparts. Maybe computer geeks would rather lug around paper versions of Cryptonomicon than read it off their PDA's, or iPhones. Maybe someone's already cracked the
If so - let me know. I'd love to transfer my existing e-book collection into plain text, or possibly loan copies of some titles to people I wouldn't necessarily trust my credit card number with. I can give copies to my mum, and she could give the same copy to someone else - but she'd have to give them all my credit card info for them to read it which makes her much more discerning.
There are other little aspects to it as well - take a look at how e-books are sold to see why they aren't pirated and see if you think it could be applied to larger software offerings.
Respectfully disagree (Score:3, Informative)
A couple of problems with that.
First off, it's no big deal to snoop USB, [google.com] which makes dongles pretty easy to crack.
You have to petition the USB folks so you get a unique vendor's ID, which is a pain. Plus, they are finite. [driveragent.com]
You'd have to get Microsoft to give you a digital certificate to make your dongle driver legit - also a pain. And you'd have to go through a driver installation just to load your software, more of a pain.
Finally, dongle bound software is just as crackable with a monitor. There ha
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
At the very least the USB dongle would have to do something sort of calculations to provide authentication using a cryptographic authentication system. Certainly
Re:Code copy protection (Score:5, Interesting)
For the most part they were trivial, but the best one used the 1MHz timer. The decryptor code was positioned immediately below the encrypted game code and ran in a (nested) loop. It XORed itself (including addresses it used for indirect loads and so on), the timer and to-be-decrypted data along with a few constants. When things magically came right the loop terminated and the very next thing in memory was the first instruction of the now-decrypted game code.
Because the 6502 CPU only ran at 2MHz you had to figure out where in the (usually 2-6 cycles) fetch-execute cycle the, say, LDA instruction would read the hardware timer if you wanted to hand decode this. And of course the length of that instruction varied based on whether it was crossing a 256 byte page boundary or not (doing an indirect load) and so on. You couldn't move the target data because that would change the addresses being used for loads and stores and thus the progress of the decryption, you couldn't copy the code elsewhere and change it to update both copies because that would change the length of the loop and throw the timings off and you couldn't mess with the timer speed because it was fixed in hardware and, well, you get the idea.
Clever fellow who came up with that one!
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