Date Posted:	Friday 1st September, 2006	Author:	cheese-cube
Subject:	Gamer's Thoughts	Views:	1971
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Copy Protection: Piracy Preventer or Consumer Harmer? Article in question: http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060830/schadenfreude_01.shtml
He doesn't look that scary.

If you meet someone in a bar and you have suspicions that they are a financial analyst in a game publishing firm simply shout "PIRACY" at the top of your lungs. If they run out of the bar screaming and babbling something about communists destroying the economy then your suspicions were well founded. The mere notion of a company losing money is enough to send them into a fit. In reality piracy isn't really that big a deal on a per company basis because the profit from video game sales always substantially offsets losses from piracy. However this doesn't stop smartasses with MBA's, a degree that’s only prerequisite is a room temperature IQ, from causing a fuss.
In business you must put profits before the consumers and to this end many video game publishers have implemented some rather evil copy prevention software in their games.

Copy protection has been in video games for more than a decade now. Video game copy protection started to gain popularity when publishers began to distribute their games on 5¼ inch and 3¼ inch floppy disks. Back then copy protection consisted of the game prompting the user to quote a certain line from the manual, which you would only have access to if you had actually bought the game. I first encountered this type of copy protection back in the early nineties when I played SimEarth. Of course this method of copy protection was easily circumvented with pirates distributing answer sheets with the pirated games. When floppy disks were abandoned in favour of CD's this method of copy protection was abandoned. Publishers instead started using "CD keys" to verify the originality of software.

Also with a lot of video games you had to have the official original CD in your drive in order to play the game, even if no data from the CD is required for operation. Some games, such as the majority of Blizzards titles, can detect whether the CD is an original or a burnt copy. Still these methods were circumvented by using unofficial "keygens", ISO image mounting applications (Such as Daemon Tools) and "software cracks".

In history most if not all software copying inhibitors have been eventually defeated. Because of this the development of copy protection has become a major industry with many companies devoted to just that and then selling their copy protection off to other software publishers. Additionally copy protection software has become rather aggressive in order to prevent circumvention by clever crackers. One such incident of said aggressiveness is with the copy protection software StarForce developed by the Russian firm Protection Technology (Which I believe has links to the Russian mafia). StarForce is a very advanced copy protection/piracy prevention system which is extremely hard to reverse engineer. StarForce employs two methods of copy protection. The first part involves the implementation of a unique signature on the actual CD when it is pressed from the gold master. This signature, which is a measure of the physical angle between the first and last written sector, is almost impossible to reproduce using conventional CD burners and the game will not run or install if the correct signature can't be detected. The second part of StarForce aims to disable the use of ISO image mounting applications. It does this by the installing a hidden device driver upon installation of the game. This device driver blocks the use of SCSI optical drives when IDE optical drives are present (Translation: most ISO image mounting applications work by simulating a SCSI optical drive, so if you have a real physical CD-ROM drive plugged in ISO image mounting tools won't work).

StarForce: tool of the devil.

Most would say that StarForce is at the leading edge of copy protection software and they would be right. However there have been a lot of complaints regarding StarForce which involves the installation of a hidden device driver. This driver has been known to cause serious problems on some systems, including, according to Wikipedia, "disk drive performance degradation and weakening of operating system security and stability". The obvious remedy to this situation would be to uninstall it.  Yet there's a catch. Because the purpose of StarForce is copy protection it is designed to be very hard to reverse engineer. To this end the hidden device driver cannot be uninstalled through normal methods and a lot of the time it remains on the users system even after the associated game has been uninstalled. But wait, there's more! The StarForce software has also been identified as an exploitation vector due to the way the access control lists of it are set.

Now just to clarify, I don't support piracy but I do support consumer protection. While StarForce does achieve its goals of copy protection the manner in which it operates and the problems it creates really outweigh its effectiveness because when it causes problems people don't go and complain to StarForce they go and complain to the publisher of the game. Video game publishers Ubisoft and JoWooD used to use StarForce in many of their titles but they dumped it due to the number of complaints they were receiving. But its not just StarForce that irks me; the whole idea of copy protection ticks me off. Basically it’s the removal of ownership from the consumer in that they are restricted in what they can and can’t do. What if you wanted to burn another copy of your game just as an emergency backup? When you buy something you just assume that you have full rights of ownership and that you can do whatever you want with it.  When you buy something with copy protection you’re only really getting the product and not the associated rights of ownership. This also leads into the whole DRM debate which I won’t discuss because I’m getting carried away enough as it is. So yes piracy is bad and yes preventative measures should be taken but they should not infringe on the basic rights of consumers.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed here do not reflect those of Gamestah or its affiliates.

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