Copy Protection Firms Encourage Piracy? 90
Ars Technica has a reflection on the revelation that StarForce had linked to pirated versions of Galactic Civilizations II. From the piece: "It's not hard to see why the publishers use the stuff; after all, no one wants to spend a couple of years on a project only to see their efforts rewarded by flat sales and a robust pirate market. Still, in the quest for better protection, these copy protection schemes have grown in both sophistication and invasiveness. Some schemes now install their own hidden device drivers that monitor your computer's optical drive access, trying to prevent copying and other unapproved uses. (If this sounds familiar, it should. Game copy protection, after all, is just another form of DRM.)"
Not surprising... (Score:5, Insightful)
They have an interest in making that problem as large and as wide-spread as possible.
Not sure. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure that copy protection encourages pirating but I won't install a bought game on my machine without a no-CD crack, etc. as well. The original games are safest when in the jewel case packed in the box on a shelf.
PIA (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm all for the Valve's Steam method of distribution. It's the wave of the future...
Not surprising...Fresh Breath. (Score:1, Insightful)
OSS
"They have an interest in making that problem as large and as wide-spread as possible."
Proprietary Software.
Big Picture (Score:5, Insightful)
Fact: Anti-Piracy software does not stop piracy.
Fact: Anti-Piracy softare adversely affects legitimate players.
Fact: Not everyone who pirates a game is a guaranteed sale/loss of a sale.
Fact: Pirated software is another model of distribution which helps create product recognition with your audience.
Partial Fact and Opinion: Many people, myself included, use access to pirated software as a tool for determining what games are worth our monetary support. I can not count the number of times that piracy has either
a) saved me from buying a horrible piece of software that marketting led people to believe otherwise, and
b) caused me to buy a game (many, many times) that I would have otherwise never looked at or had a chance to try in another form.
I wish everyone had this state of mind. Obviously that's not the case, but I also feel that the latter group of individuals also encompass the demographic that would not grant your title a sale even if they did not download the title. That is, they are usually either downloading it for the sake of downloading it, or have no access to the funds to purchase games regularly.
There are as many beneficial reasons to piracy as there are negative aspects. The lies given by anti-piracy software developers are underhanded scare tactics, and not worth a publishers time. I hope the majority of educated individuals agrees when they weigh the facts in.
Copy protection itself encourages piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
I work on a computer all day. I rip all the music I buy so that I don't have to carry around loads of CDs or bother swapping them around all the time. Digital media is more valuable to me than physical media, but I will only buy CDs because a) I want some kind of physical master copy in case my hard drive dies or anything like that and b) I want lossless compression.
So what does the copy protection do? Lock the thing I value most away from me. If I'm lucky, I get crappy MP3s on a data layer. No thanks. You know what I do if I find out an album I want is copy protected? I download it.
The simple fact of the matter is that, where copy protection is used, anonymous pirates provide a better service than the music labels. And the sad thing is that this isn't due to the record companies falling short in some way, it's because they actively choose to harm their own product.
The reason they can get away with this is because there is no competition when it comes to media. I'm not talking about the RIAA cartel, I'm talking about the basic nature of copyright. If somebody owns the rights to a particular song I like, then no competition exists for that song. I either buy it on the terms the copyright holder chooses, I don't buy it at all, or I obtain it from a black market.
For a free(r) market to exist, with competition acting the way it should, artists should be legally prohibited from signing exclusive contracts. Reduce the record labels to investors and publishers instead of the people with all the power, because right now, the situation is upside-down.
Re:Perfectly Legal Scare Tactic (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not surprising... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's great for them that they can sell their users a problem for a few hundred dollars and then charge a yearly subscription fee for a "treatment" (note: not "fix") for the problem. Sucks to be one of their customers, though.
One interesting development that I think will come out of Vista/Trusted-Computing/Windows-OneCare is the fact that Microsoft will probably be able to squash piracy, now. Trusted Computing in Vista will probably mean that it will be very difficult to get Windows updates without having a legitimate copy. Assuming it's a given that Vista will eventually require security updates (safe bet) people won't be able to do much other than purchase Windows. OneCare will probably end up checking whether the copy of Vista is legit, too, since virus scanners updating themselves every week or so is a great way for Windows to constantly "phone home".
The end result might be illegitimate copies of Vista being impossible to update, which effectively means that no one will want an illegitimate version of Vista. I think this will end up being a big mistake for MS, though. Most home users do not want to pay a few hundred dollars for Vista PLUS a yearly subscription fee. If MS didn't think people would need the OneCare subscription for Vista, they wouldn't be selling it.
The one way that Vista could weasel its way onto everyones' computers would be by getting it pre-installed on all new computers. Companies like Dell only offering Windows seems like a very important part of MS maintaining their strangle-hold on the home OS market.
Re:GalCiv2 (Score:5, Insightful)
Alternative models (Score:2, Insightful)
For the average game it will probably cost less that $1 (definately less than $5) per copy sold to deliver the game to the customer via download through the internet; at the same time you no longer need an expensive distribution network nor do you have to cut a retailer in on the sale. This means that the only people who have to make money on the sale of the product are the developer and publisher (and in the case of a console the licence provider); Publishers tend to take in the money at $5-$15 per title and then give the developer their cut (licence providers [like Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft] tend to get $5-$10 per title). This means that you could sell the average game for between $10-$25 and still make the same ammount of money. If you could buy the average new release for $15 why would you bother to steal it?
If you look at music
Re:Perfectly Legal Scare Tactic (Score:5, Insightful)
Not exactly. As the MPAA v. 2600 case showed, linking to illegal material can get you in trouble. The only reason why StarForce is able to do so without a legal challenge is because they are based in Russia, where it may be legal. Stardock, based in the US, cannot do the same thing in return.
Re:Big Picture (Score:2, Insightful)
This is not worthy of the noteriety its getting. (Score:1, Insightful)
(Basically, some guy proved a point that it's easy to find pirated copies of a game that wasn't copy-protected. So what. A 13 year old with three minutes on a 56k can do that... it's not like they hosted and distributed it)
Re:Not sure. (Score:3, Insightful)
I actually prefer disc images to patch-style no-CD hacks. My thinking is that I'd rather be running an unmodified version of the game program, because I don't know what secondary effects a hack will have on the game.
I say that as someone who *does* hack games. I am pretty sharp, and so are most of the people who make no-CD patches, but it's not the same as being a developer who worked on the game and understands what removing a function call or forcing a particular value will do to other parts of it.