Comment Re:News Flash (Score 5, Interesting) 383
That's correct. 20 years ago, the battle was over "copy protection", which invariably made it hard for the legitimate purchaser to install and use the software. They battle has moved to "DRM" (same thing, slightly more encompassing), but it's the same battle 20 years later.
I still have dozens of boxes of original Amiga disks that I have saved. I also have 'Pirate' copies of almost all those same floppies. Why? Because it was a similar thing back then. "Copy Protection" that didn't let you make a backup of your disks (or HD install it). For you young'uns, back then playing from you 'original' floppies was taboo.
So if you bought a game back then, after you bought it, if it was copy protected you'd usually find a pirate copy as to not have to use your original disks. There were advantages to the pirate versions too sometimes, like they were cracked to allow cheats or let you install them to a harddrive when the original wouldn't.
It doesn't take one to figure out why a lot of people started skipping the purchasing part and just went to the downloading part. In someways they were 'trained' by the software companies themselves to pirate.
Software companies knew that the view in the market place was never to use your original disks. People felt uncomfortable using their original floppies. But software companies didn't care. So much so that "entire" legitimate industries grew, for just this reason, that offered special hardware to duplicate disks regardless of copy protection as well as lots of software to try to do the same.