Typing a long license number is the least problem when it comes to "copy protection".
The "CD-burning software stopping to work" issue you are mentioning was the StarForce protection scheme which basically replaced your cd/dvd driver with a modified one (without asking your consent or letting you know, ofcourse). This is a perfect example of the utter lack of respect for anyone or anything that a lot of proprietary software industry has for its clients. Far from being unique, this type of "copy protection" that actually sabotages the users operating environment is quite widespread.
I suspect that the decision makers who orders these sorts of things installed in their products are the least competent people to do so, since they are 100% management and 0% technical in their understanding of the problem. "People steal our games, so let's install some bear traps and landmines in them so people won't try to copy them". What they don't seem to want to face, is that all these traps are removed before the copying really starts. There is no method at present for avoiding your game being cracked and distributed, and in many, if not most cases, the paying customer gets a poorer product than the pirate, because of invasive and annoying copy protection schemes which invariably are ineffective against the warez scene anyway. The only reasonable way of insuring that most or all of your users are paying for the product is to make the game rely on online servers which have access to the payment details. You cannot have an offline/single player mode. You cannot have private servers. You cannot become so successful that people will bother to reverse engineer your protocol and write their own server software.
Having been an avid gamer for 25 years or so, I am convinced that the biggest selling titles are also the ones who are copied the most. I rarely, if ever, buy a game without trying it properly first. So my simple advice to games publishers is to keep sticking to the old serial number validation, and forget disc checks and other similar measures. They only cost you extra money and gets you nothing in return (other than hostility from your core demographic) Rather than make it hard for people to user and maintain their software, you should make it easy to pay and play, and don't force people to run unrelated software (like "EA Download Manager" or Steam or such 'agents'). The only logical way of dealing with this is to make it a hassle to crack the serial code validation, if you can, but not implent anything that will hinder the use of the product. Hope that people like your product enough that they want to buy it after trying it.