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From: v092mgp5@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu (Scott K Wood)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Copy protection (was Re: Awesome! No I am Pi**ed!)
Message-ID: <49144@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU>
Date: 4 Dec 90 21:02:41 GMT
References: <BK.90Nov29222757@tadtec.uucp> <JKH.90Dec3092012@bambam.pcs.com>
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In article <JKH.90Dec3092012@bambam.pcs.com>, jkh@bambam.pcs.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) writes...

[stuff deleted]

>games. Another technique is the code wheel or manual page lookup
>protection. I have yet to hear about a pirated game being distributed
>with xerox'd documentation and/or duplicated code wheels! (and if any cases
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>of this do exist, I'm sure they're very very rare). I have seem several

    By saying this you are obviously not very familiar with the wrold 
of software piracy.  True, pirates do not duplicate the documentation 
or code wheels, BUT THEY WRITE PROGRAMS THAT BYPASS THAT PROCTECTION.  
I once remember seeing a copy of Rocket Ranger.  In that game, the 
copy protection was cleverly incorporated into the game.  You had to 
specify how much fuel you needed to get from one country to another. To 
do this required a code wheel supplied in the game.  That turned out 
to be far from perfect however.  In the copy I saw, the pirate had 
written a program to run in the backround that asked the user for the 
current country and the destination country, and then gave the user 
the correct code!  
    Personally, I would rather buy a game that was manual 
copy-protected if it had to be protected at all.  But in the eyes of 
the company, a disk-based protection can be made to be a little harder 
to beat than a word-lookup protection.  Developers are in the business 
for money, and when pirates get in the way of making that money, most 
of them will not hesitate to institute protection.
     In your initial message you say that pirates are simply the 
scapegoats for the horrid copy-protection found on some software.  Who 
is to blame then?  I personally see only the pirates at fault.  
Without them, companys would have never had a reason to use 
copy-protection in the first place.


>I do not agree with software piracy and do not support it. I also feel
>perfectly justified in voting with my pocketbook when some manufacturer
>sells me a product that is unjustifyably hard to use.

     "Voting with your pocketbook" doesn't change the fact that 
companies have to deal with pirates.  In fact, buy not purchasing a 
useful piece of software simply because of copy-protection is hurting 
the developer as much as the pirates are.  It is going to be a LONG 
time before copy-protection disappears, especially in the game arena, 
from the Amiga marketplace.

                                     Scott
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