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From: dvljhg@cs.umu.se (J|rgen Holmberg)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Copy protection (was Re: Awesome! No I am Pi**ed!)
Message-ID: <1990Dec7.150823.26422@cs.umu.se>
Date: 7 Dec 90 15:08:23 GMT
References: <49144@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <1990Dec5.144311.4975@javelin.es.com> <1990Dec6.174813.11590@ericsson.se>
Sender: news@cs.umu.se (News Administrator)
Organization: Dep. of Info.Proc, Umea Univ., Sweden
Lines: 55

In article <1990Dec6.174813.11590@ericsson.se> etxtomp@eos.ericsson.se writes:
>In article <1990Dec5.144311.4975@javelin.es.com> pashdown%javelin@dsd.es.com writes:
>>v092mgp5@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu (Scott K Wood) writes:
>>
>>>    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.  
>>
>>>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.
>>
>>>It is going to be a LONG 
>>>time before copy-protection disappears, especially in the game arena, 
>>>from the Amiga marketplace.
>>
>>What you are failing to realize is that there has _never_ been any sort of
>>protection that has actually stopped the pirates.  I challenge anyone on here
>>to mention one single piece of Amiga software that hasn't been pirated.  This
>>is the same case for the IBM, the Mac, the ST, the Apple II, and the C64.
>>There has virtually NEVER been a successful copy protection that hasn't been
>>'cracked' by someone.  So I fail to understand why software companies still
>>rely on this garbage.  In the past few years, it has gotten better, but most
>>still do the stupid drive gronk in order to keep the valid user from backing
>>up their validly purchased software, while the pirates march on.
>
>This is probably correct, but they may slow the pirates. Dragon's Lair had
>a rather difficult protection to break, so they were able to sell a lot of
>programs (in spite of the lack of playability) before it was cracked. The
>copy protection was so good, that my original refused to run on my machine
>that had a perfectly aligned drive. I sold it to a guy who had a mis-aligned
>drive matching Dragon's Lair :-)
>
>Good programs (like AMOS) may sell if they are reasonably priced (like AMOS).
>Even in a small country like Sweden they have in a short time sold about
>1200 copies. I will however wait for the compiler to come out...
>
>Tommy Petersson

The protection for Dragons Lair wasn't all that hard to crack really. The fact
that they had protection on all tracks on six disks was what made the crack
slow. Datastorm had the same protection and it took 1 day to get out to the
pirates. No software protection so far has really made the program less spread.

Jorgen
-- 
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