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From: mykes@3comvax.UUCP (Mike Schwartz)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: Copy protect methods & paranoia
Message-ID: <585@3comvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 4-Aug-86 12:56:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: 3comvax.585
Posted: Mon Aug  4 12:56:51 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 5-Aug-86 05:50:47 EDT
References: <236@neoucom.UUCP> <169@hao.UUCP> <584@mips.UUCP> <1539@well.UUCP> <598@mips.UUCP> <1571@well.UUCP>
Reply-To: mykes@3comvax.UUCP (Mike Schwartz)
Organization: 3Com Corp; Mountain View, CA
Lines: 37

In article <1571@well.UUCP> tenney@well.UUCP (Glenn S. Tenney) writes:
>In article <598@mips.UUCP> rick@mips.UUCP (Rick Frazier) writes:
>>PAGING ELECTRONIC ARTS.....PAGING ELECTRONIC ARTS....PAGING.....HEY EA 
>>are you out there?........come on, settle this little discussion once and
>>for all........Do you really write to disks when they are "protected?"
>Having spoken to the person at EA that would know, and the fact that
>this whole topic came up a few months ago:
>
>    E A    D O E S    N O T    W R I T E 
>    A S    P A R T    O F    C O P Y    P R O T E C T I O N
>
I lost two copies of Arctic Fox (before I got a refund).  I am sure that
I lost one of them when I turned off my amiga when it was showing me the
score page (there was no disk activity, and the screen was static for
quite a while).  The first copy of the program died after 1 day.  The
second died after about 2 weeks (I only played it a few times though).
I believe that EA does not write as part of copy protection, but I do
believe that if their disks are written to (by their programs...) to
store any kind of data that the copy protection will fail.  This is just
a hunch.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.  If a company really takes
customer satisfaction as its number one priority, then it won't copy protect
software.  Copy protection burns only those who pay for the software
(like me) and NOT PIRATES.  Pirates get the software for free anyway, and
they actually get their jollies from beating the protection schemes.  I pay,
do not get my jollies that way, and get burned.  They don't pay and get
free software (as many copies as they want or need).  Wise up.  Grow up.
I don't care how good a piece of software is, I won't buy it if it is
copy protected.  EA won't make a dime off me for any of their games.
Copy protection drives paying customers away.

This is the beginning of REAL power in micros.  Why cold start your
computer just to play a game?  Why use floppies if you have hundreds of
megabytes of hard disk on line (the Amiga is the machine to handle it)?
Why even terminate the program if you have enough RAM to run everything
all the time?