Copy Protection: Difference between revisions

 

 

 

 

The most expensive early system was to require that a piece of specialized ''hardware'' be attached to the machine, but this was hardly ever used outside of server-grade software. Some modern productivity software (in the $500+ range) uses a USB dongle key with decoding information built-in.

A more reliable (but also more intrusive) method was to require some piece of information from the game's manual to play. This could require the player to look up a code (or look up "the third word on page seven of the manual"), or, much better, solve a puzzle using clues from the [[Feelies]]. Some very early games even used this to save disk space by putting most of the expository text in hardcopy, sort of like a ''Choose Your Own Adventure'' book (complete with "red herring" exposition to discourage you from peeking at parts you aren't supposed to read yet).

 

 

With the rise of the CD-ROM and the fall of printed manuals, this sort of copy protection faded away. For the years until CD duplication became cheap, the medium itself was considered good enough copy protection.

The internet was probably the final nail in the coffin for most of these schemes, with all the secret codes now being accessible with just a few mouse clicks. Even in times when DOS (or Win 95 exclusive DOS mode, for that matter) didn't allow the player to switch and look at a solution in a plain text file, it still could be printed, or easily bypassed via DOS multitask extensions and programs like Game Wizard.

 

 

On the other hand, companies love this option to pieces. Games with an on-line component can implement such a mechanism "for free" within their own authentication structure. Of course, in the event that the company goes under, no one will ever be able to play their games ever again. Or, even if they're still in business, there's the question of exactly how many people need to keep playing an older game before the economics of appeasing fans of old titles comes into play. But the companies don't care so much about that. In fact, some probably like the idea of simply turning off the activation server for ''Mega Quest'' and thereby forcing all their users to buy ''Mega Quest 2''.

 

 

 

 

 

{{examples}}

== Feelies ==

* In the original ''[[The Bard's Tale Trilogy|Bard's Tales]]'' games, the ''actual'' spells you cast in the game used magic words that you had to type in to cast them, present only in the manual and never given in the game (you would see only the 'thematic' name of the spell in-game, not the magic word used to order your characters to cast it.) This made playing the game without the manual extremely difficult. Most ports of the games made the spells selectable by menu, eliminating this issue.

** The third game of the trilogy, ''Thief Of Fate'', had dimension-hopping as a crucial plot point. In order to travel from the main world to one of the seven other dimensions, the player had to not only cast the correct spell (see above), but then input the correct number from a three-layer card stock disc included with the game, similar to the Disney example given in this trope's description.

* The ''[[Carmen Sandiego]]'' games each shipped with a large tome: a copy of that year's ''World Almanac and Book of Facts'', a history book or Fodor's guide, from which information could be requested. Several problems occurred with this: although it was intended to get kids interested in using an almanac, it wouldn't help if the book was lost at school, or if some schools used a ''newer'' edition of Fodor's (which meant that none of the hints corresponded to the correct pages, meaning going up in rank was impossible).

* [[Infocom]] tended to be among the cleverest in their integration of copy protection: for the most part, the game was simply unwinnable without the clues which the [[Feelies]] provided:

** In ''[[Leather Goddesses of Phobos]]'', the copy protection feelie was the ''map through the obligatory maze''. Considering that the maze was pretty much instantly deadly if you didn't do the right things in the right places, this was rather irritating when the map invariably got lost.

** A curious bit of copy protection was in Infocom's only romance game: ''Plundered Hearts''. The feelies in the game consist of facsimiles of the heroine's starting equipment, one of which is a banknote. The note shows the game's villain posing dramatically... but would you believe he's showing the solution to a puzzle? Grab his hat, try to grab the book he's carrying and press on the same part of the globe where he is and presto! Secret door!

* Several Level 9 games used a method called "Lenslok". Using a graphical pattern, a passphrase was rendered unreadable. A color filter provided with the game, similar to those in the Milton Bradley ''[[Jeopardy!]]'' games, could be placed against the screen to render the text legible, but this failed with exceptionally small or large monitors.

* The ''[[Metal Gear]]'' solid has always featured copy protection measures:

** The NES ''Metal Gear'' also had some rooms that couldn't be completed without the game manual. That is, unless you used a certain bug to skip parts of the game...

*** Hilariously, the 2008 Essentials box set included all three [[PlayStation 2]] Compatible ''[[Metal Gear Solid]]'' games in DVD Cases, including the original with new artwork in the style of the original "longbox" Playstation cases. Brilliant, ..Except for the fact that there's no screenshots of the game on the back, even the one needed to progress in the game! It's not in the manual either!

* Almost all of [[Sierra]]'s point-and-click adventure games had copy protection in their manuals, meaning that those who used illegal copies of the game (or who just plain lost their manual) couldn't progress any further:

* ''Starflight II'' asked you to look up a code on a code wheel every time you left the starbase. If you entered it wrong you could still play the game, but a few hours in, your starship would be pulled over by the Space Police. The accused you of software theft and gave you one more chance to enter the right code; failing caused them to blow up your ship.

** The original Starflight had the code wheel. Starflight 2 had a fold out star map and a viewer to isolate 3 inch sections of the map. The game would then ask you the number of certain colored stars in the 3 in section once you placed the viewer at certain coordinates.

* ''F/A-18 Hornet'' had you answer a question from its rather large flight manual before starting a mission.

* Professor Layton and Pandora's Box (or the Diabolical Box in some countries) came with a train ticket needed to find the location of where the last half of the game takes place. It required a code to be deciphered and the answer had to be inputted into the game.

** More [[Feelies]] than this trope: the ticket was also shown in the game when it got to that puzzle. The puzzle required folding it, so it was a bit of a pain to envision how it folded from just the picture and without the physical ticket, but by no means impossible.

* Particularly before the advent of CDs and DVDs, console systems traditionally used media that could not be easily obtained or created - if at all - by the public:

* Eight-bit to 32-bit consoles including the Game Boy, Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, (Super) Nintendo Entertainment System and Nintendo 64 used proprietary cartridges that were relatively expensive. But by the time of the Game Boy Advance, third parties introduced compatible cartridges for playing homemade GBA games (which could also be used for pirated games, wink wink nudge nudge).

*** Technically, Dreamcast piracy wasn't quite as simple as copying the GD-ROM, which regular PC drives could not read. Dreamcast piracy involved first ripping the GD-ROM using special hardware (often the Dreamcast itself via hardware plugged into the modem slot), then some tricky work involving a boot track and multiple burn sessions for the CD-R. Once created, though, that CD-R could be easily copied and used on any Dreamcast.

* The Sony PlayStation read a tracking pattern pressed onto the lead-in of official CDs, which cannot be reproduced normally. The PlayStation 2 uses a similar system. They will both refuse to read any disc that doesn't have a valid pattern.

*** The final evolution of this "swap trick" was the production of kits containing stickers to hold down the "lid open" sensors (so the console would not try to perform the security test again when the lid was opened to swap the discs), and boot discs that would pass the copy protection check, then stop the disc from spinning and wait patiently until the start button was pressed (so the user could swap in another disc at their leisure).

*** Before the PS3s dropped backward compatibility altogether, this bit Sony on the ass - they had a hell of a time trying to read PS2 discs, to the point where most of the last-gen library was bugged out or failed entirely while playing on a [[PlayStation 3]].

** The 3.56 firmware update to the [[PlayStation 3]] marks the start of Sony's attempt to do the same thing (in addition to fixing the embarrassingly large security hole discovered not 2 months before the patch's release). How did it fare? Well, on the first release of the patch, it only succeeded in curbing (briefly) Call of Duty Modern Warfare hacks. It got cracked in under 24 hours, and that's NOT the worst news. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G40zYK-DbgY It would not work on Slim PS3s that had an upgraded hard drive], something that you are legally allowed to do. The second release of the patch only fixed the hard drive issue.

** These copy protection schemes sometimes trigger on legit cartridges, likely due to wear and tear over time. Although unrelated to copy protection, the same wear and tear can cause the game to run entirely in black and white as well.

** The English NES prototype of its predecessor ''[[MOTHER]]'', [[Fan Nickname|dubbed]] ''EarthBound Zero'' by the fans, also had similar copy protection, but it's more mundane and far less cruel in its implementation. Instead of making the game impossible and scrubbing your save games at the end, it runs a checksum at certain points to test whether the game is pirated; if it is determined it is, it stops the game and throws up a screen saying that the game is an unauthorized copy and will not continue, and bricks the ROM/cart. This measure was part of a major headache in getting the ROM to work properly when it was first discovered and dumped in 1998, and owners of the actual physical prototypes are understandably concerned that the condition of the prototypes may set it off anyway. This protection wasn't in the Japanese version, nor does it exist in ''[[Compilation Rerelease|MOTHER 1+2]]'' which is built upon the prototype data.

** ''[[Mega Man Battle Network]]: Operate Shooting Star'', a remake of the first game, prevented you from editing your folder, and initiated a battle with three Mets, the weakest enemy in the game, with every single step you took while on the Internet.

** When the ROM boots up, ''[[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles|The Manhattan Project]]'' checks to see if the copyright text and/or icon has been modified (a common practice among pirates) - if it returns positive, the damage the players give out is reduced, the damage they ''take'' is increased, and a boss around 3/4 of the way through the game is modified to have infinite health, making the game [[Unwinnable]] for anyone masochistic enough to keep playing after the first few levels.

* ''[[The Journeyman Project]]'', at three points in the game, asks you to enter a code from the "Temporal Protectorate Handbook" (aka manual). Unfortunately, if you got this game bundled with a new computer, it most likely didn't come with the manual, and unless you were clever and looked up the codes on the Internet, you would have to brute-force the code to continue.

** Fortunately, if you remember what type of code it is (a numeric sequence), it's actually pretty easy to brute-force it, since the game automatically stops you the moment you input an incorrect character, meaning you only have to go through around 90 sequences (tops) before getting at the correct code, as opposed to over a million.

*** Your glass-topped drive won't help unless you can ''also'' read fine print spinning at a minimum of 200 RPM.

* ''[[Steel Beasts]] Pro PE'' has hardware-based DRM in the form of a USB key. This key must be plugged in while running the simulation! (And it's not the only example...)

 

== Software ==

* Valve Software's [[Steam]] is its online download and updating system, used to distribute Valve's games, first-party mods and <s>some select</s> quite a few other titles they have contracted in. It's usually cited as "DRM done right" by those who believe such a thing is possible. However, at the time of its original release, late 2004, DRM was nowhere near as common as it is now, and many players, who purchased the retail boxed copy, were understandably annoyed that they would have to install a separate program that runs in the background in order to prove that they weren't thieves. In addition, initially they had to connect to the Internet every time they wished to play the single-player game. Valve eventually removed this, and by now retail sales of their games have been dwarfed by digital sales, meaning most of their players already have Steam anyway. It is worth noting, however, that Steam is one of a handful of DRM systems to deliberately prevent players from reselling or giving away their used games.

*** And oh, apparently the client would refuse to go into offline mode unless you're already logged in (the offline mode button that appears when you're unable to connect to the server is apparently broken). This will surely ruin the vacations of people who're uninformed of this limitation and forgot to put Steam into offline mode on their laptop before leaving home for a destination where getting an internet connection is very difficult.

** Steam's DRM also provides a useful service to online gamers: Since every game is tied to its owner, once a user is banned from a server, they are banned for good unless they are willing to buy another whole copy of the game. And since most of Valve's games are multiplayer...

** Did we mention that, despite having a perfectly good copy protection system built in to Steam, most third party publishers keep their own, more intrusive systems in the version of their games that they sell on Steam anyway? At least the store warns you about this... ''most'' of the time.

*** However, there are now very easy ways to get a non-steam copy of all their games.

** About routinely swapping out hardware - hardcore gamers do that as well. [[Rich Bitch|There are people who swap out video cards as soon as a newer card hit the market]].

** ''[http://www.galciv2.com/ Galactic Civilizations 2]'' by Star''dock'' Systems features "No CD copy protection"; once you install the game, you never have to verify it again. They felt that ease of use was worth the increased risk. The trick is that Stardock provides lots of free patches and content updates; If they find out your copy is being pirated, you don't get those anymore. Star''Force'', mentioned above, was so impressed by this system that they posted a link to a webpage where one could download pirated versions of ''Galactic Civilizations 2''. The backlash from gamers was so intense that they quickly removed the link.

*** All of this extra security didn't stop a pirated version of the game appearing three weeks after the game was released.

** The Starforce copy protection on ''[[Cold Fear]]'' was so bad that it locked up a large percentage of legitimate copies, and Ubisoft ''had to distribute a scene no-cd crack'' for paying customers to be able to play the game. They released their own no-cd patch later, but it was essentially the same as the scene patch.

** Likewise, the Starforce copy protection on legitimate copies of ''[[Rogue Trooper]]'' is absurdly prone to false positives, but the publishers/developers never bothered to fix the problem because not enough people bought the game for them to care anyway.

* ''[[Mortal Kombat]]: Armageddon'' had copy protection which caused the game to boot up and then go into ''Cabela's Big Game Hunter''.

* Some games like ''[[Mechwarrior]]'', ''[[Warcraft]]'' and ''[[Marathon Trilogy|Marathon]]'' had special, network-client-only "spawn" installations that you could make many or an unlimited number of on other machines from just one copy and run without the disks (sometimes full versions and/or demos would automatically run in "spawn" mode when you don't pass the copy protection). These needed a full installation on another machine to act as a server, and would sometimes connect only to servers run by the full install from the same copy. Similarly, ''[[Diablo II]]'' allowed you to install a "multiplayer Version" with which you could play online, without the cd, but disabled the single-player segment of the game.

* Recently, controversy surrounding the copy protection of the PC version of ''[[Mass Effect]]'' sprang up. Here's the short version: You're only allowed three activations on a single computer until you have to buy another copy. You don't get back an activation and changing your hardware settings takes one up.

** There was also going to be a validation process that checked up on you every 10 days or the game would not run, but the immense backlash caused that to be abandoned and the developers will only implement the three-install limit. How thoughtful!

* In the classic adventure game ''[[Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure|Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade]]'' Marcus would ask Indy to translate some symbols for him, which would need to be looked up in the manual. Failing to do so would let the game continue as normal - until a crucial point where Indy, at Donovan's place, would fail to translate a tablet concerning the Holy Grail (Indy mistakenly translates it as "Holy Grain"), prompting Donovan to say "Seems you're just an illegitimate copy of the man I thought you were."

* ''[[Operation Flashpoint]]'' is notable for being the first game to use the FADE copyright system, which slowly degraded the quality of gameplay (for example, decreasing the accuracy of the player's weapons) if piracy was detected. The same applies for ''[[ARMA: Armed Assault|ARMA]] : Armed Assault'', its [[Spiritual Successor]]. The best copy protection for ''ARMA'' was of course the fact that [[They Just Didn't Care|it didn't run under Vista.]]

** Microprose were well known for this. ''[[Sid Meier's Pirates!]]'' (the original '80s version) allowed you to start the game even if you failed the manual-based question. However, winning the "intro duel" was extremely difficult. Still, even if you lost, you could still continue playing the game from a difficult starting point.

* ''Pirates! Gold'', meanwhile, would sometimes ask you to identify a famous pirate you encountered by his flag. Answer wrong and your ship loses all cannons. It was still possible to win the ensuing battle if you had enough crew to board the enemy ship, though. Also, since the copy-protection scheme only kicked in sometimes and other times the game would tell you the name rather than ask for it, with patience it was possible to reconstruct the list from scratch.

** Or, you know, you could spend all afternoon at your friend's place doing it by hand. And once color photocopiers became prevalent, the scheme fell flat on its face.

* At first glance, the computer game ''Master of Orion'' used a simple "What spaceship is this?" manual copy protection. However, if the game executable was modified to remove the protection altogether, [[Magnificent Bastard|the game would detect the alteration of its code and become so difficult as to be virtually unplayable!]]<ref>This is probably due to the copy protection itself actually setting some key variables that are initialized to such absurd values, not unlike the Slylandro Probe and Starbase [[Game Breaking Bug|thing]] that attempts to convince players to go to the Starbase first.</ref>

** Many operators believe that the suicide batteries are actually used for another purpose: [[Self-Destruct Mechanism|planned obsolescence]]. The idea being that once the battery dies, the operator will be forced to buy the next version of the game (often, the deal is sweetened with a trade-in discount for the new version of the game), or pay through his nose for "repairs". Hence it's common to see this and [[Capcom Sequel Stagnation]] go hand in hand. In fact, these are now used in a different way: Given that many new arcade machines run off hard drives or GD-ROMs and sport real time clocks built-in (and many are based off PC hardware) and could be upgraded just like any other PCs, many of the games now contained a time bomb within themselves and will display an error telling the operator that its licensing module has expired, and to call the game company's local distributor for an upgrade. No doubt that the operator will be told that the game is no longer supported and will be pushed to buy a newer version of the game instead if he/she calls (if not charged a fortune for "repairs"). The fact that it can be used for copy protection is just a nice side effect. It is also a bad idea in itself that it didn't stop the more adventurous of the bunch from attempting to make a backup of the board while the battery is still alive and use the backup on the board once the battery has died through various methods, most with high levels of success.

** Some arcade games also required "Licensing modules", which are a separate ROM board that holds only the decryption key of the game. Many newer games, since they're run on machines based on PC hardware, requires a USB dongle to run. And of course the USB dongle could hold an expiry date instead of the game, adding to the planned obsolescence method mentioned above.

* Unintentional example: ''[[Deus Ex]]'' had a scene transition triggered by a certain audio clip. Pirated versions would often leave out much of the audio to save space, making the scene transition never take place, and making it impossible to continue the game. Additionally, there was also a batch of defective disks with corrupted audio files. Thanks Ion Storm!

* The [[BattleTech]] PC game, ''The Crescent Hawks' Inception'', had two series of copy protection: one early on in the game, when you had to look up (or memorize) different Battlemech components to continue training at the Academy in your ersatz [[Doomed Hometown]], and one very near the end, where you had to look up some stuff on a star chart in order to get your father's ''Phoenix Hawk'' Land-Air Mech (AKA VF-1J Valkyrie, but that's another trope). Woe betide you if you lost the star chart.

*** Indeed. It would ask you things like "Which Advance requires knowledge of Steam Engine and Bridge Building?" Uh... geee... could it be railroad? Ya think?

* ''[[Halo]]'' for the PC seemed to have some sort of copy protection in place; if the game was obtained illegally, players could still play the game normally without problems, but if they tried to play the online multiplayer, they wouldn't be connected and got a message saying the CD key is invalid.

*** And it seems to be coming back; several Games For Windows Live games do this. So does World in Conflict.

* ''[[Lemmings]] 2'' had a sly example; when installed off non-original floppies all would seem to proceed okay, but you wouldn't be able to advance past the first level for any of the tribes.

* ''[[Myst]] III: Exile'''s copy protection system required you to insert Disc One at least once per run (either when starting a new game, or loading an old one), then pressed an error right into the disc that made that disc uncopyable.

** That copy protection is called SafeDisc. EA loves it. Unfortunately, all the forcing of the drive to read a bad sector can't be good for the lens...

** Actually, you can't play C&C 3: Tiberium Wars in LAN mode with the same serial key either.

* Some users complain that the 2008 ''[[Prince of Persia]]'' on the PC will ping an unknown server every 75 seconds. The most common guess is that [[Ubisoft]] is tracking your CD key and looking for duplicates.

* Famous line from ''[[Captain Comic]]'': "Captain, I'm afraid you have made a terrible mistake. You failed to obtain a certain object you should have had from the start of your adventure. Since this object is not very expensive, you should go and obtain it before you venture any further." It shows up quite some time into the game.

* The 1988 Microprose game ''[[Red Storm Rising]]'' would give you the profile view of a ship and ask you to identify it; all the requisite information was in the manual. Of course, if you're as big enough of a naval geek... [[Someday This Will Come in Handy|guns in back, smokestack, missile pack]], [[wikipedia:Krivak class frigate|Krivak]]. Or you could just use Wikipedia nowadays.

** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUCyvw4w_yk A sequel] recently came out, and while it's musically more advanced , the message is still not as clear as the creators intended. Case in point: [http://sati1984.tumblr.com/post/202537346/this-video-alone-is-going-to-increase-the-rate-of this YouTube comment] and [http://www.retrothing.com/2009/09/stunning-sequel-to-dont-copy-that-floppy.html this Retro Thing article], the latter providing an excellent analysis of the video.

* Maxis' ''[[The Sims]] 3'' has recently been leaked on line several weeks early, giving many players a sneak peek at the game's functionality. EA caught wind of this pretty quickly, saying that the leaked version was missing half the game's content and was glitched to hell, and instead of hunting down every single person who's downloaded the game and preventing them from accessing the game altogether, has settled on telling them they're running an unauthorized version and pleading them to buy the full version to get extra content. Which is surprisingly fair, considering this is ''EA'' we're talking about here.

** Also, thanks to the SecuROM situation, EA decided to scale back this games' copy protection to the traditional CD check and serial number that the earlier games used.

*** [[Ruined FOREVER|Unfortunately, the direct download version of the game still sports SecuROM copy protection, limiting users to 5 installations per copy.]]

* ''The Island of Dr. Brain'' forced you to consult the manual, called the Encyclo-Almanac-Tionary-Ography, to input the coordinates necessary for finding his island. This counted as the first puzzle in the game, and you receive a gold plaque just for completing it.

* ''[[Spyro the Dragon|Spyro: Year of the Dragon]]'', if you are playing a cracked copy, has Zoe the Fairy appearing at the latter part of Sunrise Spring telling you that your copy is hacked and may be an illegal copy, which will lead you to experience "problems" you would not experience on a legal copy. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZinR10DC3-Q\]

* ''[[DJMAX]] Trilogy'' comes with a USB dongle that must be plugged into your computer to run the game. It also contains your profile, which has your usernames, unlocks, etc., so a fortunate side effect is that you can carry your unlocks across multiple machines. On the downside, lose the dongle and you're screwed.

** Inverted unintentionally in ''DJ MAX Portable Black Square'', in which songs will skip when played via UMD due to memory management issues, but won't when played via an ISO on a memory stick.

* On the Amiga, there was a game ''[[The Killing Game Show]]''. This game was broken and copied early in its life, but the original protected disk would alter the system timing during bootup. The broken copy did not alter the timing, resulting in a game that became [[Unwinnable]] without removing the "timer". (It is not known if any cracked version ever fixed this.)

* The German game ''[[Drakensang]]'' (Das Schwarze Auge/ Black Eye) had at least three instances of copy protection and you were punished for then buying the original because you had to start anew, as the problems were saved in the savegames (there was supposed to be a patch for that, but it's unknown if it ever got made). First you have to go to a NPC that doesn't spawn. This can be corrected by using an SQL editor. Then there is a vital door, that's just not clickable. And last but not least there is supposed to be a door that usually leads to another vital part of the game, but in case of a pirates version leads into a cell with no exit. And no, nobody ever said anything about this beforehand, leading to a mass of "buy the game already" and almost as much "I already OWN it" :=)

* [[Origin]]'s ''[[Strike Commander]]'' came with instructions to copy the disks and put them in the cupboard in case something happened to your originals.

** Another Origin property, the [[Wing Commander (video game)|Wing Commander]] series, required for the first few games information included in the [[Feelies]] or manual to start playing the game. When they were reworked for the ''Kilrathi Saga'' collection, the check was eliminated.

* The PC version of ''[[Batman: Arkham Asylum]]'' has one of these in the form of a deliberate glitch which disables Batman's cape glide ability, rendering the game [[Unwinnable]]. The developers say this.

{{quote|"It's not a bug in the game's code, it's a bug in your moral code."}}

** Now that the (legit) PC version is out, however, [http://www.destructoid.com/blogs/Clarke/don-t-buy-batman-aa-for-pc-148791.phtml it quickly turned out that] the publishers have apparently forgot to take out these delibrate bugs for legit retail releases, and thus the PC port would very likely to go the way of ''[[Titan Quest]]''. Oops.

** Must be noted that local multiplayer is still possible, just that two people in the same room have to play each other through the official network.

* The ''[[Dragon Ball]]'' video game trilogy known as "Legacy of Goku" (And the spiritual sequel, ''GT: Transformation'') had its form of copy protection wherein a message popped up at a certain point saying "this game cannot be played on this hardware" and wouldn't go away, should it detect that it isn't a legit copy (Although there are rumours of some retail copies having this problem as well). Perhaps stupid is the fact that [[What an Idiot!|later versions of the emulator Visual Boy Advance decided to emulate this form of copy protection]], making playing the games on that emulator ''extremely'' difficult.

** There was a Super NES game that ''accidentally'' implemented copy protection: the game program had a bug which, by sheer dumb luck, caused it to depend on extremely precise timing of the SNES cartridge - play it on a copier or emulator, and the slight timing change would crash the game.

*** Would that be a [[Good Bad Bug]]?

** ''[[Might and Magic]]'' fans have had a bit of a fun time, too, with the latest installment ''Might and Magic Heroes VI''. Ubisoft's copy protection came in the form of the Dynasty system, which rewards players with leveling items and buffs as they progress through the game. The kicker: Dynasty progress is stored in the online "Conflux". There's an offline mode, but games saved to the Conflux obviously can't be loaded offline. Players with a steady internet connection naturally figured they might as well take advantage of the Dynasty bonuses... and were treated to a series of Conflux outages during prime play-times (including a few weekends and ''the week after Christmas'') for a while after the game's release.

** All the backlash has led to ''[[Rayman Origins]]'' [[And the Fandom Rejoiced|not containing any DRM]]. Just to tell the infamy of the debacle, the game's Steam page explicitly mentions the '''lack''' of DRM.

** It should be noted that several companies, including Ubisoft, have previously tried to convince Microsoft and Sony to let them release console games that would require the player to be connected to Xbox Live or the Playstation Network at all times, irrespective of whether the game has any online elements. And despite the fact that such a mechanism would probably be far easier to implement on a console than on Windows, both Microsoft and Sony have smacked down such requests each and every time, on the grounds that they don't want to be responsible for the fallout that would inevitably happen. Let's reiterate: Sony, who ''love'' locking up everything harder than Fort Knox, using proprietary solutions wherever they can, and who have in the years attracted a lot of hatred due to their [[wikipedia:Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal|boneheaded antipiracy measures]], [[Everyone Has Standards|have rejected Ubisoft's project]]. You'd think this would be an eye opener in and of itself for Ubisoft...

** Ubisoft tried to guard against the first ''[[Assassin's Creed (video game)|Assassin's Creed I]]'' being leaked by deliberately introducing a performance-degrading bug into the code, to be removed only when the game was sent to be mass-produced. Unfortunately, they didn't actually tell anyone, so when the bugged version was inevitably leaked, it considerably hurt their sales because the pirates spread through word of mouth to potential legitimate buyers that the game had [[Porting Disaster|terrible performance even on high-end computers.]]

* ''SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo 3'' forces you to pay 20$ to play online on pirated '''or''' second hand copies. And it didn't take long to crack it, which makes this PSP copy protection irritating as it was preceded a month before by...

* ...the initial Japanese release of ''[[Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep]]''. Why? At the time of the game's release, no one fully cracked the 6.20 firmware, which the game requires. The game was released in early January; it took until early March for a major cracking progress. Yeah.

* ''Bonetown'', an [[H-game]] by western gamers, has been noted for being "Uncrackable" despite using only Securom. The big problem? The Securom was rather archaic and was quietly subverted once the Retail Version was released (aka the physical copy) rather then the Direct Download version

* [[Spirit Tracks]] had this when you got on the train. The controls for it wouldn't show up so you would end up crashing into another train over and over again in the tutorial section. This was patched.

* Pro Tools, an audio-editing suite currently used by the majority of the music industry, has gone back to the "piece of hardware" method. You can pirate the software all you like... But unless you have an "MBox" plugged into your computer, the program will start to load, put up an error window that says something on the order of "ha ha ha", and close again. Used versions of the MBox 1 go for something like $200 on the secondary market; MBox ''3''s are worse. Oh, and, let's not even ''start'' on the "iLok" dongle.

** Though, if someone in the music industry is committing piracy, well, [[Hypocrite|they have alot to answer for.]]

* ''[[Worms]]'' came with a code sheet printed in glossy black ink on matte black paper.

* The ''[[Ef: A Fairy Tale of the Two.|Ef: a fairy tale of the two]]'' duology from minori is one of the few visual novels with any sort of copy protection. Strangely, the objective wasn't to stop pirates. Explanation below.

* Fictional example: In ''[[User Unfriendly]]'' by Vivian Vande Velde, the protagonists are playing a pirated copy of Virtual Reality RPG ''Rasmussem''. Unfortunately for them, [[Talking Is a Free Action|discussing the game]] in front of an NPC initiates an infinite loop in the relevant AI which can only be terminated by a customer service representative.

* The DOS game ''Al-Qadim: The Genie's Curse'' featured copy-protection in the form of a question whose answer you needed to look up on a page in the manual in order to start playing. Not only does it give you the page of the manual and what number word it is, it also gives you the heading of that section of the manual and the first letter of the word. Unfortunately, one of the copy-protection questions used an answer that was directly related to the heading and extremely easy to guess: "On page 19, under the heading Sound, enter the ninth word: (first letter is m)" [[What an Idiot!|(unsurprisingly, the answer is "music")]]. If you answered the question wrong it would simply let you try again with a different question as many times as you wanted, so even if you lost the manual it was easy to just cycle through the questions until you got one you knew or could figure out the answer to (not to mention having the first letter of the words made brute force guesswork much easier).

* Similarly, both ''Supreme Commander'' and its expansion came with a disk-check but it was removed after a couple of patches.

** The copy protection was required by their publisher, THQ, during the short period in between the European and North American launches. Neither the developers nor the community liked the mere presence of the DRM, and it was promptly patched out; in the first patch for the expansion in fact.

* ''[[Oregon Trail]] II'' normally has to load the oregon.dat file from the CD drive, but this can be easily circumvented by copying the file to the hard drive and instructing the INI to load it from there.

* Most modern CD/DVD-ROM games require the original disc, not a copy, to be present in the drive for the game to run. Such as the aformentioned Safedisc system. Not surprisingly, most of these games have illegal no-CD cracks, although they can be flaky at times.

* ''Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project'' would make enemies tougher and the bosses invincible if the copyright code was modified.

* [[wikipedia:Cactus Data Shield|Cactus Data Shield]] uses slight quirks on the disk designed to disrupt some speakers or cause read errors. The result was that it hung on some CD players, or caused other players to repeatedly play a given track.

* ''[[Sin]]'' encrypted the music files, to prevent them from being played outside of the game.

* The ''[[Doctor Who]]'' adventure games are free via the BBC website to UK residents. Everybody else is required to pay. In order to prevent unauthorized users, they use two forms of "protection". First, the BBC website will check whether your IP is local before allowing you to download the game - and even if you manage to get around this via a proxy (or have someone else send you the game), it will "phone home" when you attempt to install it to check it again.

* The sheer contempt for DRM has even caused some companies to consider the lack of it a selling point.

== Non-software variations ==

* In the early days of [[Silent Films]], piracy ran rampant. Projectionists would often "lend" prints to pirates for duplication. The pirates would replace original title cards with their own title cards and claim copyright if they were caught. To combat this, studios painted stencils of the studio logo onto the scenery in every shot so they could verify that they were the legitimate copyright holders.

*** When Gousha still made maps, the state map of Minnesota included a huge non-existent bay along the north shore of Lake Superior between Duluth and Grand Marais. (It was obviously fake. Highway 61 ran over the 10-mile opening of the bay rather than skirting around its fictional shoreline.) No matter how many people complained, they never corrected the error.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Videogame Culture]]

[[Category:Copy Protection]]