Copy Protection: Difference between revisions

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.

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''.

 

 

In theory, the only way to have fine-grained control over what end-users can or cannot do with software is to physically separate it from them via a client/server arrangement. In this setup, the client only serves as a front-end—sending player input to the server and outputting streaming audio and video from the server. With a competent IT staff, infringement all but ceases to exist, yet each player is at the mercy of the server's uptime and bandwidth requirements for streaming audio and video. [http://onlive.com OnLive], a retail PC game streaming platform, inherently has this kind of copy-protection. With servers being overloaded and game companies bombing on a regular basis, this ends up being one of the least reliable systems in terms of gameplay and game longevity.

* ''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.

* In ''Vette!'', you are a given a question whose answer is in the manual. If you incorrectly answer three times, the game allows you to play, but with severely crippled gameplay(eg can't go above 80 mph), and after a certain time, it ends with the message "You are driving a stolen Vette".

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

** Sony also tried to combat piracy for the PS1 by making the discs' undersides black, causing them to be transparent only to the infrared laser used in CD drives, and more difficult to copy correctly since at the time of the console's release, consumers could not buy CD-Rs like this. Unfortunately for Sony, pretty soon blank discs with black undersides became available, and this part of their copy-protection scheme failed.

*** More "Security Through Obscurity" (or maybe just Everything is Cooler in Black) than anything else. The black coating wasn't technically ''necessary''; a number of games were released on bog-standard silver CDs. However, the black undersides did make a lot of people (apparently including the previous commenter) think that the discs were more special than they actually were.

*** And then Sony removed the OtherOS function from the PS3 back in April 2010, citing fears of ''security'' (or rather, ''piracy''. When the console is booted into Linux, it could now be used to run copied versions of discs). Generally, people weren't pleased and even brought on lawsuits.

* The Nintendo Gamecube uses a proprietary 8 cm DVD based on the miniDVD.

** Contrary to popular belief, discs for game consoles do not spin in reverse. But Gamecube and Wii discs do use a slight variant of the DVD sector-level encoding. Unfortunately for Nintendo, Wii pirates disregarded the physical aspects of the copy protection and instead decided to attack the console's firmware, which had quite a few holes.

* Sony has been fighting a long standing war against the Homebrew scene in the name of copy protection on the PSP. The Homebrew scene finds an exploit to allow un-official software, Sony releases yet another patch (that they usually make mandatory in order to play the newest games) to fix it, and the cycle continues. One particular patch that was designed solely to fix an exploit that would require a user to load a specific game in order to "unlock" their PSP, succeeded in introducing an exploit that allowed users to unlock their [[PSP]]s without any game whatsoever.

** 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.

** 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.

* ''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.

{{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.

* [[Electronic Arts]] tried the same thing as Ubisoft with ''[[Command & Conquer]] 4: Tiberian Twilight''. While it didn't bring up as much bad press as it was in Ubisoft's case, there were some people complaining about nonetheless, ''[http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/03/26/0653202/EA-Editor-Criticizes-Command-amp-Conquer-4-DRM and that includes one of EA's own employees]''.

** 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...

**** [http://wii.ign.com/articles/117/1172319p2.html That type of copy protection actually is allowed by Microsoft and Sony], but only on download titles—even then, however, the game has to go through a more rigorous validation process than usual, which is why most game developers don't do it. However, Ubisoft (among others) have repeatedly demanded to be allowed to implement this type of protection on ''disc-based'' games, which is silly when you consider that a significant amount of people still go without internet connections on their consoles. Fortunately, both Microsoft and Sony both have more sense than the developers in question, and still refuse to allow them to do so.

** 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.]]

* [[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.