The people behind DRM don't seem to get what they are dealing with. The people who pirate/steal their products are not making a choice between buying the product or stealing it, they are choosing between stealing it or not having it at all. DRM, specially of this invasive variety punishes the valid customers who pay good money for the product, while trying to combat the folks whose money the company will never see.
The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
81–90 of 123 posts
Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do. It somehow doesn't save me from dealing with the DRM and jumping through the hoops that people who don't just bypass. As the restrictions get more onerous and the hoops get higher, smaller, and set aflame, piracy will not go down .
Sadly, this is true. I ran into this recently with the DVD for the movie Transformers 2. I normally rip all of my movies onto my Boxee system (NOTE: I do this after I purchase the legitimate physical DVD copy of the movie, which I then keep !) It's not only more convenient to pick the movies from a menu, but more importantly for me, with two pre-teen kids in the house DVD's get scratched up fast if don't. Normally, t…
This is why Hulu, NetFlix, and such have an opportunity - they make it at least as easy to watch a streamed movie as to pirate it.
Many people seem to want to use legitimate channels; the industry needs to realize that discouraging them is not the answer.
Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
#83The solution to onerous DRM is: just don't buy any product using it. No-one needs to buy Assassin's Creed II; there are plenty of other computer games out there.
That's hardly a solution. There is no way, short of a massive letter-writing campaign, for a software publisher to look at flagging sales and know that it was due to onerous DRM. More likely, they'd blame it on piracy and go looking for even more restrictive DRM.
And so the cycle would continue until sales fall enough that the company goes under. At the same time, assuming people will stop buying DRM'd products, the companies not using DRM on their games will see their sales rise.
This seems like a great solution.
Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
#84This will "probably work" just like MMORPG's "probably don't get pirated".
But have you seen how many 3rd-party hosts there are for many MMORPGs, some built by hand to mimic the original servers? Requiring a server connection does not stop piracy, it just annoys people.
Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
#85I wonder if they turn off, or downgrade to the point of unusable, the servers the day that Assasin's Creed III is launched? They wouldn't do that would they?
Some game companies have already turned off servers for their older games. It's not a question of whether this will happen but when, especially when the service is provided for free.
Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
#86The solution to onerous DRM is: just don't buy any product using it. No-one needs to buy Assassin's Creed II; there are plenty of other computer games out there.
Alternatively stop stealing games and pay the game companies for their product and they wouldn't need to go to such great lengths to save their IP.
What about dropping the price of games? Perhaps if they weren't as expensive people wouldn't feel so inclined to pirate them. After all I assume that's why people pirate. No one wants to pay.
However, even if it did cost less, I guess most people would still rather try to get it for free, rather than having to pay anything at all.
Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the hate will come from 2 directions: One is the pirate crowd that are mostly angry that they can't get the game for free. The other is the people that bought the game and now the damn thing doesn't work because the servers are down or there's a connection issue or they're trying to play the game they paid for on their laptop somewhere where there's no internet.
Don't forget my direction - a guy who always buys his games, but has been deeply disillusioned by the way games have been "consolified" of late, hence has spent less and less on games, and has built up a level of resentment of publishers who think that reduced game sales is owing to piracy , rather than crappy ports .
Just give in a buy a console; that's what I did. If the developers are going to develop console-style games, there's no point in playing them on the PC. And since the PS3 hasn't been cracked, there's no ridiculous DRM.
Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
#88You want an anti-pirate system that will work? That's easy, we've had a working system for centuries! You hang 'em from the yardarm as a warning to others, and then you burn their ships to the water line. Pardon? Oh, you mean the OTHER kind of piracy.
So, out of curiosity, down-voted because it wasn't funny, or because jokes aren't encouraged?
Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't actually have to run portions of the game on the servers. They can just serve bits of logic code back to the client as certain milestones are met. You can easily cause 1000's of halting points in a program at the price of just a few kilobytes of data this way. The point is not to make a game hack-proof. Just to make the time to crack long enough for your purposes. (In this case, it just has to last a few m…
It's not settled computer science that the content protection problem always favors attackers, although it's clear that the state of the art does. I'm only reacting to the "laws of physics" comment you're making. It's not true that "if you can execute it, you can read it", at least for important definitions of "read" (that include "understand" or "modify"). Take, for an example, white box cryptography. Some problems…
What would be a summary of that part of "White Box Cryptography" which is new and distinct from the software obfuscation techniques that have been around for most of the history of programming? Is it more than just a bit of mathematical formalism applied to such? That's all I can tell at a first glance.
Re: The Awful Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work
#90You want an anti-pirate system that will work? That's easy, we've had a working system for centuries! You hang 'em from the yardarm as a warning to others, and then you burn their ships to the water line. Pardon? Oh, you mean the OTHER kind of piracy.
So, out of curiosity, down-voted because it wasn't funny, or because jokes aren't encouraged?
Probably a little of both.