#1
The Legend of Copy Protection
Although I'm kinda busy atm, there's one thing going around the world that I need to mention.The game "Galatic Civilisations 2", produced by Stardock, has been released without any on-cd copy protection, so you can copy the cd as much as you want for private use. Looking at what the industrie says, the sales of that game should be lousy. In fact, the opposite is the truth, at the moment the game is the best sold software (not just game) in the USA, showing up the lies about "hard copy protection -> more sells". Check those news here:
http://forums.galciv2.com/index.aspx?forumid=161&aid=104297&c=1&c=1#add
As a respond, the developers of the disputed copy protection "Starforce" mentioned that GC2 is copied, too. For proving it, the spreaded links to an illegal torrent download file of GC2. In my opinion, this behaviour shows an "believe us or we'll threaten you"-attitude. Not nice, eh?
Furthermore, the highest circulation pc game magazine in the us has proven that Starforce can damage your hardware and cause problems with you software. I could link to the post in the Starforce, but concerning to the Starforce-behaviour it'll be deleted soon. So I quote the most important facts:
...we turned to CGW's own desktop administrator, Nick Kalister, for a full technical of what StarForce can (and can't) do to your PC. "Starforce doesn't diretly trash your drives or your IDE controller channels," he explains. "It can, however cause Windows to step down to programmed input/output [PIO] mode, which could possibly damage some optical drives if they are run in that mode for an extended period of time.
Sure enough, an extended test using a 4x Memorex DVD-RW drive and a retail copy of Ubisoft's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory proved it, as the drive's burn speed eventually dropped to a paltry 1x - only to return to its original speed once we removed the StarForce program.
StarForce Technologies, for its part, often takes extreme offense to negative comments... ...When questioned, Zhidkov [SF's PR manager] told us, "The issue on StarForce is obviously sponsored by our competitors or organized crime groups that run CD/DVD piracy [operations]. We are now in close coopreration with [US and Russian officials] investigating the matter and trying to find out who stands behind the boycott campaign.
It's a nice world in which the game publishers take the risk to damage their customers PCs with a hard copy protection that doesn't prevent illegal copies anyway, isn't it?
