You too can be a criminal
Forgive me this rant; there are many more interesting and personal things I could wite about, especially after a week's hiatus. It's cheap therapy and I could use a little venting!
Software anti-piracy schemes do not stop thieves because they've all been cracked. Instead, they cause all manners of inconveniences and ultimately force us decent folks to become criminals (an exageration, but not too far off).
Example 1: a game that requires the original CD to be in the drive before it will work; a copy will not work. I would like to have a back-up copy because CDs are notoriously fragile. Lo and behold the CD gets a scratch on the top side through the dye layer. Ruined. Two choices: either throw away the game and buy a new one (stupid!) or call up the publisher to ask for a replacement. Of course they'll charge you a nominal handling fee that's almost as much as the game considering game prices steadily drop after their releases. Besides, they'll need proof. I don't remember exactly, but I believe they either required you to have registered the game or to send back the damaged disk--more time and money lost. So what do you do? Find a hack to crack the protection scheme and make a copy that the PC recognizes as "original."
Example 2: You buy a new PC with XP preinstalled. Years later the sticker with the product key attached to the chassis wears away and you lose the recovery partition on your hard drive (or the physical restore disks if you were lucky enough to have been supplied with such). Now you're SOL since you can't prove you have a legit copy and you need to reinstall because Windows security flaws have so screwed up your PC it glows in the dark. Solution: find a copy of XP and learn how to bypass the product activation feature. So you wind up forced to replace a legit copy of XP with a bootleg one. Dumb.
If, when I buy software, music, etc., I merely buy a license and not just the media, then ideally I should be able to exercise the rights granted under that license independent of the media, right? (It's just a matter of time and authentication technology before it works this way.) Well, all these protection schemes tie us back to the media once again and suddenly we're back to the days when you had to worry when you listened to your favorite song for fear of wearing out your favorite LP record. Dumb.
Software anti-piracy schemes do not stop thieves because they've all been cracked. Instead, they cause all manners of inconveniences and ultimately force us decent folks to become criminals (an exageration, but not too far off).
Example 1: a game that requires the original CD to be in the drive before it will work; a copy will not work. I would like to have a back-up copy because CDs are notoriously fragile. Lo and behold the CD gets a scratch on the top side through the dye layer. Ruined. Two choices: either throw away the game and buy a new one (stupid!) or call up the publisher to ask for a replacement. Of course they'll charge you a nominal handling fee that's almost as much as the game considering game prices steadily drop after their releases. Besides, they'll need proof. I don't remember exactly, but I believe they either required you to have registered the game or to send back the damaged disk--more time and money lost. So what do you do? Find a hack to crack the protection scheme and make a copy that the PC recognizes as "original."
Example 2: You buy a new PC with XP preinstalled. Years later the sticker with the product key attached to the chassis wears away and you lose the recovery partition on your hard drive (or the physical restore disks if you were lucky enough to have been supplied with such). Now you're SOL since you can't prove you have a legit copy and you need to reinstall because Windows security flaws have so screwed up your PC it glows in the dark. Solution: find a copy of XP and learn how to bypass the product activation feature. So you wind up forced to replace a legit copy of XP with a bootleg one. Dumb.
If, when I buy software, music, etc., I merely buy a license and not just the media, then ideally I should be able to exercise the rights granted under that license independent of the media, right? (It's just a matter of time and authentication technology before it works this way.) Well, all these protection schemes tie us back to the media once again and suddenly we're back to the days when you had to worry when you listened to your favorite song for fear of wearing out your favorite LP record. Dumb.
posted by anchovy @ 12:24 PM
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