My views on..COPY PROTECTION (edited post from Steam Powered Forums)

Sera29 wrote @ Steampowered.com Forums (thread "tax and vat, realworld vs. online pricing")
Yes, it is the pirates fault. Thats why we have copy protection. Companies are entitled to payment for their goods, but some pple prefer to get those goods for free without paying for it. Companys are in the business to make money, they have a right to protect their investments. Yes, copy proetection sucks, but if pirates didnt steal goods and actually bought them letimately we wouldnt have to put up with it.

I lol'd. You miss one MAJOR point - there are always some people that are not going to buy -insert item- (e.g. money or morale issues), even if it would be un-reachable to get it for free, so any POTENTIAL "loss" should have been divided by 2 or 3.

Today's copy protection is all about money:
There's always some workaround, it's only matter of time, so the winner are the copy protections' developers in the end, 'coz they will come up with some new version again and earn more money. And I'm pretty sure they charge a lot!

I think companies should invest more money in development of the software itself, make sure it's good and the success will be imminent. I'm very annoyed by restrictive and aggresive copy protections like StarForce or Securom (read the 2K forums about 2 possible installs of BioShock RETAIL without contacting support for new serial key (AWFUL!) here., there will be some extending in future, but still way way too restrictive), that's why I use Steam and am really unhappy to see a game with additional protection.

I understand, that crack-proof copy protection might boost sales in the very first weeks/months, but it should stay that way and the protection should be disabled after certain time, because after the main wave, there is no big reason for it and it would make regular "paying" users happier. Why there is no reason, you ask?

Two basic figures:
1)The software isn't that good and there is only little attention from "the Scene", so people might get something more "supported".

2)It's actually good and crack/workaround is here and folks that really don't want to buy, won't buy it.

I found STEAM as a good platform for it (being member for a long long time), Nadeo has understood and did similar thing: there was SF in the recent Trackmania release, but they removed it after some time, just only with the basic STEAM system protection, which is the, I think, lesser evil of copy protections like StarForce or Securom. I'll probably support them for this action and buy my first Trackmania through Steam, I was enjoying Trackmania: Nations only until I figured out, that it uses SF.

I don't think my thoughts about copy protection are 100% right, I may went too far in few points and left out some, but they aren't that B&W like yours. Do you still think, it's that easy to judge it all in few sentences? Not speaking about other things than c. pr., that can help boost the sales like protection-free Galactic Civilization II's free upgrades for legal owners. Read interesting article about StarForce's fairness and jealousy called

Games CEO finds himself reluctant warez hero

Some bits:

Wardell said it was WalMart's best-selling game last week. Stardock's protection allows users to make copies of the CD, but unless they can provide a serial as proof of purchase, they won't be entitled to upgrades.

This was apparently too much for some supporters of copy protection. One example is StarForce, which sells a range of DRM software. In the forums section of its website, a StarForce employee posted a link to a Bittorrent seed of a pirate copy of GCII - to "prove" that Stardock was making a terrible mistake.

Wardell told us that the site hosting the Torrent took down the link as soon as it was informed - but StarForce didn't delete the links to the pirate software for 24 hours.

Maybe some companies should re-think their policy and some people should tune up the saturation from black and white to something more colourful...