The New Scientist carries a story about a novel way to fight game piracy, simply by slowing down players using unauthorized copies.
Illegally copied games protected by the system work properly at first, but start to fall apart after the player has had just enough time to get hooked. As a result, the pirated discs actually encourage people to buy the genuine software, the developers say.
The new protection system, called Fade, is being introduced by Macrovision, a company in Santa Clara, California, that specialises in digital rights management, and the British games developer Codemasters, based in Leamington Spa.
Here is how it works.
Fade exploits the systems for error correction that computers use to cope with CD-ROMs or DVDs that have become scratched. Software protected by Fade contains fragments of "subversive" code designed to seem like scratches.
Here lies the beauty of the idea. The original purchased copy contains the "scratches." But illegal copies do not: they have been removed during the copy process. So the program can detect if the user is using a pirated version or not.
Instead of switching off the game and preventing it from playing at all, the master program begins to disable it. In the game Operation Flashpoint, which has been the proving ground for Fade, players soon find that their guns shoot off target and run out of bullets.
"The beauty of this is that the degrading copy becomes a sales promotion tool. People go out and buy an original version," claims Bruce Everiss of Codemasters.
The article also mentions an analogy made by Alistair Kelman, a lawyer specialized in copyright issues.
He points out that books tend to deteriorate with use and this prevents the secondhand market from competing with the market for new books. Why not the same for software?
And Macrovision doesn't want to stop here. It wants to introduce the concept in DVDs as soon as next year.
Source: Barry Fox, New Scientist, October 10, 2003
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