The Shrine

Atleast until they drop Star-Forced from their copy protection.

http://www.star-force.com/

Vicious little driver will kill your CD/DVD-ROM by forcing it into PIO. Cuts down on burn speeds too.

www.glop.org/starforce to stop the star-force infection!

Starforce is notorious for screwing up people's systems.

On the other hand, if you bunch of robber barons would stop pirating every piece of IP you can get your hands on, companies might not have to resort to such dramatic measures with their copy protection.

The <a href="http://www.gamespot.com/pages/news/stor ... ge=0">lead designer</a> for Stardock (makers of Civ II) explains why his company doesn't use measures such as Starforce.

Brad Wardell wrote:It's only industry-accepted in the PC game industry--the industry that people are regularly saying is "doomed." Most of our business is in the application software market (the market that no one argues is "doomed"), and such copy protection measures are not used. I don't have to keep my Adobe Photoshop CD in the drive to use it.

We simply applied the PC application software model of IP protection to our games--release the game with no CD-based copy protection and include a unique serial number that they need to use in order to obtain updates.

Some people pirate games, some people smoke pot. Who are you to tell people how they should break the law ?

Because if everyone pirated all their IP (not likely to happen with games, but I do fear a bit for the music industry as my generation grows older), there would be no IP industries, and possibly or even probably a decline in the general quality of IP.

Me smoking pot within the privacy of my own home, or within sympathetic settings, however, does not infringe on anyone else's rights, other than their right to tell me what to do, which is actually generally a right that I enjoy violating as much as possible.

Andrew "Conversion to chaotic good complete" Seidman

Man, I wish we lived in a world without copyright. What a dumb concept. Unfortunately, it's engrained in our business model, so it's hard to just remove outright.

I still think you're nuts about that. The games industry would practically fold up into nothingness if that happened, except for web games, and the movie industry would have nothing but indie films.

Nev wrote:I still think you're nuts about that. The games industry would practically fold up into nothingness if that happened, except for web games, and the movie industry would have nothing but indie films.

*Gandalf*Don't...tempt me, Nev!