Okay, I just had a dispute with a very good friend of mine, who is a lawyer. I really get sick and tired of discussing this stuff...so here are my final words:
Music industry has almost learned its lesson. Incompatible Audio CDs are just not acceptable for legetimate customers. I personally do not have a CD Player (Standalone) anymore, cos they are far to expensive compared to DVD players. Some of my original audio cds simply refused to run on my dvd standalone (cos it used a pc dvd rom). I didn't return them (some of my friends did, after backing it up with clonecd!)...I just copied them with clonecd and thus circumvented european law...just to listen to the music I LEGALLY bought.....Meanwhile I cannot find many audio cds that actually have a copy protection...which play in every player I own (car cd changer, home dvd player, discman, etc.....GOOD!!!!!).
On the other hand, video industry is running into the same problem the music industry used to be in some years ago. Meanwhile, there are DVDs which refuse to play in standalone dvd players (greets to ArccOS, etc.). Is this really necessary ? People start to return dvds to store... I assume there will be some new protections...and some day, when problems due to copy protection increase rapidly, the protection will be gone.
In this case AnyDVD was of great help for me. I bought "The Forgotten" which didn't play fluently on my DVD standalone. AnyDVD is forbidden in Germany...but hey, I bought it..and I want to watch it. AnyDVD did the job, i.e. it got rif of the silly protection...
Finally, we come to games, and I think, "game protectors" will never learn. Okay, I see a DVD or a audio cd is only around 15 € and a new game is almost 50 @ and up, but in my opinion the price is not important.
I buy all my games, DVDs and audio cds. I do not see any need for backing them up (exception: Audio CDs, cos I use them fairly often in different places, e.g. in my car, at home, on vacation). I don't regularly watch a movie 20 times a week, so the dvd won't get '"hurt". I sometimes use nocd cracks, just bceause I am too lazy to swap disks all the time. But that is just convience and I cannot expect that a backup does as well as an original.
BUT... what I can expect is, that an original runs on a system it was actually developed for (i.e. a dvd runs on a dvd player, a audio cd can be listened to in every cd/dvd HI-FI component, and finally any game runs fine on my computer, as far as I have the neccesary system specs, like CPU speed, Graphics card, etc.).
Here comes starforce's special hour. Every effective protection has broken standards (e.g. CDS for audio cds, you cannot call this audio cd anymore; ArccoS, see above; or Starforce....).
I know, that SecuRom7 also has almost nothing to do with any standard, but Starforce is miles ahead...
--> Quote from Starforce Nightmare developres:
"Since starforce version 3.4.65.09 to prevent old star**** methods for deactivating
cd drives starforce goes a very hardware incompatible way. StarForce protected game tries
to reset ide channel before it begins to check protected disk. Therefore this can take up
to 2 minutes before starforce begins with its disk check. All users, who have CD
drive on SCSI controller, ATAPI CD Drive on ATA/RAID controller, CD drive on USB controller
and even coming hardware innovation called CD drive on SATA controller, all those users are
involved by this hardware incompability issue of Starfore protection. This hardware
incompability appears even than, if you remove all your drives from IDE channel physically
and deactivate your IDE channels in BIOS to set needed resources free, also you don't even
need to use our program to find it out."
(If you have read so far, don't hesitate to begin your answer with: "Yepp, you are right Monty")
I know that SafeDisk, SecuRom, etc. install drivers on my system too, but none of them is that aggressive like the Starforce one.....
I know, there are a lot of people saying that they had no problem with Starforce.....just wait a little....
The first audio cd,dvd or game protections didn't harm me either, but the day will come!