A real solution to the StarF**k virus for everyone.

[RaziBG]

I could be wrong about all this but here is my point of view.

Yup, the way it's going one day buying a PC game would even more expensive and installation - a nightmare. Sucks hard. This would probably make more and more poeple choose a console instead of a PC. This sucks even harder. This whole thing with protection and piracy is a vicious circle. Like all things it has its start. Back in the old days PC games were made by enthusiasts and without the idea of earing tons of money. Slowly but surely some poeple couldn't have helped noticing there's a lot of potential in the PC games industry, so they said to themselves: 'Hey, let's make a profit out of this.' And it began. Piracy most likely began as a way to prove onesself and without the idea to be in the way of sales. But as human beings and competition being a part of our blood, more and more 'pirates' turned up. The baby gaming industry felt threatend by these acts of 'piracy'. Here is the turning point. Instead of sitting down and thinking it over (or maybe not thinking it over enough) they decided that the solution should be game protection and higher prices. 'Pirates' see this as a challenge and the wheel started rolling. I could describe it as a game of PONG. Instead of making nice offers, publishers choose the hard way.
Example in my home country of Bulgaria: yup, piracy heaven there, accoridng to many people. True, in a way. But let's think why this is happening. People with a monthly salory of around 200 euro simply CAN'T afford to buy legal software. Let's take Windows as a subject. Instead of lowering prices a lot and thus gaining customers and some profit, the piracy hunters keep prices high and thus making poeple turn to warez and, obviously, depriving from even the little money they could have earned. In fact i DO know people who would buy 1 or 2 pieces of software either because they would like to support the deserving developers or simply to know they have at least 1 piece of legal software. In a place like this a legal copy is somewhat prestige BUT only if the prices were acceptable.
Piracy will exist as long as there's something to crack (pirateize?). Companies are trying to STOP piracy instead of trying to decrease its effect. That's the mistake. The harder you strike, the angrier your opponent will get and the harder he would try to strike back. Human nature.

Software developers and publishers DO deserve support and NOT capitalists. Today's such companies are more like capitalists than developers and publishers.

[Joe Forster/STA]

By the way,

I talked about this digital piracy stuff with my 60+ year old mom recently and she told me that, when Guttenberg invented printing, lots of people went broke because they were making a living out of copying codexes manually. With the invention of printing stuff in as many copies as needed, their work became completely redundant. (Unless you want real facsimiles, that is, but let's stick to the normal customers instead.) And, you can bet, that there were lots of copies that we would now call "bootlegs" or "pirated copies" back then, too, only there were no money-hungry monopolies and governments yet to make laws against this because the technology was too new.

She said that new technologies have changed and will change the attitude of society to acquiring/duplicating stuff. It's not a question, only a matter of time.

Joe

[chaosmaster]

But at your example the gutenberg technology was made, to make write and sale a book easier! Every book was written by hand and so there could only be sold some copies of the work of an author! But the publishers of games only think to protect their games against copy pirates, but with starforce it doesn't only protect the game to be copied, it also can make your system instable and that's not the reason, copy protections were inventet!