
EarthBound's Copy Protection (2011) - JoshTriplett
http://media.earthboundcentral.com/2011/05/earthbounds-copy-protection/index.html
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jmcgough
Another favorite is in Zac McKracken - you need to enter symbols in from the
manual when traveling to other areas, and failing a few times puts you in jail
with a stern lecture
([https://youtu.be/ArjZbizPrwY?t=48s](https://youtu.be/ArjZbizPrwY?t=48s))

~~~
Animats
That approach has its own problems. Working Model, a physics simulator from
Knowledge Revolution (Macintosh, mid-1990s) used a copy protection scheme
where it asked for the last word from some page in the manual. Unfortunately,
after the copy protection was set up, but before the product shipped, someone
made a small change to the manual that caused repagination. Page numbers in
the first two thirds of the manual still worked, so the product seemed to be
OK. Those in the last third didn't. Fortunately, you could just restart the
program and try again, hoping for an early page number.

~~~
proactivesvcs
Makes me wonder when a paying customer being directly disadvantaged by DRM
first happened, and what the effects were.

~~~
zyxley
Well, you can go back to at least the Middle Ages in Europe, when valuable
books were sometimes chained in place in monasteries or libraries to keep
people from running off with them.

~~~
viraptor
That's not DRM though. Nobody stopped you from making a copy without the
chain. (apart from the fact that it would take ages and be quite expensive a
the time) Actual theft protection is not DRM.

~~~
bitJericho
Right DRM is not copy protection. DRM is about keeping legitimate buyers from
exercising free trade. You can't buy up a dozen games on steam, for example,
and resell the games on. Of course people still do, but that's what steam's
drm is intended to quell. You can't take a bluray, make a copy, upload it to
somebody's email for a price, and destroy the original. This is a perfectly
honest thing to do, it's super easy to do, but it's incredibly risky in the US
to do it.

------
csense
Would a publisher be liable to a pirate for damages if their anti-piracy
measures include code of the form:

    
    
        IF is_pirated() THEN dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda

~~~
comex
IANAL, but probably. Such a case would be somewhat comparable to the Sony BMG
scandal from a decade ago. The circumstances would be somewhat different,
especially if _only_ pirates were actually harmed, but there would still
probably be a good case under the CFAA.

