Menu
Anyone visiting a torrent tracker is sure to find droves of "cracked" programs ranging from simple shareware to software suites costing thousands of dollars. It seems that as long as the program does not rely on a remote service (e.g. an MMORPG) that any built-in copy protection or user authentication is useless.
Is it effectively not possible to prevent a cracker from circumventing the copy protection? Why?
800
In the US, the DMCA prohibits circumventing DRM used to protect copyrighted works.
Anti-circumvention refers to laws which prohibit the circumvention of technological barriers for using a digital good in certain ways which the rightsholders do not wish to allow.
Enacted in 1998 as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), section 1201 prohibits the circumvention of technological measures employed by or on behalf of copyright owners to protect access to their works (also known as “access controls”), as well as the trafficking in technology or services that ...
The anti-circumvention provision makes it illegal to create technology to circumvent technology that has been put in place to protect a copyrighted work. This provision includes not just the creation of the technology but also the publishing of information that describes how to do it.
No, it's not really possible to prevent it. You can make it extremely difficult - some Starforce versions apparently accomplished that, at the expense of seriously pissing off a number of "users" (victims might be more accurate).
Your code is running on their system and they can do whatever they want with it. Attach a debugger, modify memory, whatever. That's just how it is.
Spore appears to be an elegant example of where draconian efforts in this direction have not only totally failed to prevent it from being shared around P2P networks etc, but has significantly harmed the image of the product and almost certainly the sales.
Also worth noting that users may need to crack copy protection for their own use; I recall playing Diablo on my laptop some years back, which had no internal optical drive. So I dropped in a no-cd crack, and was then entertained for several hours on a long plane flight. Forcing that kind of check, and hence users to work around it is a misfeature of the stupidest kind.
151
It is impossible to stop it without breaking your product. The proof:
Given: The people you are trying to prevent from hacking/stealing will inevitably be much more technically sophisticated than a large portion of your market.
Given: Your product will be used by some members of the public.
Given: Using your product requires access to it's data on some level.
Therefore, You have to released you encrypt-key/copy protection method/program data to the public in enough of a fashion that the data has been seen in it's useable/unencrypted form.
Therefore, you have in some fashion made your data accessible to pirates.
Therefore, your data will be more easily accessible to the hackers than your legitimate audience.
Therefore, ANYTHING past the most simplistic protection method will end up treating your legitimate audience like pirates and alienating them
Or in short, the way the end user sees it:
29
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
