Copy protection rant

[HangFire]

Ok, so today I was curious so I started to read about a type of CD copy protection, called StarForce. I had heard it has a lot of problems, but after doing some digging apparently its a lot worse than I thought at first.


Basically, Starforce is a set of drivers that installs itself silently onto your PC with a game, without your knowledge or confirmation. There is no mention of this in EULAs.

When I found out, I immediately checked to see if I had it on my PC. I went to Windows device manager, checked on "show hidden devices", and there was 4 different StarForce drivers on my PC. My immediate reaction of was to get rid of them, but I figured I'd look into it more.


After checking, apparently they're a real bitch to remove. Uninstalling the game will not remove them, as I do not have any StarForce games installed right now. Also, as I've read, for some people manually getting rid of the drivers their PC to the point that it needed a full re-install of everything to work again.



Its been reported that it also gobbles up CPU cycles, slows CD drive read times, creates CD-R read errors, and is responsible for many device conflicts that people have had. For some it screwed their CD-rom up to the point where it wouldn't work period.

Also, StarForce isn't the only one to do crap like this, theres a number of other copy protection things that load crap on, but none are as malicious as StarForce.


From now on one of my requirement of wether or not I pay for a game will be what sort of copy protection it has.



I found this; http://www.larian.com/riftrunner/support/SFclean.zip . Its supposed to safely remove Starforce if its causing problems with people's hardware, or if they just don't want that crap sitting on their drive.


Maybe I'm just over-reacting, but oh well.

Edit: Removed some profanity and fixed grammer.

Also, I tested it on my PC. It asked for a reboot, I did it, and it gave me no problems and removed Starforce.

One note is that removing it will make any Starforce games not run unless you have installed a no-cd crack for it. No, I do not support piracy, and circumventing CD checks is not illegal.

StarForce probably doesn't reduce your PC to a smouldering pile of ash like I make it sound to, for the mostpart its probably harmless and only a minority experience problems, but I'm just one of those people who prefers a PC thats as 'clean' as possible.

[TruB]

good info.. maybe you should becoming some kind of net reporter.. as many here has potential for..

[Exilibur]

So what's the solution?

Companies will keep coming up with solutions like that to stop piracy, and honestly it does sound like a wonderful idea, since only the most patient and experienced computeruser would try to remove it...

I feel kinda the same way when cd's i buy only play on my computer if i install some screwed up player... I mean come on! I have winamp already... If it the cd really is such a pain, then I'll just download mp3's as well...

I have no idea how the music business can believe they are doing themselve a favour here.

I really want to believe that the industry is shooting itself in the foot, but I'm afraid they're not, since most computer users probably wont have the patience or the skills to circumvent such malicious software as starforce or whatever else there is out there...

[Whistler]

it's "copy restriction" rather than "copy protection" as I don't think it has "protected" anything... actually it's just annoying for legal users, and people can still crack it and copy it (if you aren't skilled, you can still find cracks at various warez sites )

also saying "software industry" encourages people to imagine that software is always developed by a sort of factory and then delivered to consumers. The free software community shows this is not the case. Software businesses exist, but those that develop free software are not like factories. The term "industry" is being used as propaganda by advocates of software patents. They call software development "industry" and then try to argue that this means it should be subject to patent monopolies. The European Parliament, rejecting software patents in 2003, voted to define "industry" as "automated production of material goods".

"and circumventing CD checks is not illegal."
actually it IS illegal in some countries with laws like USA's "Digital Millennium Copyright Act".