I've been Starforced!

Exactly wrong, my friend, would game publishers bother with invasive copy protectection if piracy was non-existent?

Altogether now: DUH! :roll:

Nope, but who says copy protection has to be invasive to work? I don’t mind CP, so long as it doesn’t screw over my system.

Agreed, and I don’t think it’s right for CP to cause honest users the kind of expense or headaches reported here. But the benign versions of CP are not getting the job done so publishers must be employing more extreme methods. I’m all for CP that works, in stopping piracy 100% and not disrupting honest users at all.

But, again, all of this is driven by stupid, greedy software pirates who expect you and me to pay for our games and drive the market while they get theirs free.

Seems to me that people having problems with copy protection is driven by the incompetence of that industry.

Exactly wrong, my friend, would game publishers bother with invasive copy protectection if piracy was non-existent?

Altogether now: DUH! :roll:[/quote]

You are giving publishers credit for intelligence they clearly don’t have, DUH! If the game is BIG enough, it will be cracked. And fast. Doom3 will still sell a million copies or more. It’s the smaller titles that really get hurt by something like Starforce. There’s several games I was going to buy, but since they use Starforce, I won’t bother. That’s lost revenue.

All this piracy talk just makes me wish people had some tiny bit of honor and decency in them to play by the rules instead of always trying to subvert them.

sigh

–Dave

That’s just not the American (or Captialist) way.

That’s just not the American (or Captialist) way.

Tssk, Tssk. Perhaps not the Human Way. The great thing about Capitalism is that it uses the “self interest” mechanism to benefit not just the individual but the system of individuals. Invisible Hand is not a rock band. Gosplan doesn’t deliver goods and services in an effiecent OR equitable manner. There was a big lab experiment done in the last century that proved it. It only cost 20 plus million lives but it was thourough.

Oh, please. The current set of copyright laws are not divine writ.

Almost by definition this is an impossibility. For you to play that game, that DVD, that CD, the data has to be decrypted into an accessible format at some point, and after that point you can make a copy of that content.

So, working with that logic, the only way you improve protection is to make the protection more invasive. The only way to make something 100% uncopyable is to make that game, album or movie 100% unplayable.

That’s the whole point of Starforce. The only way the developers of this software feel they can control what you copy is to intrude upon the very ability of your operating system to read and write to storage. Thats why they go as far as putting a low-level device driver to monitor and intrude upon harddrive access, cd-rom and dvd player access, usb storage and the like. This takes up processing time and introduces yet another failpoint into the system.

Of course, this means the negative effects will be unpredictable in their intensity on any one user. Go and read through hardware forums for those who own motherboards using VIA chipsets to control IDE access, then read about arguments over the VIA 4-in-1 drivers, and you’ll see that code that involves such low-level storage control may work for most, but can cause severe trouble for some, to the point that many suggest you’re better off staying away, so as to not chance being part of the unlucky 10% who come away with their system performing worse.

Now people like Dave Long like to moan about how any talk about Starforce being anything other than good is just the talk of unhonorable software pirates. Fuck that noise. I have no moral qualms about using a no-cd crack on the games I spend $50 to buy simply so I don’t have to bother with constantly changing discs, and the implication that because I support the ability to use games I purchased as I see fit in a perfectly legal manner under basic, non-DMCA, copyright laws, I’m somehow an unhonorable pirate, well he can go fuck himself.

Reading through his near-joy at the idea that more intrusive copy protection is on it’s way and hisses at anyone who dares talk about such protection in a negative way makes me believe that Dave is one of those people who actually enjoys letting companies dictate how he can use their products. Which ties in to how strongly he defends Nintendo, a corporation that seems quite happy to tell their customers what they want (“You don’t want online play. You want GBA-GC linking instead.”).

I on the other hand have no problem giving a company that respects me as a customer my money, and I do quite often. However, if a company is going to disrepect me as a customer, as content publishers who push Starforce do, I’m going to say fuck you to them and move on to those publishers that do. There’s no reason a publisher should feel it’s perfectly fine to risk my computer’s data or usb device hardware for their profits.

I never said that was a BAD thing. :D

And I spelled capitalist wrong. Damn you, communist spelling!

Reading through his near-joy at the idea that more intrusive copy protection is on it’s way and hisses at anyone who dares talk about such protection in a negative way makes me believe that Dave is one of those people who actually enjoys letting companies dictate how he can use their products.

I think Dave’s joy was about the fact that whatever system is invented to protect intellectual property and digital media rights, the key is that people who play by the rules i.e. pay for the product should be rewarded and those who do not play by the rules should not have the product. Derek is coming at this from a pure consumers perspective. It also happens to be very similar to my own before I quite my monkey job and went into business for myself. My oh my how that can change one’s viewpoint. Of course I wish my products were selling so well that piracy was an issue but that’s beside the point.

At the risk of falling off my soapbox. The two fundemantal things that ensure our stable and affluent society are:

  1. Free and open markets
  2. The rule of law to protect the “free and open” part.

Piracy is a scourge even in small practice. Also a system that forces honest users to adapt piratical methods needs to be fixed, although the method for getting that done is hard and subject to debate.

I never said that was a BAD thing.

Once again I made an ASS Out of U and ME. Well, mostly me actually.

np, I can see how it would read like I’m raggin’ on the old US of A…

Bingo. Thank you.

–Dave

People who play by the rules are getting bit by this product. Explain to me how Starforce “rewards” those who play by the rules? The rule is that if you want to play a Starforce enabled game, you must have a device driver uncertified by Microsoft that runs low-level interference on your system.

You’re not going to get a cheaper game because Starforce is enabled, so that’s not a reward. You have an chance that USB devices can be affected negatively, so that’s not a reward. You have a chance of corrupting other storage access drivers if you attempt to uninstall Starfoce from your system , so that’s not a reward. Your game won’t launch if there’s any software that Starforce even remotely thinks would allow you to play a legally purchased game without having the cd-rom in the drive, so that’s not a reward. Your cd/dvd reader access times are likely to go up, so that’s not a reward. Extra processing time will be taken from your CPU to handle all this, so that’s not a reward.

Explain to me how expressing near joy at the idea that systems like Starforce being the “way of the future” translates into “customers who simply accept Starforce as a good thing” being rewarded? Sounds like even in the absolute best case scenario, their “reward” is getting a game they payed for with hard-earned money, with the chance of moderate to serious negative effects on their system.

Sounds more like someone only concerned about the company, and could care less if a few paying customers get screwed in the deal.

You know Race Driver 2 debuted at $29.99. So you actually DO get a cheaper game in this case. Maybe not because of Starforce, but I can’t answer that.

I do get joy at the idea that the people who make the games I love might stand a chance of making more money at doing so if copy protection that works for everyone can be implemented. Because more money means they will net me more games from that company. I like that.

I also like PC games. And if publishers fully believe that PC games can’t be profitable because of piracy, that’s going to mean less PC games. That pisses me off and it should piss you off too if you enjoy games on the PC. Because if there’s no piracy or it can be prevented, then we can finally find out what kind of effect it truly had on sales.

–Dave

Oh, give me a break. Publishers have no evidence that copy protection reduces piracy.

With all due respect, no one without an agenda can claim that the 29.99 price is influenced by its Starforce protection and not with the fact that the market simply wouldn’t have paid more for the game in any reasonable numbers.

Again, you’re showing joy over Starforce and whining about people who don’t like, even if they legally purchase the game. We know Starforce isn’t perfect, that it results in a significant number of people having problems, and your only real response is “I don’t care. I welcome my invasive customer-rights removing masters.”

I love PC gaming, and honestly, things like Starforce are significantly contributing to the death of PC gaming. You say that piracy is killing games, but what about all the people who are turning away from PCs towards consoles because they’re tired of games that don’t work on their machines?

If you knew a particular bit of spyware code, like Gator, was causing huge amounts of system instability in large numbers of people’s computers that they don’t understand, to the point where people are giving up the platform as a gaming device and moving on to consoles, wouldn’t you be a bit mad at the developers behind Gator?

So why aren’t you mad at the people behind Starforce for heading in that same direction? Why are you joyous at the prospect of software that so interfered with the customer’s ability to use the game in a way they want that it could turn more people away from the plaftorm?

Again, logically, the only way to make something 100% technologically uncopyable is to make it 100% technologically unplayable. And making thigs unplayable for a growing number of people isn’t the way to keep the PC gaming arena from shrinking.

Copy protection that cares more about protecting content than preventing corruption and performance degredation of the system it works on is flat out bad, and being joyful about it only serves to reinforce the idea that we as “consumers” should bend ourselves to serve corporations and not the other way around.

You’re not going to get a cheaper game because Starforce is enabled

Actually the whole point is that you will. I’ve got enough formal education in economics to be dangerous I’ll admit but the basic idea is that piracy distorts the demand curve for a product. How much is debateable. But saying that the guy who pirates wouldn’t have bought it anyway is simply not true. If a guy pirate’s it then he’s expressing potential demand. He either paid somebody else less at an illegal vendor or got it for the cost of an ISP subscription i.e. “Free.” But if neither of those options were available who is to say that he wouldn’t have paid something to the IP holder. At anyrate his demand is factored into what the company sees on its bottom line. It depends on the shape of the supply curve and other factors but increased demand can actually mean a reduction in the unit price of the product or commodity. Another way to think of it is that the people who pay for the product are subsidizing those who do not…this type of interaction is common in what are called equilibrium systems.

Copy protection that cares more about protecting content than preventing corruption and performance degredation of the system it works on is flat out bad, and being joyful about it only serves to reinforce the idea that we as “consumers” should bend ourselves to serve corporations and not the other way around.

Your’e absolutely correct. Customers should be upser if copy protection has other effects than protection the IP. Often it does. How many times have we seen a company offer a work around because it’s copy protection scheme is screwed up. Many. Customers need to provide feedback i.e emails, don’t buy the product, etc. that will send a message to the market, but be upseat that the company messed up the copy protection scheme and not that it’s trying to protect it’s IP. This is a huge issue and greater minds than ours are spending millions trying to figure this out. It is bound to be messy. But I would bet money that it is worked out along with a code of law “Digital Rights Management” that is pretty good as well. This is what our society is going to transform into. Knowledge workers and knowlege owners.

One last thought. If you owned 100,000 shares of Electronic Arts, would you want warez dudes to be “Sticking it to the Man?” What if you are “The Man?” The new buzzword in the thinktanks nowadays is “Ownership Society.” Stakeholders etc. Did you realize that something like 58% of the US population owns equities? That’s a huge change from just 30 years ago.