brett@smosjc.UUCP (Brett Coon) (07/06/90)
Many of these posts about copy protection seem to incorrectly assume that any copy protection which can be defeated is worthless. The fact is, all forms of copy protection can be defeated, due to the fundamental requirement that the program which performs this protection has to be machine readable. Thus, a sufficiently motivated pirate can read and/or modify this code. For copy protection to be successful, it merely has to provide enough of an impediment to reduce the level of copying to an "acceptable" level, which, of course, is entirely subjective. In this sense, the ID PROM idea is no better or worse than word-in-the-manual or disk based protection, since all of these methods can be defeated by attacking the actual protection code. In addition, you can defeat ID PROMs by duplicating the PROMs, manual protec- tion by duplicating the manuals, and disk protection by duplicating the disks. The difficulty in these forms of copying depends on the implementation. The fundamental advantage of ID PROMs is in convenience to the user. Ideally, this form of protection would be entirely transparent to the average user; no words to look up, no disks grinding. The problem is that Amigas don't currently have such ID PROMs. This brings me to the point of this post. Suppose a company or, better yet, a non-profit organization, were to manufacture and sell ID PROM protection devices which could be added to the Amiga as an accessory. For example, they could plug into the parallel port. The protocols to access these devices and uniquely identify them could be made available to software developers. Soft- ware would be sold with whatever protection the seller feels is appropriate, but would have the option of making a one-time copy whose only protection was the ID PROM. People without the devices would just have to live with the original protection. But people with the PROMs would have the option of using it as the only form of protection. This method would not make software harder to pirate than it currently is. It would still be sold with a "classic" form of protection, and thus open to the same means of duplication. The ID PROMs could also be duplicated, but assuming they were cleverly designed, this would require a reasonable hardware invest- ment which would discourage this method. The primary advantage in my mind is that users would now have the option of using an unobtrusive, "nice" means of copy protection. No more key disks, no more useless manuals, etc. Since all software companies could support the same ID PROM setup, you wouldn't have a long line of dongles hanging off your computer: just one. If you wanted to take the program to a friend's computer, you could just take the device with you, or you could (maybe) still use the original copy-protected disk. Personally, I would be willing to spend $100 or so if it meant the end of disk grinding, paging through manuals, messing with those annoying code wheels, and not being able to install programs on the hard disk. -brett -- |Brett Coon | uunet!smosjc!brett | |S-MOS Systems, Inc. | "You like 'em, anchovies?" | |San Jose, CA | -Runaway Train |