trc@houca.UUCP (10/15/83)
Has anyone heard more about the new copy-protection scheme involving putting a permanent, unique, electronically readable "tag" on every disk? Believe it or not, I had the same idea, then read about it being done (In BYTE) two days later (disgust - there goes my chance at fame and fortune ;-) ). The Byte article didnt mention how it was to be done, but the way I thought it might be done is to use the "sector hole" reader, and encode the disk with a "delay coded" ID - any disk drive able to read that hole and get the information back to the CPU could use this technique. Of course, it would be limited to floppy disks, but one *could* allow (with very careful protection, of course) a few copies to be made from the master disk, and there is no difficulty with distributing the software or re-selling it. The only difficulty is that every disk has to have a slightly different version of the code. (And the differences have to include a lot of "noise" changes, to disguise the location of the crucial data.) The reason that this might work is that it would be difficult to "punch" a disk with the same pattern of holes, without damaging the disk in the process - a professional pirate could do it. Tom Craver houca!trc