cairo140
2+2=5
The question is simple. Considering current trends and past history, how will Media (herein used to denote the corporate distribution of music, movies, DVDs, games, etc.) adapt to the phenomenon of Piracy?
Although piracy has been around since the beginning of time, it became overwhelmingly powerful around the year 2000, when broadband internet access was widespread among developed countries. This, along with first-generation popular P2P file-sharing applications, caused the widespread distribution of pirated media.
Furthermore, applications distributed on CDs had very little means to prevent burning. Many forms of media at the time had no means of encryption or authentication, opening the door to sharing through private copying. Worse yet, the number of individual or groups illegally copying media and distributing it to the public at a cost were growing exponentially.
Those trends caused the media distribution companies to look into piracy-prevention services. The most popular copy-prevention program is Safedisc, developed by Macrovision. Safedisc used authentication of a hidden encrypted digital signature to initialize an application, and added "weak sectors" to a disk to make it much harder for conventional burning programs to burn a copy-protected disk.
Pirating developed to cope using CD/DVD-images (which when mounted to virtual CD/DVD programs like Daemon Tools, bypass most Safedisc features). These, in conjunction with applications and replacement executables capable of bypassing the remaining Safedisc encryption checks on mounted CD/DVD images, allowed nearly all existing media to be very easily copied and distributed over broadband internet.
Another means that the industry has employed to fight against piracy is using license keys. The activation keys that are verified offline will be, are, and have always been vulnerable due to distribution of license key generators. License keys verified over an internet network have been slightly more effective, but still vulnerable due to replacement executable files.
Perhaps the most effective piracy prevention tool to date involves a constant internet link. This was made popular first by a system called Battle.net used by the Blizzard company. Each installation would install a unique encrypted license key file on the hard disk. Whenever a user attempted to connect to the multiplayer network online, the key would be verified. If ever two such keys simultaneously tried to access the online server, the particular key would be banned from the server, thus disabling a user's access to a large portion of the game.
This has been taken further by Massively Multiplayer Online games (especially Role Playing Games), which require a user to constantly pay a monthly price (with the exception of some games like Guild Wars) in order to access the service. There do exist several viable ways to bypass this very effective anti-piracy measure involving fixed executables, registry edits, and proxy servers. However, these bypass methods are neither safe nor easy to use, so piracy in these circles is very sparse.
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In any case, piracy is still a very prevalent phenomenon in today's world of media. Although I addressed primarily games, many of the identical copy-protection methods have been used on movies and music CDs to varying degrees of effectiveness.
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Recently, it seems as if, in spite of advancements in anti-piracy technology, a few developments seem to lean popular media towards the opposite direction.
Firstly, open-source programming and licensing, which has existed for quite some time (since way back in the old days of Red Hat Linux), is popular on many internet-based and a few offline-based applications and games. Many new media releases have makers who declare their willing forfeiture of rights and privleges their work, thus making the particlar item public domain. Michael Moore did this unofficially with the DVD-release of "Fahrenheit 9/11," despite constant pressure from film-based anti-piracy organizations. Recently, Stardock, the maker of Galactic Civilizations II was linked to implicitly encouraging and providing opportunities for "illegal" distribution of their software. Historically, the company, like many other smaller ones, has focused less on investing in copy protection, and allowed the nature of piracy to take its course.
----
So now we are back at the original question. What is the future of piracy in media? Will it get bigger? Smaller? Professionally-managed? Or will software companies eventually prevail and manage to eradicate piracy? I'd like to know your opinions.
Although piracy has been around since the beginning of time, it became overwhelmingly powerful around the year 2000, when broadband internet access was widespread among developed countries. This, along with first-generation popular P2P file-sharing applications, caused the widespread distribution of pirated media.
Furthermore, applications distributed on CDs had very little means to prevent burning. Many forms of media at the time had no means of encryption or authentication, opening the door to sharing through private copying. Worse yet, the number of individual or groups illegally copying media and distributing it to the public at a cost were growing exponentially.
Those trends caused the media distribution companies to look into piracy-prevention services. The most popular copy-prevention program is Safedisc, developed by Macrovision. Safedisc used authentication of a hidden encrypted digital signature to initialize an application, and added "weak sectors" to a disk to make it much harder for conventional burning programs to burn a copy-protected disk.
Pirating developed to cope using CD/DVD-images (which when mounted to virtual CD/DVD programs like Daemon Tools, bypass most Safedisc features). These, in conjunction with applications and replacement executables capable of bypassing the remaining Safedisc encryption checks on mounted CD/DVD images, allowed nearly all existing media to be very easily copied and distributed over broadband internet.
Another means that the industry has employed to fight against piracy is using license keys. The activation keys that are verified offline will be, are, and have always been vulnerable due to distribution of license key generators. License keys verified over an internet network have been slightly more effective, but still vulnerable due to replacement executable files.
Perhaps the most effective piracy prevention tool to date involves a constant internet link. This was made popular first by a system called Battle.net used by the Blizzard company. Each installation would install a unique encrypted license key file on the hard disk. Whenever a user attempted to connect to the multiplayer network online, the key would be verified. If ever two such keys simultaneously tried to access the online server, the particular key would be banned from the server, thus disabling a user's access to a large portion of the game.
This has been taken further by Massively Multiplayer Online games (especially Role Playing Games), which require a user to constantly pay a monthly price (with the exception of some games like Guild Wars) in order to access the service. There do exist several viable ways to bypass this very effective anti-piracy measure involving fixed executables, registry edits, and proxy servers. However, these bypass methods are neither safe nor easy to use, so piracy in these circles is very sparse.
----
In any case, piracy is still a very prevalent phenomenon in today's world of media. Although I addressed primarily games, many of the identical copy-protection methods have been used on movies and music CDs to varying degrees of effectiveness.
----
Recently, it seems as if, in spite of advancements in anti-piracy technology, a few developments seem to lean popular media towards the opposite direction.
Firstly, open-source programming and licensing, which has existed for quite some time (since way back in the old days of Red Hat Linux), is popular on many internet-based and a few offline-based applications and games. Many new media releases have makers who declare their willing forfeiture of rights and privleges their work, thus making the particlar item public domain. Michael Moore did this unofficially with the DVD-release of "Fahrenheit 9/11," despite constant pressure from film-based anti-piracy organizations. Recently, Stardock, the maker of Galactic Civilizations II was linked to implicitly encouraging and providing opportunities for "illegal" distribution of their software. Historically, the company, like many other smaller ones, has focused less on investing in copy protection, and allowed the nature of piracy to take its course.
----
So now we are back at the original question. What is the future of piracy in media? Will it get bigger? Smaller? Professionally-managed? Or will software companies eventually prevail and manage to eradicate piracy? I'd like to know your opinions.
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