Sunday, November 13, 2005

New Sony lockware prevents selling or loaning of games

Stupid anti piracy

Found this tidbit of info @ Boing Boing, an "news" site that posts interesting shit from around the world.

Anyhoo, the thing that pisses me off about these anti-piracy measures is that they only really hur the legit customer. Ain't that silly?

Pirates will crack these codes/serials/physical protection/etc no matter what Sony/Microsoft/the bloody RIAA does. All this shit does is make it more difficult for the buying consumer to use their products. For instance, certain DVD protection makes it difficult for consumer DVD players to read the discs. The legit consumers buy something they can't use, and pirates just crack it anyway; the average Joe can find said cracks on the internet very easily.

Honestly, I haven't heard of one game or app not being crackable; the closest was Half Life 2, but it just took a couple days. Serial # verification for online play is fine; that's not going to stop a legit customer from playing the game unless they are stupid enough to give that number away.

So who's losing, really, by adding inane anti-piracy measures such as this? Oh yes, the company who did implemented them in the first place by pissing off their consumers. IDIOTS.

/end rant

2 Comments:

At 9:53 a.m., Blogger James said...

I totally agree. I've bought a few CDs now that have been a pain in the ass to use because of copy protection measures. I generally don't listen to the CDs themselves (unless I'm in the car), I just rip them to my hard drive and listen from there. But now some of these things have copy protection where they rip to some protected format that most players can't read properly (except for Windows Media Player, surprise surprise).

I sent a nasty e-mail to the company through their comments page, but surprisingly got no answer.

I don't have a problem with people trying to protect copywrited material, that's their perogative.

But it's like a city trying to stop arsonists by eliminating matches from the store instead of trying to catch the criminal.

 
At 1:01 p.m., Blogger Medieval said...

I don't have a problem with copyright protection either (even though it's highly ineffective); but when it damages compatability and usability from a consumer point of view, I think it should even be made illegal.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home