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Copy Control ... Out of Control By MrLipid Out of Control If a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested and a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, I would have to identify myself as a liberal who has been mugged. Twice. The first mugging involved my failed efforts to get Ubisoft’s XIII to run. Its TAGES copy control would allow it to install and that was about it. It has never run on any system I have installed it on. Not even the very special system I built following my second mugging. The second mugging involved the near-collapse of my everyday system following the installation of Micro Application’s Xpand Rally. I had played the demo of Xpand Rally and been impressed. Techland, the title’s developer, had managed to create a near-photorealistic world to drive much too fast through. While I had some concerns about the StarForce drivers the demo installed, the drivers seemed to create no problems. Perhaps the wily Russians at StarForce had finally managed to civilize their copy control software. Nope. Once the full game was installed, including the obligatory CD in the drive, things went downhill faster than one of the cars Xpand Rally simulates. StarForce’s clever new drivers detected something they didn’t like on my system and proceeded to deeply involve themselves in the IDE channels linking my CD, DVD and hard drive to the motherboard. My system was now in MS-DOS Compatibility Mode. This is not a good thing. Typical causes include drivers or files that require MS-DOS compatibility mode, a corrupt master boot record, an issue with the registry or a computer virus. Or, apparently, StarForce. Uninstalling Xpand Rally did nothing but free up diskspace. Having earlier downloaded the StarForce driver removal tool, I assumed I was going to need to remove the StarForce drivers to return my system to normal. Oops. The removal tool was nowhere to be found. Seems it was removed when Xpand Rally was installed. Great. Finally managed to get out to the web and download another copy of the removal tool. It did its job, and my system returned, more or less, to normal. Party Line Silence The marketing team at Techland had been hounding me for several years to review Xpand Rally. When I let them know what their title’s copy control had done to my system, their only suggestion was that I install the title’s patch. The patch included newer versions of the StarForce drivers. When I asked for some guidance on what might be causing the problems—I wasn’t excited about reloading Xpand Rally and its patch only to have the system blow up again—the correspondence ended. They would not share with me what sorts of apps or hardware might be causing StarForce to come roaring to life. I had much the same futile exchange with the folks at StarForce. I was told that StarForce does not create problems for anyone. That a newer version of the StarForce drivers would solve whatever issues I might have. That they could not help me if I didn’t send them the 1.5 MB msinfo file for my system. And then, nothing. This has turned out to be the pattern on most tech support forums. A flurry of activity followed by silence. (In the case of the Adventure Company, the silence became total when the company gave up and shut down the board.) A particularly good example of the typical exchange can be found in the Codemasters forum. The position Codemasters is taking with regard to copy control was offered by one of the forum’s administrators: "The bigger picture is that in a play-off between piracy and irritating legitimate users we have to address piracy first, even if it disillusions legitimate customers. We don't want to annoy our customers, but the greater threat to our revenue is from pirates—unless someone can prove otherwise (if there's been any research into this aspect of piracy/protection). Rock and a hard place ..." Fewer Buyers, Fewer Sales? Just how hard is this place? Let’s take a look at PC game sales over the past five years. From 2000 to 2004, according to the folks at the Entertainment Software Association (working from numbers gathered by the NPD Group), unit sales of PC games in the United States have dropped from 84.9 to 45 million. This means that the U.S. PC game market is now about the same size as the portable video game market. Given the recent release of the Playstation Portable, it seems reasonable to bet that the 2005 numbers will reveal the PC as the least popular electronic gaming platform. Is it a fair assumption that piracy is what is causing the PC game market to wither? And, if it is a fair assumption, will it be possible for game publishers to reverse this trend through more robust copy control? While I have my doubts about the role of piracy and the value of copy control, I would like to suggest one way publishers might be able to win back some of their disillusioned legitimate customers. A Modest Proposal ... Any PC game featuring copy control technology, such as StarForce or TAGES, should clearly identify that technology on the package, in the manual, on the CD(s) or DVD(s) and in the EULA. If there is a driver removal tool that must be used to uninstall copy control drivers, the tool should be installed by the game during its installation and linked to with a desktop shortcut. Before the game runs once, if the copy control finds something it will respond badly to, it should put up the following message:
If the copy control finds nothing objectionable, the game will simply run with no warning message. If the gamer refuses to disable, uninstall or physically disconnect anything the copy control objects to, the game will simply not run. Every effort should be made to guarantee that no legitimate user winds up with a nearly unusable system simply because the user attempted to load and play a copy controlled game. But, But, But ... Would plastering copy control logos all over a game’s box, manual and media affect sales? Perhaps. Then again, it would put an end to the sort of infuriating nonsense that occurs now when a game only seems to install and then either doesn’t run at all or cripples a system to the point of near inoperability. If letting folks know what sorts of things the copy control objects to would provide too much information to pirates, that doesn’t say much for the quality of the copy control, does it? My proposal is designed to reduce the need for the sort of individual user-by-user solution that companies appear to want to offer. What is the point of supporting rooms full of techs whose job it is to pore over msinfo files to tease out the offending app or bit of hardware when the copy control itself could do that at the user level? Especially when the choice of complying with the copy control could then reside in the hands of the user. Remember the user? The one who actually paid for the software? Somewhat Happy Ending Though I have never gotten my copy of XIII to run on any system, I did finally get to play Xpand Rally. All it took was building a system with no CD burner, no CD burning software, no virtual drives and no virus protection. Once any possibility of copying anything, other than to the hard drive, was removed, as well as any possibility of a driver catching the attention of the virus protection, Xpand Rally ran just fine. Did I go too far? I have no idea because no one I asked was willing to provide any guidance other than "download the patch and upgrade the drivers." The irony here is that the PC I built to run Xpand Rally is, in effect, a console. All of the usual arguments about how superior PCs are to consoles because PCs can do so much more pretty much evaporate once the PC is reduced to little more than a device for streaming content from a CD or DVD. My Choice I understand the intensity of the terror that is driving publishers
to put pirates first and customers second. That’s their choice.
All I am asking for as a legitimate customer is the information I need
to make a choice about complying with what the copy control requires.
Right now I don’t have it. Until I do, I am not going to purchase
or ask for as a gift any title that uses copy control technology. When
I choose to play a game, I want to play the game ... not system-stability
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