They will never learn.. There's so much market space for "copy protecting" companies to invent new mechanisms of "stopping piracy". It's not that they wouldn't know what they're doing, it's just that there's money to make and sadly, enough fools to make believe.

Lost revenues are what frighten the major record label companies as the do the software companies. Too much weight is put upon the impression of how-much-revenues are lost due to piracy, though it is undeniable that piracy in its many forms does also gather people to share knowledge about something they most likely would not ever laid their hands on without. Yes, it has its bad sides, which, I will leave be unsaid at this point.

On the other hand, it has been so sweet to see the protections fail.. every single time. From the good old days of the C64's Duplicator, Amiga's Xcopy, hacking PC software with hex-editors etc.etc. to seeing Dreamcast's "thicker density" CDs being converted to a normal 80min CDR format, to whatever new MPEGx-type rippers emerge, it's been a blast.

Funnily enough, the now very much old school scene people are sitting at the very most respected of many Internationally reckoned technology companies and, how should one say it, "new skillz" emerge.

For every 8 hours spent on creating new ways of protecting software, I'd say there's probably at least 800 hours spent on reverse-engineering or hacking that very same new method. Maybe there's good to it...what would these guys do if they wouldn't work on releasing pirated software/music? I'd say they'd be putting even more effort into creating the most deadliest things to screw around on the Internet.


Amarth