new piracy fighting tactic?

[redact]

not sure if you guys have seen this article, but i found it while resaerching for a speach in english

A Clever Way to Fight Game Piracy
The New Scientist carries a story about a novel way to fight game piracy, simply by slowing down players using unauthorized copies.

Illegally copied games protected by the system work properly at first, but start to fall apart after the player has had just enough time to get hooked. As a result, the pirated discs actually encourage people to buy the genuine software, the developers say.
The new protection system, called Fade, is being introduced by Macrovision, a company in Santa Clara, California, that specialises in digital rights management, and the British games developer Codemasters, based in Leamington Spa.
Here is how it works.

Fade exploits the systems for error correction that computers use to cope with CD-ROMs or DVDs that have become scratched. Software protected by Fade contains fragments of "subversive" code designed to seem like scratches.
Here lies the beauty of the idea. The original purchased copy contains the "scratches." But illegal copies do not: they have been removed during the copy process. So the program can detect if the user is using a pirated version or not.

Instead of switching off the game and preventing it from playing at all, the master program begins to disable it. In the game Operation Flashpoint, which has been the proving ground for Fade, players soon find that their guns shoot off target and run out of bullets.
"The beauty of this is that the degrading copy becomes a sales promotion tool. People go out and buy an original version," claims Bruce Everiss of Codemasters.
The article also mentions an analogy made by Alistair Kelman, a lawyer specialized in copyright issues.

He points out that books tend to deteriorate with use and this prevents the secondhand market from competing with the market for new books. Why not the same for software?
And Macrovision doesn't want to stop here. It wants to introduce the concept in DVDs as soon as next year.

Source: http://radio.weblogs.com/0105910/2003/10/10.html

 

[coolbho3000]

3...2...1... someone finds away to dump "subversive" code. Anything that can be read by a drive can be dumped!

EDIT: WAIT the article is from 2003.

Well we can now see how successful that was.

 

[Shuny]

It stills exists, in "Armed Assault" without a proper No-dvd and after a few minutes, you turn into a bird (sic)

 

[jumpman17]

It's like those DVDs that some online rental sites experimented with where they sent you a copy of the movie (an actual copy, not a retail disc) and it was on a type of disc that would start to deteriorate after so many hours and you would just throw it away instead of returning it when done. But people could just throw it in the burner as soon as they got it, thus solving nothing.

 

[cracker]

Before that it was used on a couple of Codemasters' PSX games and then the PS2.

 

[redact]

whoops i didn't see the publish date

 

[HyoImowano]

Kind of sounds like the MoD.

 

[adgloride]

For this to work, most of the games being released will have to be good.

 

[Neko]

Can't burners copy damaged sectors already ?
I think I saw a option for this in a burning program already.

 

[cracker]

Can't burners copy damaged sectors already ?
I think I saw a option for this in a burning program already.

Yes but the problem lays in that the dvd drives automatically correct any errors they come across (or if there are too many then they will think they failed to read the disc).