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greenmedic88 on 11 September 2008
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twesterm said:
dib8rman said:
It's a snowball effect, in 1994 was sharing copies of games such a huge deal that something DRM like would be needed?

I'm not exactly at any standing point on DRM, I haven't done nearly enough checking into its concept. But from what I understand it's some form of ID tag that creates restrictions on products purchased at full price.

The issue would be at what price would the product be renting or bought. There is a major difference, fortunately Block Buster forced the US government to acknowledge this with their late fee clause.

So at what point does the person own the product? Does the person own the DRM inside the product? If that's the case is it legal for the person should a means arrive to remove the DRM that they own?

If they don't own the DRM then are they stealing that portion of the product? Is it free? Did the person ask for it?

Sounds like DRM is literally being forced down the consumers throats when the real piracy is in bootlegging and not just sharing disks.

The big legal issue these days and I'm certain it's bound to show up in court soon enough lay in micro-transactions for either virtual products that were already in the original medium purchased or using real currency for virtual products.

Wow, how my little thread has grown (now of I only had the time read the 70 or so replies I've missed)!

Anyways, copy protection was a huge problem in 1994, so much so that they had something even worse than the dreade DRM.

Every time you started your game they made you look up a specific page, paragraph, and character in the manuel or ask you some very specific question about something in the manual.

That was far worse than any DRM since this was in the days before the internet and you couldn't just look it up.  If you lost your manual you were screwed.

 

Memories. lol

Some games used to come with cardboard decoder wheels with arcane symbols printed on them. Rotate the wheel to the appropriate code to see the correct symbol combination. Much like the manual copy protection, without that wheel, you couldn't load up the game. Hilarious stuff.

Back then, since all games were distributed on readily copied 3.5" floppies, there really wasn't any other way to keep one person from distributing/trading games with however many people they chose to, which is exactly what many people did. 

Of course back then, PC games were practically a cottage industry whereas now there are often tens of millions tied up in the release of a single game.