http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994248
A new form of copy protection, called "Fade", protects games from being copied, not by making the copying impossible, but by making it unattractive. Games using this technology can be copied freely, and will work well at first, but eventually the copy protection degrades the game experience so badly that getting a legitimate version is the only solution.
Defeating the technical ability to make flawless digital copies seems like a perverse technological triumph, but it does have this upside: ordinarly I can know if I am going to play a game intensively within several hours of first playing it -- so if I did like it, I would not object to buying it.
The major caveat is that the Fade technology should be clearly distinguishable from an actual machine malfunction, so I can correctly diagnose what is going on. I also wonder, based on the technology used, if this protection could not be defeated by cloning the original, instead of copying it.
Posted by jho at October 15, 2003 11:11 AM