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PC Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Macrovision Adopts Fade Anti-Game Piracy Technology 94

Posted by simoniker from the my-CD-has-disappeared dept.
Thanks to the New Scientist for their report that Macrovision are adding Fade anti-copy protection, which "makes unauthorized copies of games slowly degrade", to their SafeDisc copy protection scheme for games. The technology, devised by UK publishers Codemasters, first debuted in Operation Flashpoint for PC back in 2001, and "affects gameplay aspects" in that title if it believes the game has been altered, including "reduced accuracy of some weapons, reduced weapon performance, increased enemy hit endurance and increased player injuries." The piece also claims that Fade works by "...exploiting the systems for error correction that computers use to cope with CD-ROMs or DVDs that have become scratched."
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Macrovision Adopts Fade Anti-Game Piracy Technology More

Macrovision Adopts Fade Anti-Game Piracy Technology

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  • What's going to stop someone then cracking the main executable to bypass the degradation?

    After all, cracks are the mainstay of copied games anyway.

    (Never mind the mainstay of legit games when you don't want to have to fish out the play-disk each time...)

    • Re:Pointless attempts? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:20PM (#7177042) Homepage Journal
      "What's going to stop someone then cracking the main executable to bypass the degradation?"

      Time. By the time they get all of it cracked, the game will have been on shelves a while.

      Spyro the Dragon had protection sort of like this in the late 90's. If it detected one of the protection schemes was broken, it'd make something in the later level disappear. The cracker had to play through the entire game to check that the crack worked. They kept a fully cracked copy off the streets for roughly a month, after that, it wasn't so important that it be protected anymore.

      • I saw Homeworld2's copy protection cracked the day before the official release date... there seems to be a pretty good network of people working on cracking the latest games.

        I doubt this kind of protection will last much longer.
        • FADE does nothing of any use. Pro Race Drive/Toca Race Driver was released with this. The first two cracks weren't complete, but within a few days there was a 100% crack that works just fine. The patch came out shortly, and there were no issues with cracking that at all.

          The system can be entirely subverted by using the likes of Alcohol 120%.

          Marcovision are the biggest peddlers of silicon snake oil around. They're products DO NOT STOP COPYING. MOST DVD players can easily bypass it, you can bypass their VHS
          • Codemasters are wankers. ANY company that rattles it's sabre and threatens sites with legal action for hosting copies of their 8-bit titles from the 80's needs to be bankrupted NOW. (Of course, preventing people from playing the godawful Dizzy series is actual a public service I think.)

            And the amusing thing?
            I seem to remember that it was CodeMasters who came up with one of the early ways of getting around the old NES game-chip problem.

          • There are companies, like nintendo, square, enix, and a lot of others, that still sell their 80s games, on new plataforms. So defending their IP is just defending their business (you know, not because you wasted your youth playing those games, mean you have the right of getting them for free).

            Don't get me wrong. I'm completely pro-emulation, but if a company still sells a game, in your country, and on your language, you should get the original copy.
            • Yes, but Codemasters do not. (Nor do Ultimate, better known now as Rare.)

              If I bought, say, Alien-8 back in the 80's, I should still have the right to play the game now under emulation. There WERE no licence agreements back then. It was yours forever, and I have every right to play it now if I feel so inclined. No copyright law stipulates that I can't.

              AS for Square etc... Fair play to them. Square have released their stuff on other consoles. I have no problem with them being pissed at emulation, but come o
      • OK. Great protection as the evidence shows...

        16/06/01: Deviance release cracked Operation Flashpoint (I couldn't find the nfo)

        21/06/01: Free Trade FXP realease a CloneCD image. They report no FADE errors after playing for 5 days (30 hours). http://www.nforce.nl/index.php?do=nfo&id=1699

        Another great CD protection that only hurts honest users.
        • What pisses me off, is I use no-cd cracks on games I buy. Then I dont have to change CD's, the games run faster, all the game is already installed, no reason to have the CD in except to make the game company happy.

          So now, theres a chance, if I use a no-cd crack, the game will play funny? What about if I want to use a virtual CDROM instead for speed? Copy protection like this is just an annoyance. Problem thou, only online games have CD keys that work well for copy protection, single player games have the
          • Only if the crackers fuck the crack up. They learnt their lesson with Pro Race Driver, so even if it does happen, you'll only have to wait a couple more days I would think.

            I use no-cd's on every game I have. I have about 15-20 games installed, not ONE needs the CD in the drive. It can't be good for the drive constantly spinning up, winding down, spinning up etc... So fuck it, I crack the lot so I don't need to juggle a pile of CD's. With a two year old son, I can't leave jewel cases laying around. If all o
            • Actually, there is one good reason. (Yes, replying to my own post.) To please the brain dead shareholders who wouldn't know an FPS from a first post.

              "We're licensing (insert lame ass copy protection here) to protect your investment in our software".

              Said shareholders smile knowingly then say to themselves "What's software?" and keep smiling because they laughingly believe these costs make the software safe... LOL!
        • It stops casual copying. That's certainly not what's killing the industry, but it does sell a few extra copies when people are either afraid or ignorant of the fact that you can get cracks online. If these schemes weren't on the discs, then when one of my friends bought a game, about 10 copies would be made and distributed so we could play online together. Cracks at least deter this to some extent.
      • Don't forget that these are all based on Copy-Protection schemes that are licensed from other software houses. Once you can break 'Fade' or 'Secu-Rom' as a technology, the art of completely patching a new executable is essentially running a script. This won't prevent piracy in the least, but will hurt legitimate users in the long run.

  • So what happens... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DJayC ( 595440 ) * on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:18PM (#7177006)
    Great... but what happens when my legit CD gets scratched and the pattern mentioned in the article is altered, or no longer recognizable? This seems like a really great attempt, but I think this is going to start causing problems with people who own the legit CD. Also, I would assume the check happens at startup, so I think something similar to a no-CD patch may still be a workaround, so maybe they are playing this up a little too much. I'm interested to see how this holds up.

    • Re:So what happens... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Sancho ( 17056 )
      While this isn't directly addressed in the article, their attitude towards it is certainly shown:

      The idea intrigues Alistair Kelman, an independent lawyer who specialises in copyright: "Fade is entirely in keeping with the spirit and great traditions of copyright." 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?

      Ok, that may not be Macrovision's ideas, but it's a good explanation. O

    • More to the point, why make the game slowly degrade anyway instead of simply disabling it? They give the explanation that by then the player will be addicted to it. Seems pretty ridiculous to me. Why wouldn't he just remove the game and reinstall it? And I really don't believe that the copying apps will be stumped by this trick for long either. Anything the game can read, they can read too. They'll figure out how to copy the disc so that it retains whatever patterns the game is looking for. It's just

  • So basically.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OutRigged ( 573843 ) <rage@o u t r i g g e d . com> on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:19PM (#7177018) Homepage
    If one of my CD's becomes damaged, the game will start to screw up. If I try using a backup of said game CD to prevent this, the game still becomes screwed up.

    Of course they're going to replace damaged CD's for free right?
  • So basically if my game gets a scratch in it, the game becomes useless to me? That's great - take a medium with error protection and get rid of that error protection. One of the nice things about a CD is that if you get a scratch in it, the medium is supposed to be fault tolerant. Way to go guys!

    • Hmmm. Doesn't that break the Yellow Book [mediatechnics.com] standard governing CD-ROM?

      No, wait a minute. It might not be a violation of the standard, as videogame discs are commonly written in ISO9660 Mode 2, which isn't supposed to contain LECC. Then again, since it's a computer game, compatiblity with Windows would be better served by using Mode 1.

      It's a really stupid move on Macrovision's part. Even if removing the error correction built into the CD-ROM standard doesn't violate ISO 9660, it will lead to less durable game

  • What if it "believes" wrong? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Andy Smith ( 55346 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:30PM (#7177127)
    If you want to check my posting history then you'll see that I'm strongly anti-piracy and supportive of pretty much *anything* that copyright holders do to defend their livelihood.

    But I disapprove of this technology.

    What if it believes a genuine installation of the game is in fact a pirated copy? What if it then sets about slowly punishing the person who has done nothing worse than purchase a game?

    This technology, a piece of software and therefore objective by definition, is attempting to make subjective, semi-human judgements. The only way such technology would be acceptable is if it was 100% reliable and fault proof.

    Do you want them testing it on your system?

    And you just *know* the next step will be punitive file deletions, hard drive formatting, etc.

    • Re:What if it "believes" wrong? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by lightspawn ( 155347 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:54PM (#7177331) Homepage
      What if it believes a genuine installation of the game is in fact a pirated copy? What if it then sets about slowly punishing the person who has done nothing worse than purchase a game?

      This is even worse because some gamers may not even realize what's happening.

      "The game became really difficult after level 8, so I quit playing. I sold it back to ebgames at the mall for $12".

      Of course, ebgames sell this to somebody else for $33. What's the game's next owner supposed to do? How can he even tell something's wrong when he's never even played the game the 'right' way?

      This sux.
    • And you just *know* the next step will be punitive file deletions, hard drive formatting, etc.

      And the step after that will be massive lawsuits by consumers harmed by the system, and backlash that'll make what's happening to the RIAA look tame.
    • And you just *know* the next step will be punitive file deletions, hard drive formatting, etc.

      Slippery slope fallacy!
  • ... to avoid making a demo version of the software?

    I understand that they want to profit from piracy. Not against that. But problem 1 is that it's a challenge that will encourage crackers and problem 2 is that as long as they use the same generic program to protect it, there'll always be a quick crack. Meanwhile, they potentially step on the toes of those who have scratched media. You know, the legitimate customer?

    If I thought I was going to be eaten alive by pirates, I'd consider a different approach
    • Wait wait wait...

      NanoGator, you have made some good points in the past, some I agreed with and some I didn't.

      But did you just say that a company should spend millions of dollars to produce a piece of entertainment software AND THEN the only reason someone should feel like paying money for it is if it includes a small pewter statue or game art? WTF is that?
      • "But did you just say that a company should spend millions of dollars to produce a piece of entertainment software AND THEN the only reason someone should feel like paying money for it is if it includes a small pewter statue or game art? WTF is that?"

        A misunderstanding. :P

        I didn't use the words 'only' or 'should'. I said I'd consider adding something to it to encourage sales. You can copy the game, but you can't copy the physical stuff that comes with it.

        Give me a little credit, will ya?
        • Unless the value add is worth as much as the game it won't do much to detur piracy.
          • "Unless the value add is worth as much as the game it won't do much to detur piracy."

            Faulty logic. Sometimes $50 is too much to buy a game, where $40 is reasonable. Give a little value add to it and that $50 price tag isn't so bad anymore.
            • I'm guessing you arn't adding much to the piracy problem then. 40 dollors will buy almost any game over a couple months old (PC anyway). If I am going to get a game for free, the value add must be worth the whole price of the game to compel me to buy it.

      • No, he means such a bonus item would be a good encouragement for people to buy a legit version instead of copying/downloading it and applying a custom patch.

        Also, I fear that this technology will actually put people off the game, make it like a kind of negative demo. People might copy it, or download it, and then notice that the game is way too hard, and then proceed to not like, and thus not buy, the game in question.

  • Read the article again... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DoctorRad ( 608319 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:42PM (#7177215)
    New scratches won't affect gameplay. The point is that the 'fake scratch data' won't be copied verbatim by disc copying software[1], so the code knows the disc is a copy.

    Read errors caused by new scratches on an original disc will just get corrected as per normal. The 'fake' scratches will still be there, so the game will play fine.

    Matt...

    [1] Yet...
    --
    A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.

    • Well, if they've integrated this into Safedisc I sense that it's _already_ been worked around...

      Both Alcohol and CloneCD have (for quite a while) been copying Safedisc protected CDs with no problems. Now, instead of exiting the program they just tamper with it, I don't see that affecting the original Safedisc mechanism in any way - the copying software and the CDRom Emulators that successfully emulate copy protection schemes like this will still function just the same.

    • This guy addresses the "OMG SCRATCHED CD's" that are cropping up all over the rest of the replies to the story.

      Please don't let this guy get overlooked.
    • ok, so how does this battle virtualisation of the cdrom drive? ie. you take the cd, put it in, use software to make a clone of it on the hd. then that clone image(with the information of scratches/whatever in it) is used for playing. it cannot be argued that the scratch couldn't be 'copied' this way unless you're saying that the software(game) can read it on a more lower level than the virtualisation software can make it's own clone of it(yeah yeah some of these titles detect some of these virtualisation so
    • And what happens to the legitimate user when a new scratch happens over the fake scratch data, altering the pattern?

      --Paul
    • Uh...Not for nothing, but I dd all of my discs for backup. This gets all of those little imperfections along with the disc too. If they're going to put "fake scratches," or whatever you might want to call it, on the disc then how is this thwarting making an image? I dd my stuff because for one thing, I lose CDs like it's nobody's business, but I also hate having to put a disc in the drive everytime I want to play it. Suppose I want to play UT2003, then after that I want to delay homework even more and p
      • It isn't that the copy slowly degrades. It's that if you don't properly copy the CD and fake a scratch in the right place, then it knows you have a pirated copy. It slowly makes the games worse and worse.

        Why do that? Macrovision has a history of selling copy-protection schemes to companies with a glamour factor. The DVD protection, for example, doesn't make the DVD not play at all. It just makes it irritating to play. The image fades bright and dark. Macrovision presents reports that say people get about

  • Is Fade Legal? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LightForce3 ( 450105 ) <lightforce3@[ ]oo.com ['yah' in gap]> on Thursday October 09, 2003 @06:45PM (#7177247) Homepage
    If memory (and legal knowledge) serves correctly, if I buy a piece of software (or, technically the disc and the right to use the software), I am legally entitled by US law to make a working backup of the software. It would seem that this anti-piracy technology interferes with this right.

    Also, what happens if the original disc gets physically scratched so that the "fragments of 'subversive' code designed to seem like scratches" can't be read but the rest of the disc is fine?

    As another poster stated, any company that uses Fade should offer free replacement discs to legitimate purchasers.
    • You may be legally allowed to make a backup copy, but the copyright owner is not legally required to facilitate the backup.
    • I'm sure that if there's any case law about Playstation games, it would be very insightful regarding this issue. From what I can tell, the technical side of this copy protection system seems similar to what they do for PS games.
  • You mean thats ilegal???? HU? Poor Pirates, what are going to be made ilegal next? Dogs? Cats?
    • Your post contains a sequence of more than one question mark; therefore, you are in violation of the Sounding Like A Fucking Dolt Act. Federal agents have already traced the source of the offending punctuation, and should be arriving shortly at your door.
      • Your post contains a sequence of more than one question mark; therefore, you are in violation of the Sounding Like A Fucking Dolt Act. Federal agents have already traced the source of the offending punctuation, and should be arriving shortly at your door.

        Your post conatins an utter inability to comprehend sarcasm; therefore, you are in violation of Section 2 of the Sounding Like A Fucking Dolt Act, which I can only assume you are familiar with.
  • Actually, I have to admit that it's a pretty neat idea. Not some Nazi protection like Safe-Disc.
  • "The beauty of this is that the degrading copy becomes a sales promotion tool. People go out and buy an original version."

    Now wait a minute, so then how does cranking the difficulty to an absurd levels and making the player screw up make people want to go out and buy it? I highly doubt that those who experience this will go out and buy it, most likely they will either get a good rip, program some hack, or just delete the game.

    This technology will end up biting them in the butt. Just think of the reviewe
  • I've always liked the concept of turning pirated copies into a "superdemo" of sorts. My main concern, and the concern of most of the people here, appears to be that the copy protection does not degrade the performance for legal, purchased players. I don't think we should jump to any conclusions on this front. SafeDisk technology is uncopyable (cough) due to an inherent pattern in the disk, yet we have been using those for years. While all my reviews get bonus smileys if playing the game doesn't require
  • The "degradation" idea is interesting. The rest doesn't sound new.

    If anyone remembers the old copy protections, the "subtle pattern" sounds very much like the deliberate damage of particular sectors on a floppy disk. A refinement was to use bit patterns for the sector data or the track format that the hardware of the time could not reliably read (iirc- a long series of 1 bits, you wrote the data encoded as nybbles with no pattern having more than two consecutive ones). The principle was simple: read the ba
  • well, even if you do make a copy by getting around the protection, you will never be quite sure weather today you are actually playing poorly, bad luck, or weather it detected that you have a copy. This could really drive you to get a real copy.
  • But what exactly does this mean for all those copies they give out to the press to "review?"
  • The operating system on my non-Linux box has been progressively getting buggier. I wonder if if contains that copy protection code or something?

    Wait, here comes Blaster again. Damn.

    Seriously, that's all we need: more software that is packed to explode on the user. All you need is a scratch or two to start the fuse.

    Back in the Commodore days there was a game that rattled the drive a couple times when it loaded. One rattle was a bad sector for copy protection (whoops, DMCA init in 5...4...3...). The
  • I think the best copy protection mechanism is one that turns a pirate copy into a game demo. You can play enough to get hooked, then the copy protection system kicks in and waggles its finger at you like that fat guy in Jurassic Park.

    If you really like the game by then, you'll go out and buy a copy. If you don't like it by then, or if you're a penniless thief, the developer never lost a sale to you anyway.

    But this system makes a game slowly degrade over time. If it introduces bugs or other flakiness, the
  • Hmmm... Seems ok at first, then gets worse and worse as you get further into it... Sounds familiar; maybe Microsoft has been using this all along and everyone's getting pirated disks...
  • No matter what method is used to detect if a program is a pirate copy, making it work "degraded" rather than failing outright is a very good idea if you want to prevent piracy.

    The reason is that it makes it much harder for the person trying to crack the copy protection to figure out if they did it. They have to have a reliable test to see if it is "degraded" and they have to wait at least as long as the test takes. Ideally the program should work perfectly for many minutes and then start to degrade. So eve
  • If this is half as good as the current protection implementations (SafeDisc's, SecuROM, etc.), it will just lead to another round of games people HAVE to crack just to PLAY their copies. It happens with many games currently (Neverwinter Nights actually REMOVED the copy protection in a patch because it caused so many headaches - given, they added it back in with the expansion). It's not going to stop anyone - guaranteed. A cracked copy will still be out on - or before - the release date. And as Lavarr Bu
  • Autodesk had a lovely double protection system on one of their old DOS 3D Studio. The initially released crack allowed the program to be run without the attached dongle and was widely released and used. What the crackers had missed was the second level of protection, which caused people's models to slowly 'melt' every time they were saved.
    • Actually, what happened was the renderings would slowly and progressively grow fade out (hmm, interesting coincidence, no?) until finally anything you rendered was just a solid black image. I had a friend who worked for an Autodesk reseller up until only about two years ago and I never heard about anything which affected the models themselves, but the fade trick was in use as late as 1996.

      We used to intentionally run copies of whatever their newest version was without the dongle just to see if it was stil

  • Seriously .. I had a pirated copy of Operation Flashpoint and I never had any problems with the game at all.
  • I think that this increase in difficulty, instead of dissuading hardcore players, will in fact cause more to try it and see if they are affected. They may think of it as a challenge or perhaps a proper test of their skills. This idea may cause a new wave of piracy by people that would have generally not done so. Or, perhaps even stranger, cause people that have purchased the game to copy it and reinstall it in a legally-spurious manner in order to ramp-up the difficulty.
  • I read about the same technique being used in one of the "Spyro" games (on the Playstation?), where gameplay would degrade over time. This made it much harder to copy, because you needed to play it for a long time to tell if a copy was good or bad. In this case, the developers implemented the technique themselves.

    Eventually, this protection was broken, but the article (in Game Developer Magazine) indicated that it delayed the release of perfect copies for a few weeks, which was a big chunk of the games'
  • I think that macrovision has a lot to gain by using FUD along with FADE (ok, lame pun): Once this can get to the mainstream media, or even most gaming mags, you can be sure that this story turns from "ingame copy protection alters gameplay" to "pirated games don't work right".

    Remember a few back ago when the BSA was warning people about viruses in pirated programs[*]? I have a feeling we are going back there. Once joe average hears about anti-piracy software messing up his aim, he'll start blaming pirated
  • What's to stop someone from making an image of the CD, then baking it up to tape, and then breaking it out when ever their CD starts throwing craps? (me thinks this wasn't an entirely well thought out copy-protection scam)

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