[Flipside]

Not to forget the copy protection of Elite, Bye bye retina

What makes me laugh is that most of the copying facilities are provided right there with your fully legal software and hardware, and then as soon as we actually use what we have paid for......

[Martinus]

Originally posted by an0n
Gimme a nice number-table or a plastic-tag system over this techno-crap any day.

Even after all these years there's STILL no crack for Mega-Traveller 2. You either need the number-table or you're ****ed. Which, incidentally, is why I can't play my legal copy of Mega-Traveller 2. Bastards.

[color=66ff00]Nobody NOP'ed the code out? Well I guess a decent coder could remove the possability of using something as simple as NOP code skipping. You'd be surprized what it still works on though.
[/color]

[kasperl]

well, blank media has an intended purpose of backing up files, just like KaZaA has an intended purpose of sharing your own music.

[Setekh]

Originally posted by IceFire
The whole industry has become a total farce since the advent of digital media.  They are still stuck in the 80's while the users are plunging forth into the 21st century.  Lawsuits and big money aside, its totally comical how badly the RIAA handels itself.

True dat. I'm wondering when they're going to wake up to themselves - they won't last forever this way.

[Rictor]

Or Indy Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. You had to match up these 3 disks printed on the manual to unlock the manual. And the 3 disks were also in the game, so that was just freaking immersive. But if you loose the manual, then you can't play. I mean, they have some crack or something these days, thats how I was able to replay it after I had lost the manual.

But still, that was an awesome way of protecting your stuff. It was pretty efficient back then (not so today I suppose) and it totally immersed you in the experience even during installation.

[aldo_14]

I remember copying every ne of the little sysmbols printed on the TIE-fighter manual so I could play it (from 3 floppies, IIRC).....

On the subject of the RIAA and thier idiocy, I buy more CDs when I can download tracks in advance.  since I got broadband and,er, suitable software just before Xmas, I've bought more CDs than I did in the preceeding 2 months.

[Singh]

yup. the games of old used to use the manuals a LOT. Even Star Trek 25th Anniversary was unplayable simply because you never got the system co-ords without the manual. Another good example is F117a or even Gunship 2000- but i think they eventuall cracked those........

That, and many other games.....dunno why the newer companies dont bother with the same thing, at the least its going to deter the smaller hackers and copy people.

And as regards to the RIAA- they are just money-grabbing fools. As an0n mentioned earlier, at least the movie industry is a bit smarter about these things.
heck, if music CDs and copy-rights were cheaper, or if the cash actually went back to the artists, 50% of your problems would be solved because the consumers would prefer to buy the original CDs cheaper or at least know that they are supporting their favourite artists. Heck- if you released free CD samples of the artists, and then offered discounts for the real thing, it would be just as effective.......i think.......Americans are too unpredictable to tell

[aldo_14]

They do a lesser degree with cd keys printed on the backs of manuals and in boxes.... the last few games I've bought - Call of Duty, KoToR, Rise of Nations - all had cd-keys on the packaging.

I think it went out of style becuase it's now very easy to photocopy or scan in manuals and distribute them - so they've had to resort to more hardware specific methods.

[Stealth]

Well i'd say the reason the RIAA's doing all this stuff is to make MP3 sharing as hard as possible, not impossible... they know they're never going to stop MP3 and file sharing completely, but they want it to be hard for people to be able to share MP3s.  and they've succeeded for the most part.  it is harder than it was a year ago to find and download MP3s

[Stryke 9]

Problem with the RIAA is they're trying to bring a dictatorial approach to consumerist capitalism- trying to keep up the illusion that the problem isn't in their business tactics, but in that the populace refuses to actively conform itself to the RIAA's needs. It's a pretty basic rule of business that if you're trying to sell something people can manufacture at home you need to somehow make your version more attractive than the homemade one. Price-gouging and sabotaging your own products with over-restrictive security systems that bother the legal user more than hinder crackers really aren't the way to do that. And if your product is less desirable than the free version, no legislation in the world is gonna make people do what you want 'em to.

[aldo_14]

Not to mention using bully boy tactics which are often misdirected or comepletely disproportional makes it less moral to buy their 'products'.  

Any sense of moral superiority the RIAA may have had from people who consider themselves 'honest' supporters of music has been crushed by stuff like sueing little girls & grandmothers who don't even own a PC, often for sums equal to the profit of amny thousands of CDs!

They've managed to make attacking the RIAA a justifiable cause, which is a fairly impressive achievement in itself.

[IceFire]

Thing is the Music industry needs to take a note from what DVD's did to the movie industry.  Just a movie wasn't good enough - you gotta provide extras (which are often times stock footage anyways or pre-recorded nowadays), top quality sound and mixing (which has fallen by the wayside in recent years), and when it comes to movie soundtracks from a 2 hour long movie we want a bloody soundtrack that compairs to the movie one.  I've seen of movie soundtracks that I really wanted to buy (whatever the price was) but they have cut it down so much that half the music is missing.  Hans Zimmer's Pearl Harbor springs to mind.  Almost three quarters of the movies themes and music are totally absent from the soundtrack CD including the entire Pearl Harbor attack sequence which could easily be 10-15 mins in a slightly abridged version.  Where is it?  Missing.  Other movie soundtracks suffer the same problems and they are simply out of the 'worth buying category'.

No the music industry needs a rethink.  This won't happen but I'd say throw out the RIAA, throw out the power hungry, dollar centric, beaucratic record labels and replace them with a new consortium made up of artists where its the consortiums priviledge to sell as many artists as possible using multiple media distribution and marketing products like DVD movies.

If its a rock band we want stuff about the band...and band junkies will want it and we want the best possible sound quality and positonal audio so if you crank it and you have the right system the band is there with you.  All too often the mixing is so horrible that it doesn't really matter how good your system is, how many channels its running and how many sound processors you have making it happen.  And If its a movie soundtrack it better be in order, comprising the movies music in as much detail as possible, and don't skimp on the sound quality.

Gosh the music industry is so backward it makes me mad.

But I'll be ok

[Grey Wolf]

If they actually used some of the newer technology, such as the CDs that actually have more than 2 channels, then they probably wouldn't be having these problems. I didn't even know they made 5.1 CDs until about a month ago when I saw about a half-dozen of them in a store.