October 16, 2003
Deliberate scratches on CDs?
Re: Fade.
This goes way back to the idea of punching minuscule holes in 5.25" floppies. We used tricks like this for copy protection then too. The pirates adapted then and they'll adapt now. At that time the most common work around was to just hack the code that did the checking. It'll be no different now either. Since that code will have to run on a CPU (and be loaded into RAM in the process) it'll just be a simple matter of tracking down the code and hacking around it.
Make what people want at prices they want to pay.
Otherwise it's just an endless arms race that ends up doing harm to the legitimate consumer. Either by making the product onerously difficult to use or by infringing on our established legal rights regarding fair use. Fair use doesn't mean pimping a stolen copy off to your buddies either.
As for degraded feature sets, yeah right. Like software isn't already chock-full of degraded feature sets! Have you tried using the abmoninations they put on extended CDs? Gack, the software's worse than a virus!
Who is this helping? The publishers are already ignoring we're not being provided products at prices we want to pay. Now they want us to continue to pay those prices and suffer the risks of software failing and destroying what we've legitimately purchased?
Why am I not sympathetic to their cries... perhaps because they're not listening to us either. Fortunately, CD and media sales are in decline. We're voting with our wallets. They just refuse to accept the facts.
