Limits of Copy Protection

[zackbass]

I was reading the thread about the different systems for buying Half Life 2 in the General Games forum today and noticed what might be the start to an interesting discussion, especially in a place where a good discussion IS possible (yay for the Highly Technical forum!).

Originally posted by 2630Goon in the General Games forum
In the future(not too far down the road)all content wether it be games or dvd movies or music cds will have to be purchased and downloaded off companies web sites.There will no longer be phsyical ways to copy a game or music cd.The companies will get rid of physical means of copying.Future dvd players and music cd players will not use a phsyical disk(music or dvd disk) at all, but movies or music will have to be downloaded from company sites to a hard drive device in the player itself.

The way I understand it, perfect copy protection is not possible. The data could be protected by encryption, but at some point the end user (also the cracker) would have to receive the key in order to use the data he/she bought a licence to.

If there is no way to decode the data then there are other ways to get to it too. In the case of software the code will eventually have to be run in a "naked" state in which it can be intercepted. In the case of audio/video the data must be in an interceptable state in order to reach the output device, or in the most extreme case of protection be interceptable between the output device and the viewer/listener.

As we all know, the copy protection only needs to be cracked once in order to make it useless.

What are some copy protection schemes that could provide "total protection"? How would you implement it? It seems like a very interesting (and on topic) engineering problem.

[THE SHADOW]

I think copy protetction will never be "100" safe, as there will always be someone who would crack it, games will still be sold through the retail channel for quite some time, as not everyone is on broadband and I would not like to be the the kid trying to download games like half-life 2 over anything slower then at least DSL or cable, obviously higher if you got the dough.

Correct me if I am wrong but I believe that ever since computers, programs and the rest of the techno world got invented, people have successfully cracked them, reversed engineered them or whatever else happens to pop into bored technology experts' minds.

But sure, distribute only online, and you might slow piracy down but only for a certain time period.

[ua549]

Originally posted by THE SHADOW
Correct me if I am wrong but I believe that ever since computers, programs and the rest of the techno world got invented, people have successfully cracked them, reversed engineered them or whatever else happens to pop into bored technology experts' minds.

Actually it wasn't until the US government won a suit against IBM that software was even sold. Until then software was bundled with the hardware. If I wanted a piece of software all I had to do was ask tech support to send it to me. Those were the good old days!

[s1203372]

The idea that downloading a program from a company website rather than having it on a physical disk falsely associates the program with the media. It's the digital information on the media that is copied - the media has little or nothing to do with it. Regardless of the source of the information, it will always be vulnerable to attack.