drm - Preventing copy protection circumvention

Question

Anyone visiting a torrent tracker is sure to find droves of "cracked" programs ranging from simple shareware to software suites costing thousands of dollars. It seems that as long as the program does not rely on a remote service (e.g. an MMORPG) that any built-in copy protection or user authentication is useless.

Is it effectively not possible to prevent a cracker from circumventing the copy protection? Why?

Answer 1

No, it's not really possible to prevent it. You can make it extremely difficult - some Starforce versions apparently accomplished that, at the expense of seriously pissing off a number of "users" (victims might be more accurate).

Your code is running on their system and they can do whatever they want with it. Attach a debugger, modify memory, whatever. That's just how it is.

Spore appears to be an elegant example of where draconian efforts in this direction have not only totally failed to prevent it from being shared around P2P networks etc, but has significantly harmed the image of the product and almost certainly the sales.

Also worth noting that users may need to crack copy protection for their own use; I recall playing Diablo on my laptop some years back, which had no internal optical drive. So I dropped in a no-cd crack, and was then entertained for several hours on a long plane flight. Forcing that kind of check, and hence users to work around it is a misfeature of the stupidest kind.