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[Frumple]

Check this out.  http://starmen.net/mother2/gameinfo/antipiracy/

That... is actually kinda' awesome. I mean, sure, I'd 'raeg' if something like that was put into a game nowadays (and I actually paid money for it -- I stick to FOSS stuff nowadays, mostly due to hardware limitations ), but in '94? That's pretty canny, especially considering how much smaller less well known piracy efforts were, back then. Thanks for the link!

When did all this piracy hullabaloo start up, anyway? I mean, the big dogs using it as an excuse to push control over digital/intellectual material, etc, etc.

As an odd thought, I just now realized I should be wondering what kind of (if any) negative publicity th'major publishers are drumming up by pushing DRM measures. Would th'piracy scene be as large and efficient as it is now if th'big dogs had just let things lay? Reminds me of the fancy new bacteria we've got growing in response to antibiotics

[freeformschooler]

Normal Copy protection (the old kind, like just having a serial you put in) was fine, and I don't get why it needed a change.

Because it didn't take too long for at least one publisher to see how easy it is for someone to put a string of text on the internet and then, allegedly, have this affect their sales.

[Aklyon]

I get your point, but I said things like that, not strictly just serials.

[Levi]

When did all this piracy hullabaloo start up, anyway? I mean, the big dogs using it as an excuse to push control over digital/intellectual material, etc, etc.

Piracy has been around at least since the Commodore 64.  I remember my dad ordering pirated games from shady magazines when I was a kid. 

[Rakonas]

Normal Copy protection (the old kind, like just having a serial you put in) was fine, and I don't get why it needed a change.

Because it didn't take too long for at least one publisher to see how easy it is for someone to put a string of text on the internet and then, allegedly, have this affect their sales.

Some companies still use old copy protection like that and do great. Namely Paradox, can't really think of another example at all. The necessity of the serial to post on a game's forum is pretty clever, too.

[Frumple]

Piracy has been around at least since the Commodore 64.

Yes, of course*, but there wasn't nearly as much mainstream-ish attention to it, from what I remember. Nowadays you get freaking news articles on it and junk. Certainly the publishers weren't using it as an excuse -- then, at least -- to push for thing like SecuRom. Obviously, that's what it morphed into, over the years, but I'm kinda' curious when the big 'counter-attack' type stuff started happening from the publishers' side and major groups started pushing out Zero Day material like clockwork and so forth and so on.

* Probably even earlier. I can only imagine there were knock-off Go boards or whatever back in the BCE.

E: I now totally want an ancient knock-off-brand Go board.

[Aklyon]

Spiderweb Software (Geneforge/Avernum serieses) also uses serials,though they're much less known than Paradox.

[Sowelu]

I miss my old code wheels, like the ones for Starflight or this baseball game I used to have.

Starflight II was also pretty neat.  You get this great fold-out starmap, which is useful on your own, but also a little overlay thingamabob.  The game asks you to put it at coordinates foo,bar and tell it how many red and blue stars are in that region, and if you get it wrong, after a little while the space police will pull up alongside your ship and blow you away.

[Levi]

* Probably even earlier. I can only imagine there were knock-off Go boards or whatever back in the BCE.

E: I now totally want an ancient knock-off-brand Go board.

Me too.  Go rocks, and an ancient knock off brand would still be pretty valuable. 

[Sensei]

I don't mind orwellian rules under the justification that you're meant to get a license to a thing rather than a thing- as long as it means you reap the benefits of that as well.

For example, if you need internet to play the game, you should be able to download and play your account anywhere. You should be entitled to updates of the software. If cybercafes were more popular here, I can imagine people playing on public computers.

[Aklyon]

But no matter how supposedly justified, Internet should not be required to play singleplayer, unless it is actually an online (flash, non-mmo rpg, etc) game. requireing it for multiplayer is perfectly reasonable, but for singleplayer its just plain power abuse.

[Sensei]

Indubitably. *sips tea*

[fenrif]

Piracy has been around at least since the Commodore 64.

Yes, of course*, but there wasn't nearly as much mainstream-ish attention to it, from what I remember. Nowadays you get freaking news articles on it and junk.

There were no articles about it in the news back then because there weren't ANY news articles about games at all really. It was all just previews/reviews ad the like. There might've been a few magazines specifically devoted to gaming news, but they wouldn't have been widely published.

And you can't have a knock-off go board, because noone owns the rights to go, and back when it was created the concept of intellectual property and copyright hadn't been invented. So no knock-off go or chess for you.

[nenjin]

I wanna say DRM started for real reals probably....I dunno, '94 or something. Starforce fucking with your BIOS is the first I ever heard of DRM.

Piracy is about as old as the first BBSes.

[ScriptWolf]

personally I think DRM's should go back to how you lot described earlier in the thread, where games when pirated would have a fault with them like, a gun firing out of line or the game not letting you past a certain level or deleting everything you have done. That seems like a batter idea, and is not sticking a big middle finger up at the consumers who buy the game.