Coding Horror: Is there an optimal piracy rate?

January 14, 2006

Is there an optimal piracy rate?

I've recently been struggling with a number of racing sims I bought to use after work hours in our new racing cockpit. I'm a big believer in supporting developers. I'm a developer myself. But digging around for CDs or DVDs is impractical for dedicated gaming rigs, so I install no-cd patches when I can.

Unfortunately, finding no-cd patches is getting harder and harder because of a relatively new copy protection known as StarForce. It's a kernel-mode device driver that talks directly to the IDE hardware to validate the CD or DVD. Beyond that, the technical details are sketchy, probably to prevent crackers from gaining the upper hand. But the net result is that no-cd patches for games with the latest StarForce protection are rare.

For example, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, which was released early last year, has no known working no-cd patch as of today-- almost a year later. That's amazing. There are legions of hackers and crackers out there. Fending them off for this long is completely unprecedented. For as long as there has been software, there have been crackers-- and they've always won.

My hat is off to the developers of StarForce. However you feel about copy protection, they've accomplished what many thought could never be done. Now, before you spam the comments with diatribes about how much StarForce sucks, how it kills small children and formats your hard drive, etcetera, take the time to read their point of view in this interview with a StarForce rep. It has their side of the story, and many additional details. I'll also add that I played, completed, and sold Splinter Cell Chaos Theory earlier this year without once knowing that I was playing a StarForce protected game.

Now, this is not to say that StarForce can't be circumvented. It can. The primary method of circumventing StarForce at the moment is to stop using parallel ATA optical drives:

physically unplug your optical drives*
use a special utility to completely disable parallel ATA on your PC (that's assuming you're using serial ATA hard drives)
switch to external USB optical drives

It's kind of a scorched earth solution, but it's the only thing that works. And once you've done that, you're still not done! The very, very latest versions of StarForce monitor hard drive access at the time of disc validation to see if that "DVD" you mounted is really being read from the hard drive. So you have to load an additional device driver that hides the physical drive access from StarForce.

All in all, a giant pain in the ass. Which is entirely the point of copy protection.

But is StarForce too much copy protection? Chris Anderson maintains that there is an optimal level of piracy for any industry, due to the following effects:

Remember dongles? Any protection technology that is really difficult to crack is probably too cumbersome to be accepted by consumers.
Piracy can let you raise your prices. Rather than pricing between the absolute economic bottom and the top, you cede the bottom to piracy-- no price can compete with free-- and set your price between the middle and the top.
Piracy helps seed technology markets. The ubiquity of pirated Windows and Office have made them de-facto national standards in many countries.

Chris proposes that a certain level of piracy is simply good business:

When all these effects are considered, it appears that there actually is an optimal level of piracy. That right level would vary from industry to industry. Today the estimated piracy rates are 33% for CDs and 15% for DVDs. The industries say that's too high, but most anti-copying technologies they've brought in to lower that figure have proven unpopular. Would even tighter lock-downs help? Probably not. Maybe 15%-30% is simply the market saying that this is the optimal rate of piracy for those industries, and any effort to lower that significantly would either choke demand or push even more people to the dark side.

I tend to agree. I think DVDs are an excellent example of this "good enough" theory in action. They have a basic level of copy protection, but they're priced so reasonably very few people bother to pirate them. The people that continue to pirate DVDs probably wouldn't buy them no matter how low they were priced.

* no, disabling them in the BIOS doesn't work. StarForce talks directly to the ATA hardware at the kernel level.

Posted by Jeff Atwood View blog reactions

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Comments

Instead of game-specific no-CD cracks, you might want to try Game Jackal ( http://www.gamejackal.com ).

That's a very clever program that inserts a stub on the Windows driver level between the CD/DVD drive and the application. First you start up your game normally, CD in drive, and let GJ record the data that's transmitted through the driver. Later you just let GJ play back the recorded data for that game, and no longer have to insert a CD!

Cheap, easy to use, and works very well for Civ4 and Star Wars Battlefront 2. Caveat: I think GJ still has trouble with StarForce -- check the forums on their website for discussions on that subject.

Chris Nahr on January 16, 2006 07:42 AM

The whole copy protection thing (not just for games, but also for audio cds, etc.) is bullshit. I am completely within my rights to make a backup disc and use that to play.. or make a backup image and use that to play.

Not to mention that copy protection can make even legitimate copies/computers not work. I've had problems with the low-level drivers that StarForce installs, as well as other protection schemes (namely it completely breaking my DVD burner's burning support..) I remember when I couldn't get "Battle for Middle Earth" to play.. it kept telling me to insert the disc. Pfft.

It makes me wonder how much consumers are going to take before they just all start pirating the games-- the warez release groups seem to have no problem cracking most games and making them "NOCD" within a few days at most.

Nicholas on January 16, 2006 11:27 AM

> I think GJ still has trouble with StarForce

That is clever, but GameJackal doesn't work at all with semi-recent versions of StarForce as well as a few other types of protection. That's because these protections talk directly to the IDE hardware via a driver themselves; they don't use the OS calls.

> the warez release groups seem to have no problem cracking most games

This isn't true, though. Many starforce games are NEVER cracked. A handful are, but most aren't.

Jeff Atwood on January 16, 2006 12:33 PM

I worked at a company once (long enough ago that it was the era of supposedly copy-protected floppy disks) where the president's attitude was that he'd rather have people pirating our software and using it than using the competitors'.

mike on January 16, 2006 12:35 PM

I couldn't agree more with the statement:
"Piracy helps seed technology markets."

When I was a poor broke college student, I would steal every piece of software that I could get my hands on. I never felt guilty about it because I couldn't afford to pay for the software even if I wanted to.

Now that I'm a developer and I actually have money to spend of software, I tend to buy the programs that I pirated in my college days because I'm already familiar with them.

I think most of the time when software is pirated, it is from someone who couldn't or wouldn't pay for the software anyway. So software companies aren't loosing any money, but they are gaining market reputation.

Ryan Smith on January 16, 2006 02:15 PM

StarForce's protection is so good, it doesn't work on every computer; reports of problems with StarForce are not at all uncommon. Daemon Tools (a CD/DVD emulator) plus an additional IDE Jammer (which is supposedly built-in to the coming version) punctures StarForce's protection. You have to have an ISO loaded onto your drive so technically there's no no-CD crack. Also technically, there's nothing stopping pirates from playing the game (aside from the fre gigs of HD space to leave an image that they can mount). Another forum I read talked about Starforce and its impact on racing games a bit - http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/39309975/m/659001117731/p/1 and the thesis of the first post (before it devolved into Yet Another Argument Over Piracy) was that the reason that 1nsane was (and is) such a successful racing game while Cross Racing Championship, a game with more hype and by the same developer, was a flop was that CRC had Starforce.
I understand the desire to make sure that there's no shrinkage (horrible accounting term, that) but I also think there's something wrong when your paying customers have a lesser experience than the people pirating your software (hi, early versions of Morrowind) and this normally seems to be the case. At any rate, god bless the hackers pumping out no-CD cracks so I don't have to dig through sleeves of game discs every time the bug bites.

dave solomon on January 17, 2006 10:03 AM

Nice post, but I have to disagree with the statement about the DVDs. Maybe, in the USA, they are cheap... according to the average salary - I worked in the USA.
But for example in the Czech republic, where I live, the average month salary is about 800 USD (that means 520 USD minus taxes) and average DVD costs 32 USD... cheap? No, thanx. That does not mean I dont buy a DVD from time to time (I bought Stanley Kubrick collection recently), but I have to think twice.
The same situation is on the field of software, as the prices are not made according to the purchasing power parity, but simply by currency conversion. You cannot buy Visual Studio 2005 Prof from one salary, Windows Home cost half the salary and for Windows Prof You cough all your salary.
That is Czech Republic, Central Europe... imagine the situation more eastwards where salaries are much lower...
About 80 to 95 percent of software is pirated in Russia, but that is simply because the people cannot afford it.

dalt on January 17, 2006 10:43 AM

> the prices are not made according to the purchasing power parity, but simply by currency conversion

Obviously this is a bad way to do business, since income and salaries are very different in other parts of the world. I know drugs, for example, are not priced this way:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000323.html

> About 80 to 95 percent of software is pirated in Russia, but that is simply because the people cannot afford it

I agree with you, and this is exactly what the post says-- the economic bottom is ceded to piracy.

Jeff Atwood on January 17, 2006 12:55 PM

> plus an additional IDE Jammer (which is supposedly built-in to the coming version) punctures StarForce's protection

Actually, it doesn't. The newest versions of starforce fix this hole by "un-jamming" the IDE channels at startup, if they are in a jammed state.

Remember, if it can be done in software, it can be undone in software as well...

The real solution is for Daemon Tools (or whatever) to emulate an IDE drive. All existing emulators emulate SCSI drives, which cause a problem since SCSI optical devices are all blacklisted by StarForce if even one IDE optical drives is found.

Jeff Atwood on January 17, 2006 12:58 PM

Damn, I'm glad I don't play PC games anymore so I don't have to put up with this BS. I would never buy a game that came along with some funky kernel-mode driver crap like that. Sony root-kit anyone?

Jacques Troux on January 24, 2006 05:50 PM

Well, starforce isn't a rootkit. It's a device driver.. they run in kernel mode by definition. And the device driver ONLY runs when the CD is validated; there's nothing that sticks around in memory or anything like that.

Sorry, I could have been a little more clear in my post.

Jeff Atwood on January 24, 2006 08:08 PM

Well i was not an gammer ohter then the lara 99 time to time i play it from cds or from my hard now that i heard that new lara 2005 dvd but it got starforce wow after reading this i think i m good and best at the lara 99 , this is way too over to do things like this that i don't have time well
if some one do it let me know by e-mails or what ever thanks in advanced ,
have fun ,
bye,

One Winsome on March 30, 2006 08:25 AM

i hope daemon tools beat starforce. I want to backup my Toca RAce 3 and i cannot... IDE drives may eclipse in the future. Is satrforce going to blacklist even usb sticks? :)

Larry on April 5, 2006 04:08 AM

Worms 4 is starforce protected and i've got a crack and that goes for rainbow six lockdown Nananananana!!!!

John on April 8, 2006 05:05 AM

Since most no-cd hacks involve decoding the exe and removing all links to the cd testing code entirely, starforce can be as agressive as it likes. If it is removed from the EXE, it can't run.

New methods usually only gain companies 6-12 months from the hackers.

Frankly, I hate having to risk my originals and having my fair use rights violated by preventing me from producing a backup (and using it in place of the original as an expendable media). I prefer the No-cd hacks as they don't require me to forever be fiddling with my drives as I change games AND they allow me to lock up my originals nice and safe, only risking them during install.

Xepol on May 25, 2006 10:18 PM

Jeff: "And the device driver ONLY runs when the CD is validated; there's nothing that sticks around in memory or anything like that." - oh, does it mean my hdd driver is in memory only when i'm working with file system? And when I finish opening file it uloads itself from memory.
And whe I want to access HDD again... hell, where do i get the driver from now? :)

I don't think it works this way...

Keff on May 26, 2006 07:29 AM

This is a great discussion. I learnt a lot. Starforce seems to be one of the toughest protections ever made. The other day, I tried Prince of Persia T2T but it didn't run at all. Tried that simple age old trick of removing the CD cable and it worked like a charm. What not... Starforce failed on one of my laptops... While on one side, I get so excited upon knowing that I'll be able to play the game, the other side, I feel a little uneasy too... For, these programmers spend day and night coding these games and well, what to say? The next day or even before release, they are pirated. Guess it can't be helped. These games are too costly for a normal individual to afford. I used to play video games in my childhood for roughly 10 cents an hour(it turns out to be 20 units in my currency)... When AOE was released... It was priced at around $60(60*100*2 units in my currency)...

Why would I buy such a costly game? I didn't. After an year, one of my friends gave it to me... I got it for free... Guess piracy can't be avoided after all...

Purifier on May 28, 2006 01:10 PM

I used to manage an internet cafe, and copy protection software was a complete nightmare. We owned legitimate copies of all our software, not just one copy, but one copy for every PC that had that title installed in the stop.

Letting the customers get hold of the individual CDs/DVDs was out of the question, and many games refused to work with noCD cracks online. Because of this we had to use Daemon tools to mount an image of each game stored locally on the PC, meaning each PC needed 60GB of HDD space just for the images.

Storeforce protection was so good on one racing game we had, that it was impossible to crack, so in the end we had to remove that game from our systems.

This is a prime example of too much copy protection.

Kevin on June 2, 2006 02:13 PM

Besides all: I AM TOO FUCKING POOR TO PAY FOR WINDOWS! I'm still a high school student, my parents are not poor, but they can't afford giving me a computer that is capable of running games, genuine windows, genuine office, 50$ per computer game, and I like music and books and going out too. This things cost a lot.

I want to be a game designer, and I would love to pay for games and for my music but I don't have the money. Sorry, I just don't have it. I am not a fucking thief. There are two options: either I download windows or I don't use windows. Either I download your band or I won't hear it. You are just fucking yourself, I'm a decent guy and if I had the money I'd buy your software, you are just losing word of mouth from me about how awesome your music is or making your OS standard with me and many pirates using it.

Now my windows is stuck and I can't play COD2. Thank you.

Wortzel on June 1, 2008 03:57 AM

>> I am not a fucking thief

yes, yes you are. a self justified thief, but a thief nonetheless. I don't want to get into some BS about how different software is from actual goods (on account of it simply being data at the lowest level), but it costs money. Wether or not you can afford it is not a justifiable excuse for pirating.

I'll admit it- I pirate software fairly profusely. But you don't see me jumping on a soapbox claiming that what I'm doing is justified. I don't. Ideally, if you couldn't afford something. You wouldn't use it. Can't afford a computer? Don't get one. I didn't have one until I was in grade 12 of high school (that being only 5 6 years ago, and the computer was a 286....). Can't afford the software to run the computer? Go ahead and pirate it, just don't jump on a pedestal claiming that what your doing is actually good for the products publishers. Even if that was the case, it wasn't the reason you pirated it, now was it. You didn't think, "hmm, I think I'll pirate this OS, not because I want it, but rather because I agree with the ideals of the company that produced it and would like for them to expand and grow, which I can supplement by giving them free publicity. Heck, they should be paying me to use their software".... No. You pirated it because YOU wanted it, not because of any vested interest in the company that produced it.

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