Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!mcnc!xanth!kent From: kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: "Look up a word in the manual" copy protection Message-ID: <1569@xanth.UUCP> Date: Sun, 12-Jul-87 18:26:30 EDT Article-I.D.: xanth.1569 Posted: Sun Jul 12 18:26:30 1987 Date-Received: Wed, 15-Jul-87 00:37:34 EDT References: <4807@sgi.SGI.COM> <6816@g.ms.uky.edu> <1812@vax135.UUCP> <294@l5comp.UUCP> Reply-To: kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) Organization: Old Dominion University, Norfolk Va. Lines: 29 Summary: Just type the manual onto the disk, Scotty! In article <294@l5comp.UUCP> scotty@l5comp.UUCP (Scott Turner) writes: >In article <1812@vax135.UUCP> cjp@vax135.UUCP (Charles Poirier) writes: >>equipment. It doesn't take anything like two minutes if you know where >>your manual is to start with. Think of it as a soft dongle (pardon my > >Obviously you've never misplaced a manual, or had it sprout legs. "Were is my >XXX manual?" "Uh, I borrowed it Scott and it's at home, sorry..." Or how about >you took the manual home and left it there? What gets lost in this discussion is how easy it is to subvert "word in the manual" copy protection. It doesn't take a lot of time for the original owner or some enterprising pirate to type the ENTIRE manual onto disk. At worst, if the original disk was full, this ups the cost of piracy from $0.99 (surely you don't believe pirates can afford DSDD disks at $1.34? ;-) to $1.98, as a whole second disk is used for the manual. For the Knights Templar in the crowd, just think of this as a way to avoid losing the manual, or of still being able to use the information therein after the original becomes part of a late night peanut butter sandwich by accident. Of course the original (paying) purchaser of the software has to be pretty ticked off at the vendor (say by EA not putting the Bard's Tale copy protection file in it's own directory so that a user could copy the rest of the code and data into 2meg of ram and reASSIGN all the other logical names to ram:, thus stopping the once per 10 seconds access to the disk for picture data, while still enjoying key disk copy protection) to bother to type in a whole manual, but vendors seem to excel at finding ways, like beating disk drives to death, to irritate purchasers into finding ways to get even. Kent, the man from xanth.