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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.