Chapter 13: Sharing Video Games

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Overview

Games lubricate the body and the mind.

—Benjamin Franklin

Nobody really buys a computer to balance their budget. Most people buy a computer to access the Internet or play video games. And while the music industry suffers from declining sales, the video-game industry continues to enjoy record-breaking sales. The European Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA) (http://www.elspa.com) even claimed that video-game sales in 2003 hit $18.5 billion and forecast continuing growth of up to 10 percent every year. That’s a heck of a lot of dough.

Naturally, with so many people playing games, there will always be a minority who want to steal them. To keep that minority as small as possible, video-game manufacturers employ a wide variety of tricks. Some try traditional copy-protection mechanisms, and others use colored ink to print secret codes that users must enter whenever they want to play the game. (The colored ink keeps the codes visible to the human eye but renders them invisible when photocopied.) Not surprisingly, the anti-piracy schemes don’t slow down the dedicated pirate.

In one of the latest examples, Ubisoft (http://www.ubi.com), publishers of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, used a copy-protection scheme from MacroVision (http://www.macrovision.com) dubbed SafeDisc 2. This copy protection mysteriously prevents a video game from running if it detects any of the following three programs running on a computer:

Daemon Tools http://www.daemon-tools.cc

Alcohol 120% http://www.alcohol-soft.com

Clonecd http://www.clonecd.net

Not only can these three programs copy a copy-protected CD or DVD, but they can also store the disc’s contents as a virtual drive on your hard disk. A virtual drive basically saves the contents of a CD or DVD as a file on your hard disk, but it tricks your computer into thinking that the file is an actual CD or DVD drive. So instead of playing the game directly from a CD or DVD, your computer plays the game directly from the virtual drive, which makes your games run much faster.

Once people copy and save all of their game CDs and DVDs onto their hard drives as separate virtual drives, they can store or loan their original CDs and DVDs to others. As an alternative, many people simply share their virtual drive files instead. You can run that virtual drive on any computer that has the same program that created the original virtual drive. To learn more about a commercial tool that can store and run copy-protected game CDs and DVDs as virtual drives on your hard disk, visit FarStone (http://www.farstone.com).

Making your legitimately purchased games run faster by storing them as virtual drives is completely legal. However, the game industry fears people will illegally give away copies of the virtual drive files containing copies of copyrighted video games, and they’re probably right.

Besides SafeDisc 2, some additional copy-protection mechanisms designed to defeat virtual drive programs include SecuROM (http://www.securom.com), CD-Cops (http://www.linkdata.com), and LaserLock (http://www.laserlock.com). Still, despite the prevalence of so many different copy-protection schemes, programmers keep updating the software that allows people to duplicate copy-protected CDs or to run copy-protected CDs as virtual drives.

Besides relying on copy protection, video-game publishers are using lawsuits to thwart video-game piracy. Atari, Electronic Arts, and Vivendi Universal Games recently teamed up to file a lawsuit against 321 Studios, which marketed Games X Copy, a program that could duplicate copy-protected CD and DVD games. In the lawsuit, the game companies claimed that “321 Studios’ actions directly violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) . . . which prohibits trafficking in products or services that circumvent technological protection measures designed to prevent unauthorized access to and copying of copyrighted materials.” 321 Studios eventually went out of business.

While legal action may prevent companies from selling programs that can copy game CDs, there will always be programs available that can copy CDs and run copy-protected games on virtual drives. To find programs that can duplicate copy-protected CDs and DVDs, visit BurnWorld (http://www.burnworld.com) or use your favorite search engine to look for the phrase CD copying or DVD copying. Many individuals create CD and DVD burning tools and give them away for free, while many companies incorporate in other countries and sell their products over the Internet, thereby circumventing U.S. copyright laws. By using programs that can copy and run copy-protected CDs and DVDs as virtual drives, you can stay one step ahead of the latest copy-protection mechanisms that may be stopping you from playing the games you own legally (or illegally).

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