User:JamesTDG/Imformal software ownership article

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Chapter 1 - Incarnation

In the days of old, software used to mean something. You bought it, and it just did this magical thing, it worked. No stupid subscriptions, no needing to phone home to some shady server, you had the disc and you could use it in any way you wanted to. Unfortunately, as-is the mandatory requirement for companies to maximize shareholder value under the current global economic model, this changed. Companies wanted every penny they wanted, and that meant the introduction of Digital Rights Management.

The model was simple, to prevent a clone of the software from running, it demanded something that could prove that the code was not an illegitimate clone. At first glance, it would seem like a necessary evil, the honest consumer bought the thing and the pirate was stuck with something effectively useless. In 1979, the first attempt at antipiracy was established via Microsoft, with the game Microsoft Adventure on the Tandy TRS-80. At the time, the majority of computer games available to the consumer market was in the format of text-based adventure games, akin to the popular choose your adventure books. Microsoft Adventure's format of anti-piracy was unique, modifying how the floppy is read on boot to prevent traditional duplication software from viably making illegal copies. This measure, while capable of successfully blocking duplication, would soon be bypassed by Nick Andrews, an Australian who reverse engineered the copy protection for sake of maintaining a backup of the game. Andrews would then modify the game's code so that it could be duplicated onto standard floppy disks, notably producing the first software crack at the time.

While reordering tracks acted as an effective copy-protection scheme, it was clear that it was at best a temporary solution that would only work at most a few times, thus publishers took alternative routes. In the early 1980s, DRM shifted towards verifying the legitimacy of the product, rather than outright trying to block the game from being duplicated, especially due to the rising frequency in floppy and cassette media being duplicated. Commonly, this format of DRM leveraged the physical existence of the product in some manner. The title Jet Set Willy featured possibly one of the most frustrating attempts, where the cassette inlay featured a color-coded chart and force the end-user to match random colors on boot of the game with the chart. This format of DRM also had severe accessibility issues, as individuals who are colorblind, had monochrome displays available at the time, or simply lost the inlay, either struggled with or outright couldn't play the game that they purchased. The effectiveness was questionable at best due to the fact that the chart itself was also easy to duplicate.

Chapter 2 - Physical confrontation

It was clear at this point that end users were duplicating most anti-piracy tools, since manuals could be easily duplicated on top of the media the game was being distributed on, in some cases, users even simply wrote down the specific words/phrases from these manuals when distributing duplicates. Towards the mid-1980s, companies tried bundling in various physical add-ons to their games to force duplicates to be nonfunctional. While many devices were made, the effectiveness was leaning towards questionability, especially since much like manuals and cassette inlays, these too were easy to lose, and in some cases, even break or wear down past functionality over time.

In 1985, ASAP Developments released LensLok, a cheap physical piece of DRM meant to decipher a pattern on the user's monitor to generate a 2-character security code to enter. It was a small red plastic device made of prisms that the user placed on their monitor to find the hidden message. The first game to feature the usage of this tool was on the Commodore 64 and ZX Sprectrum releases of Firebird's Elite. In a demonstration by Modern Vintage Gamer, LensLok was exceedingly frustrating to work with, often having the end user failing with the hardware. This frustration essentially necessitated legitimate owners of Elite to obtain cracked copies of the game simply to avoid potential loops due to the unfair nature of the tool. ZX Spectrum users in particular would be the most punished by this format of DRM, as if they failed to pass the DRM check, they would need to go through another 10 minute load of the cassette just to play the game. LensLok was also the subject of controversy due to the fact that each lens was designed to be bundled with the specific license it comes with, as the game could simply be paired with the wrong lens.

One of the other common physical pieces of DRM was the code wheel, originally a tool meant to encode/decode messages using the Caesar Cipher, these cheap paper tools were meant to decipher a random code given to the user by the game's DRM, and let the user pass for that play session. While not as frustrating as its contemporaries, it had the same follies shown from having the end-user clone the wheel via photocopy, or more effectively, write down every possible combination that can be generated by said wheel into a spreadsheet. The game Falcon tried to sneak around attempts to photocopy the code rings by using extremely faint pigments for the functional parts of the ring and use nonstandard characters as well, but the wheel itself can become an accessibility nightmare if the wheel faded or the user was vision impaired. Interestingly, some games recycled existing code wheels, meaning users could more effectively share certain copies of games with each other. Delphine Software's Another World in 1991 used a symbol-only based code wheel with a physical design meant to have the be wheel as difficult as possible to duplicate.

In 1991, Robocop 3 had a tie-in game release on the Amiga, Atari ST, and MS-DOS platforms, and featured a physical dongle which had to be inserted into the user's second joystick port in order for the game to launch. Ocean intended for the dongle to be so complex that in their own marketing materials, they boasted that it would take several months to crack. It was cracked by the team Fairlight in about 5 hours and mass-distributed across BBSes a week before launch.

Chapter 3 - Cat & Mouse

Physical components, while somewhat effective to prove that the end user owned a legitimate copy, suffered from a crisis where if those physical components were lost or damaged, the game itself is rendered unplayable. This can most often be seen from the 2nd-hand market, where users could obtain games that were out of print, something that was common since not all games were sold for a prolonged period. This is likely where the birth of software cracking groups occurred, as these users most likely were forced to crack these games. A pirate is simultaneously bored and lazy, and bypassing anti-piracy measures acted to fulfil both tenets, since these tools acted as a puzzle to solve and also made it so the user could more readily access the game.

Most often, games that relied upon manual DRM were the first to be cracked, either because the systems themselves were trivial, or because the game wouldn't work otherwise. The introduction of LensLok likely bred a new tenet of piracy into the system however, spite, as the implementation of it was either improperly set up, or just plain frustrating for the end-user to follow through with. Publishers would need to react fast to this trend though, because honest consumers were effectively being punished while users with cracked copies could get along with a more functional game. This became a cyclical fight between publishers attempting to block pirates and pirates finding new methods to defeat the DRM.

One of the first pieces of software to proactively fight against unofficial copies of games being distributed was introduced in the mid-1980s via Copylock, being used commonly among publishers. It was probably the most effective manner to prevent illegal copies at the time, since it was designed around Amiga & ST hardware to only be able to read the serial and not write it on track 0. Cracking groups at the time understood the intricacies of the hardware however, leading to games being cracked in an exceedingly short period of time and widely distributed across the internet, in some cases leading to games being cracked before they were on store shelves.This was a significant cycle between publishers and pirates though, as new manners to detect unofficial clones began to appear, and a quirky phenomenon occurred where incomplete or improper cracks would act faulty because of certain measures in place, and the gameplay would degrade over time.

One of the first hardware-based DRM techniques was introduced by Nintendo in the Family Computer/Nintendo Entertainment System in the late 1980s. In 1985, the CIC chip was patented, which was meant to exist on both official cartridges and the console itself as a lock-and-key mechanism to ensure that legitimate software was being run on the console. If an inserted cartridge failed this check, the console would be stuck in a boot loop until it was turned off. There were various methods to bypass this chip however, such as abusing voltage spikes to effectively knock out the lock chip or using an official cartridge alongside the original as a "donor". Atari uniquely manufactured their own custom CIC chips after extensive reverse engineering to bypass Nintendo's own measures. Various owners of NES consoles who were interested in direct homebrew would often cut the reset pin from the chip inside their own consoles, however Nintendo would respond by having code in their games that was meant to detect the CIC's functionality in the console, and would simply not run if that chip was tampered with.

Even arcades were not safe from these measures. Capcom, SNK, among other arcade manufacturers were known for hardening the security of their games against bootleggers via various pieces of hardware. Most would design the game so that a critical function of the game, such as the tracks of a racing game in SEGA's [insert game here] or forcing enemies to be unable to fire in [company]'s [insert game here]. Most notoriously however was the introduction of RAM chips in arcade cabinets to combat bootleggers, which unlike with previous measures, carried a significant risk for cabinet owners, since the functionality of the game was tied to a battery on the RAM board that would give out within a couple of years. Dubbed the "Suicide Battery", it became infamous for both halting unofficial bootlegs at the time, as well as also making legitimate copies also be broken. SEGA was the first company to implement such a measure in 1987, where the battery kept the RAM going so that it could carry the necessary data to decrypt the ROM. Depending on what CPU was in the epoxy block with the battery, the game either could lose all sound, or worse, the whole console became useless when the battery dies. This is one of the first examples of anti-ownership being applied against consumers, albeit likely unintentionally.

Chapter 4 - Collateral damage

It was not long until the prolonged war between pirates and publishers would scorch the earth against the average consumer, and the birth of the compact disc and subsequent spread globally only helped to exacerbate this problem. Protection Technology's StarForce became one of the largest assaults against the average consumer, being reported to damage computers, leading to cracked licenses being legitimately safer than any official game with this DRM. StarForce discs are encrypted, while the CD itself acted as the decryption key for the encrypted files. Splinter Cell Chaos Theory released in 2005 with the third revision of this DRM, taking over 400 days to crack on PC. How it was able to survive so long against cracking groups at the time was related to the device drivers that are embedded with StarForce, and this was one of the first ever piece of kernel-level anti-piracy software. What's worse is that the end-user was not informed of the install/presence of StarForce, so far as to exclude its mention inside the End-User License Agreement.

The classification of StarForce as beyond DRM, but instead malware, was discovered by users uninstalling games and the driver software for SF remaining on their machine. The issues did not end there, users with PCs that had multiple disc drives had to physically disconnect any extra disc drives from their system, otherwise the game would refuse to launch. StarForce was additionally included on game demos, intended by publishers to stop the abuse of them to find clues to crack the main releases. Other common reports included reduced CD ROM speeds, blue screens of death, and random reboots. Smaller reports included the DRM prohibiting users from listening to audio CDs due to it disabling DMA on Windows machines. These problems culminated in a 2004 lawsuit against Ubisoft for their usage of StarForce in their games, as it was discovered that the DRM could be abused to inject malware into users' PCs.

StarForce did not take the criticism from users lightly, threatening lawsuits over harassment against users and major critics, such as Cory Doctorow in early 2006. Additionally, the company claimed that despite no mention of StarForce in the EULA, because the end-user agreed to the installation of the software, that StarForce was not in the wrong for any damages caused by the software. This is possibly the earliest example of the critically bemoaned "EULA roofie" associated within entertainment software:

There is no legal concern because before a user loads a game, he or she has agreed to accept the conditions of the end-user licensing agreement, typically known as a EULA. These are also known as click and go, or click and accept agreement. When you accept, you are saying I will load this game or application at my own risk, and have read and understood the terms. Or there will be a disclaimer that protects the publisher from damages of any kind due to their products' use. Our product is licensed to our customers, and becomes part of their product, so the user by accepting the terms, is giving approval. - Abbie Sommer

During this time, DRM evolved to have so much complexity, that it birthed a new problem, dependency. One of the greatest flaws of SecuROM was exactly this with the advent of Windows 10, where old drivers and security features introduced to the operating system led to SecuROM becoming unplayable. Other flaws with the software included issues with the optical drive, conflicts with software, and installation limitations. One of the worst examples from SecuROM was with Electronic Arts' Spore in 2008, wherein the game was required to phone home to servers operated by EA to sustain functionality. The implementation was so abhorrent for legitimate license holders that it held the throne for "most pirated video game", and it is unknown if any other game since Spore has achieved a larger record. The flawed DRM went so far as to additionally spark class action lawsuits the same year the game released.

The software cracking scene was essentially critical during this period, since NoCD cracks are the only way users are able to play games dependent on these cracks in general.

Chapter 5 - Wildfire

In the late 2000s, games began becoming reliant on phoning home to servers for their functionality. The tamer part of the spectrum required just a temporary online validation just to get the install to function, however, worse actors hinged their functionality to always online DRM. While internet access was at an uptick during this time, many consumers faced metered connections from their ISPs, and suffered the most from this kind of DRM. It has been cited as a prevalent reason for many users opting to pirate certain games, especially since rural users either had no internet access or spotty access at best. It was roughly a decade later that "smart" devices would also begin growing in popularity, IOT hardware's largest perk, which would also be discovered to also be its greatest drawback, is its dependency on the internet, and in the 2020s, this internet dependency has turned into a form of DRM against the end-user.

It is an expectation that there is no effective way to preserve internet infrastructure for the end-user, however as publishers wanted to force the end-user to verify their licenses by having their software phone home to these servers, it was to be expected that these games would stop functioning as well. Notably with the death of GameSpy's server hosting service, countless games lost any functional multiplayer, including Gearbox's Halo CE and EA's older Battlefield games. The GameSpy servers themselves acted as a form of DRM to force multiplayer-only titles like Battlefield 2142 to be unplayable. The largest ownership loss incident to-date however was the slow death of Games for Windows Live, which led to hundreds of games reliant on the always-online DRM to be unplayable, especially including Microsoft-published releases for PC like Halo 2 Vista and Fable III, which require the end-user to patch out the DRM to retain access to these games. Smart hardware, such as cameras sold by Wyze, Echoes sold by Amazon, and even smart plugs have faced equal fates, where they are dependent on servers that either can shut down or the companies stop supporting older versions of the hardware. Generation 1 Amazon Echoes were sunset by Amazon in 20XX,and the bankruptcy of Pebble led to their smart wearables losing all functionality.

Even worse scenarios have occurred, where previously purchased hardware was subverted into being dependent on a paid subscription model, such as the bankruptcy of FutureHome leading to smart devices sold by the company being bricked unless end users paid for a subscription to retain full functionality of their hardware.

The dependency on the internet for entertainment software has additionally led to the death of the 2nd-hand market for software. With the birth of Steam in 2003, digital software shifted towards a model where each license could only realistically be tied to one end-user. Even as Valve continued to sell physical copies of their games, these physicals were dependent on phoning home to Steam to verify the purchase, and worse, these physical licenses locked their functionality to only one end-user as well. This proliferated to other publishers as well when they wanted to have a slice of Steam's market share. When Origin launched in 20XX,physical games on PC such as Battlefield 4 repeated this same exact model.Ubisoft's uPlay (launched in 20XX) had the same measures in place, such as what could be seen on the box of Anno 2204.