now now, they aren't bad people, just really stupid.

I mean even if they didn't lose any sales because of the DRM it costs money to maintain those servers

Free culture may have to wait a while
 

I just thought of a cool and maybe useful anti-piracy measure. Imagine the install comes with a simple, randomly generated captcha that you have to repeat. And to read it you need 3D goggles. Really you just need a mess of overlapping red and green text, maybe some parts you read with your left eye and then your right to make it extra secure.

Yeah, people can make their own 3D goggles easily or get them elsewhere. But let's face it, most people won't. You might run it through an image editor to solve it, even with a three minute time limit, but again that's an effort only a minority would manage. Producing a crack would involve the kind of cutting-edge image recognition software that spambot companies pay top dollars for, I don't see that happening. And 3D goggles are cheap and also fun. Everyone wins!

Actually producing a crack would just involve taking the installed game, putting it in a zip, and sending it onto the internet.

If you can play the game, the game is on your system in its full playable glory. If that is true then it can be copied in its full playable glory. If that is true, there is no way to stop pirating.

I guess. Though some games complicate that by installing themselves in various parts of the computer. Some registry editing perhaps? Or maybe people could live with repeating the process once per month or so.

(I want my 3D goggles damnit.)

I guess that's why developers were kind of hopped up on that service or whatever that was supposedly going to let people play games remotely on a server. That way they don't have a physical copy to fiddle around with.

Except me, lacking any kind of depth perception at all. (Lazy eye that could not be corrected surgically.)

Cries silently in corner.

SWB

the idea is good, but cracks completely by-pass the security measure. Though it might work if you combine it with something like Steam, where the verification system and the game are seperate so you cant just slap an .exe file into the game program

All steam released games are cracked.

I didn't say use steam I said use a system outside the game combined with some physical security system. So they cant just by-pass the need for the physical one. I think a multilayered but relatively simple verification system would be better. You dont need to make piracy impossible, just make it more of a hassle then getting it legit. Having to deal with two cracked files and a serial generater as opposed to just popping in a disc and entering a code