My anti piracy mechanism not only stops a program (no music/movie and O/S)from loading on even a second PC, but also displays a message while attempting to load, that this CD has been loaded on one PC and will not load on this PC.It can also be configured to display in whose PC it has been loaded. Additionally this can also be configured to send an email/legal warning notice next time when connected to the internet.
To test this, I need a program along with its programmer. This mechanism is to be written in the program itself. My mechanism is not a seperate program by itself.
I am in no hurry to sell this now. I have gone thru all patents on this subject. Nothing comes close to this. I am not a computer man. I work in a pharmaceutical company in-charge of distribution,production planning and related services. Our task force is about 700 people and we are growing at 50% annually.I don’t get any time to update my anti-virus also.

But I will appreciate if you send me your opinion at kgiyer@hotmail.com

K.Ganapathy

I’m also one of your skeptics in that an uncrackable method to protect games from piracy exists. So prove us all wrong and release a sample of your system to the world. If no one can break it, you’ll be more credible and companies will be willing to buy your software/idea. Until then saying you have an uncrackable mechanism is nothing more than vaporware.

K.Ganapathy

the game industry can try to pull out the best strategy out of the Sun Tzu war manuel, somebody is gonna crack the games regardless. and PC is not only the victim, consoles are catching it too. just look up any popular game in any torrent site. its availiable in raw file. all you have to do is snag it. thats right, snag it! and if you are a true computer whiz and know a thing or two about files and imaging, its cake.

but you still got those other millions who don’t use torrents and the games still generate mad revenue and its not fair to make stuff too complicated for the “honest consumer”. so what are these greedy game industries complaining about? more money for a private jet? if they think these delays are an effort to say “confuse” these Jedi piraters waiting for the release date like vultures in the Mahabi desert, they are stupid. they are only hurting themselves. and its simple, release the games, stop complaining make money.

One example I can think of is for making special content, or even main game content, only available to users with an internet connection to a main server. For example Spore (http://www.spore.com) is going to be an offline game, but new game content will be developed by players and uploaded and downloaded automatically to a server. Because of this frequent connection to the server, illegitimate programs (e.g. duplicate serials, or other forms of identification) could be blocked from accessing this content, minimizing the user’s enjoyment of the program.

I know that for other games most servers block illegitimately acquired software from playing multiplayer on official servers, which I think is an effective deterrent. Although there are work-arounds against this, like unofficial servers, or spoofing the server.

Other then the issue of anti-piracy, there are definitely other assets that need to be considered for a PC-game that was not discussed in the post. For example, game producers will want to protect game related data such as user info, source code and etc. from potential adversaries such as competitors or malicious users(especially in multi-player games).

StarForce uses a device driver in Windows, going thru other drives at a kernel level. This could compromise the user’s system if it had a vulnerability.