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New Scientist has a piece on Fade, a new protection system for games developed by Codemasters. Fade forces the copy of a game to slowly deteriorate, so that while the game is in play, the player slowly loses control over character, or weapons or cars, whatever the player is doing in the game. The idea is that pirated copies allow users to play for a while, but once the person is "addicted," the game stops working, forcing the person to go out and buy or rent the game lawfully.
The idea intrigues Alistair Kelman, an independent lawyer who specializes in copyright: "Fade is entirely in keeping with the spirit and great traditions of copyright." He points out that books tend to deteriorate with use and this prevents the secondhand market from competing with the market for new books. Why not the same for software?
The difference is that the book is still readable, even in used form, all the way to the end. If Fade is used just to affect pirated copies of games (they plan to release a DVD version next year), fine, but if it begins to be used on lawfully purchased games, DVD's, music, whatever, I think people will not like it. DRM often conflicts with people's ideas of what they can do with their purchases. Example, restrictive DRM that does not allow them to make fair use of the work has infuriated people, causing lots of frustration, bad press and in some cases, damage to PC's (from some CD protection devices sold recently).
On the other hand, if Fade works like SunnComm's CD copy-protection technology, which can be disabled by holding down the shift key, as reported earlier this week by Alex Halderman (a student of Ed Felten's), it may not be worth anything.
Hiawatha Bray/Boston Globe has SunnComm's response: ''There's nothing in his report that's surprising,'' said SunnComm president Bill Whitmore. ''There's nothing in the report that I'm concerned about.'' Whitmore said his company's system is simply supposed to give honest music lovers a legal way to make copies for personal use, not to stop large-scale piracy.
As Ed Felten notes, if the goal is to do as Whitmore says, all that's needed is to give people ordinary, unmodified CD's. The same may be true for Fade games, because the really big pirates that put a dent in the biz, will figure out a way around it. They are pirating the games after all, so anti-circumvention laws don't really have much effect if they can get around the software protection scheme. And then all you succeed in doing is frustrating the less technically adept, regular paying customers.
Posted by Mary Hodder at October 09, 2003 07:25 AM