Companies are using a new software protection system, called Fade, to protect their intellectual property from software thieves. Fade is being introduced by Macrovision, which specializes in digital rights management, and the British games developer Codemasters. What the program does is make unauthorized copies of games slowly degrade, by exploiting the systems for error correction that computers use to cope with CD-ROMs or DVDs that have become scratched. Software protected by Fade contains fragments of "subversive" code designed to seem like scratches, which are then arranged on the disc in a pattern that will be used to prevent copying. Bruce Everiss of Codemasters says, "The beauty of this is that the degrading copy becomes a sales promotion tool. People go out and buy an original version." (New Scientist 10 Oct 2003) <http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994248> steve