The luser will think it's worth buying their own copy after getting addicted to the game. ... So the rub, is that copies are allowed to be made, but unless cracked,

At 04:22 PM 10/13/03 -0400, Sunder wrote: the

copies are nothing more than time limited demos.

What's wrong with these things? They're not fraud.

The only way that this could work is if they put up some sort of splash

screen at some point to let the luser know that the program isn't buggy, but that the copy protection noticed it's a backup.

Which trivially eliminates your objections to the user thinking something is wrong.

As usual, the real loser is the original purchaser, because if he scratches his CD, he's out $50-$70 or whatever games cost today, and he

can't make backups.

Yes. The company *should* swap scratched originals to preserve this backup right, but I don't think they're legally required to. And the company won't be around forever, whereas backups can, so the swapping plan is inferior. *However*, as incrementally clever as this scheme is, it is succeptible to a CD dupe program that is bit for bit correct, no? And since the protected software *checks* the CD for the errors, than a CD bit-for-bit copier *must* be able to be written, no? Or is there a problem writing intentional-errors on consumer-grade CD burners? (If so, this is a good marketing tool; if not, this is going to be cracked.)