Technological Protection Measures in Video Games Thread

Hey peeps. I am doing my honours this year and my thesis will focus on copyright issues regarding video game piracy. I will not go into the specifics yet considering my supervisor and I are still trying to pinpoint what exactly should I be discussing in 20,000 words. Pretty daunting but I'm up for the challenge .

I write to you fellow gamers because whilst I can easily find information regarding statute and case law that intends to protect video game consoles and punish those who infringe on these protections, the technological part of said research is not my forte. At this moment I intend to write about the technological protection measures of all video game devices, hence from PC's to consoles and handheld. The IEAA supplies some nifty stats and facts about piracy, as well as the office of the Governor-General website. I wish to concentrate only in Australia but alas it seems I might need to branch out to U.S.A cases as they tend to create the precedents for these issues.

So to end this rather long rant, it would be extremely helpful if anyone can help me out with my research regarding the technological protection measures for video game consoles, and maybe even in games. In other words, what measures do Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft and video game developers use to protect the devices and games from pirates? Websites, illustrations, interviews, articles and statistics would be great!

I won't always be online here so if you want to speak directly to moi, please contact me in msn: verdan069@hotmail.com or add me in steam (which I prefer): ChinoRaval. I promise that all of you will be the first to read my thesis and helpers will get an honorary mention in my thesis well .

Thanks a lot!

Edited by: Ice_Cream_Man

If you wanted a two-sided argument, you chose a bad topic. There are fairly few positive reasons why modern publishers have chosen to adopt their (beyond ridiculous) "security" measures. I'll rummage for you some procon articles. I've read quite a few recently.

It's not really an argument. I will merely state how and what law-makers and developers implement to protect the copyrighted material. I am surely not planning to compare but rather provide a detailed explanation. Thanks for your input though.

Basically, a large portion of protection techniques usually break the CD/DVD standards which cause problems with some devices. Others methods use access keys or content encryption. Currently, to my knowledge, most if not all protection techniques can be defeated; either through software countermeasures (usually PC based), or with mod chipping (game consoles), which are designed to circumvent the protection systems. Mod Chipping is illegal in Australia.

Wikipedia has a general overview and external links to more reliable and "trusted" sources (find the links in the page for each copy protection technique):
En.wikipedia.org

I could also recommend a very good and thorough website; It has a large list of different techniques and has detailed information regarding each technique:
Cdmediaworld.com

I will provide more information if needed or requested. By the way, your forum signature animation is quite disturbing...

Thanks for the awesome input Scarecrow . I've been reading the Cdmediaworld website and it's extremely helpful!

No problem, glad to help.