One superb copy protection technology !!!

Software pirates who make illegal copies of a particular computer game are finding the games companies are coming up with a radical new anti-copying strategy.

Illegally copied games protected by the system work properly at first, but start to fall apart after the player has had just enough time to get hooked. As a result, the pirated discs actually encourage people to buy the genuine software, the developers say.

The new protection system, called Fade, is being introduced by Macrovision, a company in Santa Clara, California, that specialises in digital rights management, and the British games developer Codemasters, based in Leamington Spa. It makes unauthorised copies of games slowly degrade, so that cars no long steer, guns cannot be aimed and footballs fly away into space. But by that time the player has become addicted to the game.

Fade exploits 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. The bogus scratches are arranged on the disc in a subtle pattern that the game's master program looks for. If it finds them, the game plays as usual.

When someone tries to copy the disc on a PC, however, the error-correcting routines built into the computer attempt to fix the bogus scratches. When the copied disc is played, the master program then cannot find the pattern it is looking for, so it knows the disc is a copy.

Similar technology is being planned for Dvds as well wherein the movie stops playing after a key plot.