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State of the art annoyances

Current game copy protection schemes are usually pretty obstructive. Nowadays being lucky means only a key, a DVD check, and monitoring the existence of virtual DVD drive software. Requiring a key is acceptable, DVD checks are annoying and slow down the startup of the game, and the last thing... how is that supposed to help anyways? If you can create a 100% identical image, you could just burn that. I never understood that part. Those few cents aren't really an obstacle.

Or if you take a look at DVD movies: not directly transferable (e.g. if you want to copy something on a portable player to watch it on the train), unskippable FBI warning messages & ads, region codes, and of course some horrible menus.

Audio CDs are also quite "funny". If you buy one with copy protection, you aren't really getting a CD, because it isn't conforming with the Red Book (audio CD standard). To make matters worse these non-CDs contain a lot of intentional jitter bugs. Basically it's half broken to begin with, it only works thanks to the error correction (which is almost at its limit), and it also won't work in all players.

The flaws of DRM

DRM is inherently flawed. While it does use cryptographic concepts, the basics of information theory were completely ignored.

Let me illustrate this issue: Alice sends a message to Bob and Eve intercepts that message. Thanks to encryption Eve cannot read that message, because she doesn't know the key. When it comes to DRM Eve and Bob are the same person, however. As you can imagine this doesn't really work. If you can decrypt the data, you can also make a decrypted (DRM-free) copy.

The freedom to do things differently

The big problem with all these schemes is they annoy the customers to no end. To make matters worse: illegal copies have the added benefit of omitting all of these nuisances. Annoying the honest customers and rewarding those who didn't pay? That doesn't really sound like a good idea if you ask me. It should be the other way around surely.

I wondered if there is a scheme which reverts the whole situation; thus adding benefits to the consumers while degrading the experience with pirated copies. One thing which came to mind is automatic profile synchronization.

There is a limited number of save slots or profiles (e.g. 3) and these profiles are automatically synchronized with a central server as illustrated by the following diagram:

In this slightly extreme case all 3 profile slots are in use. Alice even uses 2 different machines to play the game. She could even use 5 or 10 if she wanted to. And so could Bob and Carol. There is no restriction whatsoever (apart from the limited number of slots) and sharing a single copy with your family or friends is even encouraged.

"And how exactly is that supposed to protect anything?", I hear you ask. Well, it's simple. It's only suitable for games with valuable game-saves. E.g. if there are many things you can unlock with lots of hard work. If the key is given away to too many people, they unlock stuff for each other, progress the story, or even reset everything again. It ruins everything. But it's even better than that - they ruin it for themselves. Over and over again. :)

On the side of the paying customer we even get some added benefits:

• free game-save backups (they can be pretty valuable)
• synchronization between different machines
• sharing the game with friends and relatives (they can also split the money if they like)
• being allowed to install it on several machines (e.g. desktop and laptop)
• and you even get a hint of viral marketing on top

Of course there are some downsides. It doesn't work for all kinds of games, smaller indies cannot afford the server costs, and it also may raise privacy concerns. Nonetheless it's pretty intriguing, since the "protection" is only a side-effect of a useful feature.

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