Preventing game piracy: Digital Rights Management

Here is a template to upload driving forces.

Description:

The next generation game consoles are introducing a radical new anti-copying strategy: Digital Rights Management (=DRM). DRM is an umbrella term for any of several arrangements which allows a vendor of content in electronic form to control the material and restrict its usage in various ways that can be specified by the vendor. It is the science, art, and business of managing digital goods so that all of the participants in the digital goods chain win:

• Consumers win by getting a good, perhaps novel product or service at a reasonable price.
• Distribution and infrastructure providers win by getting paid to facilitate the distribution of goods, and perhaps by additional related interactions with their customers.
• Content owners win by getting fairly paid for their efforts, and by having new, innovative distribution channels available to them.

The theory behind DRM is that it tries to prevent illegal copies of a particular console game. But how should this work in practice? At first illegally copied games protected by the system work properly , 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, according to the developers. It also 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. And because players get addicted to the game, they will go out and buy an original version of the game.

Enablers:

• The increasing use of Peer-to-peer technology
  
• Bittorent and bittorent programs
  
• The low costs of DVD recordable
  
• The increasing use of DVD-writers
  
• The increasing use of Modchips and emulators
  

Inhibitors:

• Time will lead to introduce new chips and emulators that could crack and disable the DRM in the future
• China as the most dominant piracy market in the world
• Increasing development costs of games

Experts:

Macrovision - developers of DRM for game consoles
http://www.macrovision.com/

Timing:

The development of Emulators - a brief history
1980 - The starting point of the emerging emulators is the Atari 2600. At that time it was the most popular game console on the market. The emulator was used to allow games from other hardware to be run on the manufacterer's device. The main purpose of the emulator was to attract more customers.

1990 - The first non-commercial console emulators began to appear. This was mainly developed by amateur programmers to deduce the exact workings of a console through reverse engineering. After a period, these emulators could reproduce the workings of the Nintendo NES, Nintendo SuperNES, and the Game Boy.

1997 - The release of NESticle. The start of a revolution in the emulator industry. This was mainly caused by the ease of use and unrivaled compatibility with ROM images. Moreover, this encouraged also other developers to test and experiment with console emulation.

After 1997 - Emulator developers are becoming better equipped and skilled. The differnce in time between the release of a game console and the development of a emulator is getting smaller. This period is also the introduction of old-school games on emulators.

The development of Modchips - a brief history

Web Resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4248
http://www.info-mech.com/what_is_drm.html