Copy protection, also known as content protection, copy prevention and copy restriction, is any measure to enforce copyright by preventing the reproduction of software, films, music, and other media.Thomas Obnigene, DVD Glossary , filmfodder.com 2007. Retrieved 19 July 2007.
Copy protection is most commonly found on videotapes, DVDs, Blu-ray discs, HD-DVDs, computer software discs, video game discs and cartridges, audio CDs and some VCDs. It also may be incorporated into digitally distributed versions of media and software.
Some methods of copy protection have also led to criticism because it caused inconvenience for paying consumers or secretly installed additional or unwanted software to detect copying activities on the consumer's computer.
Terminology
Media corporations have always used the term copy protection, but critics argue that the term tends to sway the public into identifying with the publishers, who favor restriction technologies, rather than with the users.Confusing Words and Phrases that are Worth Avoiding , GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF). Copy prevention and copy control may be more neutral terms. "Copy protection" is a misnomer for some systems, because any number of copies can be made from an original and all of these copies will work, but only in one computer, or only with one dongle, or only with another device that cannot be easily copied.
The term is also often related to, and confused with, the concept of digital rights management (DRM). DRM is mostly a more general term because it includes more broad management of rights such as video rentals that can expire after a given amount of time. Unlike DRM, copy restriction may include measures that are not digital. A more appropriate term may be "technological protection measures" (TPMs),How do technological protection measures work?, World Intellectual Property Organization which is often defined as the use of technological tools in order to restrict the use or access to a work.
Business rationale
Unauthorized copying and distribution accounted for $2.4billion per year in lost revenue in the United States alone in 1990,Greg Short, Comment, Combatting Software Piracy: Can Felony Penalties for Copyright Infringement Curtail the Copying of Computer Software?, 10 Santa Clara Computer & High Tech. L.J. 221 (1994). Available at: http://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/chtlj/vol10/iss1/7 and is assumed to be causing impact on revenues in the music and the video game industry, leading to proposal of stricter copyright laws such as PIPA.
Copy protection is most commonly found on videotapes, DVDs, computer software discs, video game discs and cartridges, audio CDs and some VCDs.
Many media formats are easy to copy using a machine, allowing consumers to distribute copies to their friends, a practice known as "casual copying".
Companies publish works under copyright protection because they believe that the cost of implementing the copy protection will be less than the revenue produced by consumers who buy the product instead of acquiring it through casually copied media.
Opponents of copy protection argue that people who obtain free copies only use what they can get for free and would not purchase their own copy if they were unable to obtain a free copy. Some even argue that free copies increase profit; people who receive a free copy of a music CD may then go and buy more of that band's music, which they would not have done otherwise.
Some publishers have avoided copy-protecting their products on the theory that the resulting inconvenience to their users outweighs any benefit of frustrating "casual copying".
From the perspective of the end user, copy protection is always a cost. DRM and license managers sometimes fail, can be inconvenient to use, and may not afford the user all of the legal use of the product they have purchased.
The term copy protection refers to the technology used to attempt to frustrate copying, and not to the legal remedies available to publishers or authors whose copyrights are violated. Software usage models range from node locking to floating licenses (where a fixed number licenses can be concurrently used across an enterprise), grid computing (where multiple computers function as one unit and so use a common license) and electronic licensing (where features can be purchased and activated online). The term license management refers to broad platforms which enable the specification, enforcement and tracking of software licenses. To safeguard copy protection and license management technologies themselves against tampering and hacking, software antitamper methods are used.
Floating licenses are also being referred to as Indirect Licenses, and are licenses that at the time they are issued, there is no actual user who will use them. That has some technical influence over some of their characteristics. Direct Licenses are issued after a certain user requires it. As an example, an activated Microsoft product, contains a Direct License which is locked to the PC where the product is installed.
From business standpoint, on the other hand, some services now try to monetize on additional services other than the media content so users can have better experience than simply obtaining the copied product.
Technical challenges
From a technical standpoint, it seems impossible to completely prevent users from making copies of the media they purchase, as long as a "writer" is available that can write to blank media. All types of media require a "player"—a CD player, DVD player, videotape player, computer or video game console—which must be able to read the media in order to display it to a human.
At a minimum, digital copy protection of non-interactive works is subject to the analog hole: regardless of any digital restrictions, if music can be heard by the human ear, it can also be recorded (at the very least, with a microphone and tape recorder); if a film can be viewed by the human eye, it can also be recorded (at the very least, with a video camera and recorder). In practice, almost-perfect copies can typically be made by tapping into the analog output of a player (e.g. the speaker output or headphone jacks) and, once redigitized into an unprotected form, duplicated indefinitely. Copying text-based content in this way is more tedious, but the same principle applies: if it can be printed or displayed, it can also be scanned and OCRed.
Copying of information goods which are downloaded (rather than being mass-duplicated as with physical media) can be inexpensively customized for each download, and thus restricted more effectively, in a process known as "traitor tracing". They can be encrypted in a fashion which is unique for each user's computer, and the decryption system can be made tamper-resistant.
Copyright protection in content platforms also cause increased market concentration and a loss in aggregate welfare. According to research on the European Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market on platform competition, only users of large platforms will be allowed to upload content if the content is sufficiently valuable and network effects are strong.
Methods
Computer software Copy protection for computer software, especially for games, has been a long struggle between publishers and crackers. These were (and are) programmers who defeated copy protection on software as a hobby, add their alias to the title screen, and then distribute the "cracked" product to the network of warez BBSes or Internet sites that specialized in distributing unauthorized copies of software.
Early ages When computer software was still distributed in audio cassettes, audio copying was unreliable, while digital copying was time-consuming. Software prices were comparable with audio cassette prices.Copy Protection: A History and Outlook http://www.studio-nibble.com/countlegger/01/HistoryOfCopyProtection.html To make digital copying more difficult, many programs used non-standard loading methods (loaders incompatible with standard BASIC loaders, or loaders that used different transfer speed).
Unauthorized software copying began to be a problem when floppy disks became the common storage media. Copy protection does not exist on CP/M. For other operating systems, the ease of copying varies; Jerry Pournelle wrote in BYTE in 1983 that "Apple users ... have always had the problem. So have those who used TRS-DOS, and I understand that MS-DOS has copy protection features".
1980s Pournelle disliked copy protection and, except for games, refused to review software that used it. He did not believe that it was useful, writing in 1983 that "For every copy protection scheme there's a hacker ready to defeat it. Most involve so-called nibble/nybble copiers, which try to analyze the original disk and then make a copy". In 1985, he wrote that "dBASE III is copy-protected with one of those 'unbreakable' systems, meaning that it took the crackers almost three weeks to break it". "The only real effect of copy-protection is to inconvenience honest users", Edward Mendelson wrote in The Yale Review: "Publishers like Microsoft assume you are (1) a crook who will pirate their program, and (2) an idiot who won't know how". IBM's Don Estridge agreed: "I guarantee that whatever scheme you come up with will take less time to break than to think of it." While calling piracy "a threat to software development. It's going to dry up the software", he said "It's wrong to copy-protect programs... There ought to be some way to stop [piracy] without creating products that are unusable".
Software vendors disliked piracy, but did not attempt to sue the vendors of nibble copiers because copyright law allows users to produce backup copies of software. Unlike music piracy, no significant software piracy market existed. A more serious problem was a company or other large organization purchasing a single copy of an application and producing many copies for itself. Philippe Kahn of Borland justified copy-protecting Sidekick because, unlike his company's unprotected Turbo Pascal, Sidekick can be used without accompanying documentation and is for a general audience. Kahn said, according to Pournelle, that "any good hacker can defeat the copy protection in about an hour"; its purpose was to prevent large companies from purchasing one copy and easily distributing it internally. While reiterating his dislike of copy protection, Pournelle wrote "I can see Kahn's point".
After Sheldon Richman wrote in 1985 about unexpected messages ("The Shadow knows. Trashing program disk") and sounds occurring during use of a legitimate copy of a Microsoft application, the company removed copy protection from some software. Jeff Raikes of Microsoft attributed the messages to a former employee. A 1987 Computerworld survey found that Lotus 1-2-3's copy protection was the top complaint, with one customer stating that it "just makes life miserable for people". Lotus said that it would remove copy protection on future releases of the software. (The United States Air Force preferred non copy-protected software, affecting vendors' bids to sell products like 1-2-3 and competitors to the military.) In 1989, Gilman Louie, head of Spectrum HoloByte, stated that copy protection added about $0.50 per copy to the cost of production of a game. Other software relied on complexity; Antic in 1988 observed that WordPerfect for the Atari ST "is almost unusable without its manual of over 600 pages!". (The magazine was mistaken; the ST version was so widely pirated that the company threatened to discontinue it.)
Copy protection sometimes causes software not to run on clones, such as the Apple IIcompatible Laser 128, or even the genuine Apple IIc, or Commodore 64 with certain peripherals.