Online games seem to have it the easiest. Games like Eve-Online.. you can download the client for free.. but you need an active account to play.. It's impossible to pirate because there's nothing to copy that you can sell or use without an account.

I can't think of a decent system that doesn't have some penalty for the average user or require a constant service to be provided from the vendor.

I've seen all manner of Anti-Piracy techniques in my time, from plastic lenses you put over a box on the TV to help to unscramble a code on the screen to badly printed code sheets, black paper with gloss black ink that can only be read at an angle, in good light.. but defeated photocopiers..

I could never get the Lenslock thingy to work, it required some sort of voodoo majeek to get it working that I never understood. Probably involving bouncing a laser off a full moon or something. The codesheets are great for someone with perfect vision but make the game useless as soon as the codesheet is lost/damaged. Some games used images and codes in the manual to be looked up.. but it's all hassle.

Long ago, On my old Spectrum, the big companies would use extremely sensitive tape recording systems so that if you recorded the tape to another, it wouldn't work.. but it just meant that the chances of it not working on some legal persons PC were higher.. again, the regular joe suffers.

All of these techniques rely on something tangible, Something physical, something else.. which is not the game. which can be lost/destroyed or stolen. Does this mean the license to play the game is the protection itself? When the means to authenticate the game have dissappeared, so does the right to play?

If I build protection into a game which relies on a server and a database to generate keys and keep track of legal versions, then that's an expense that I'd have to pay and as soon as it becomes unprofitable to keep that server running, it would be shut down. If this server authenticates each time the game starts, that's it.. game's dead. No more.. finito.. unless, someone hacks it, removes the copy protection and releases a version on the net. Or I release a version without protection.

It is a good reason to not include protection in the first place.. but then there's no incentive at all to buy the game.

Unless I provide a free download for the demo and then only let registered/paid up members download the full game.. what a dilema..