What can Developers & Publishers do to combat Piracy?

[Woodsey]

Not make shit products.

Not provide shit "services" (GfWL).

Not treat paying customers like twats.

 

[WOPR]

I have a great idea! It's unconventional, but it'll work. Trust me.

Okay, so you know how, like, making a game means it'll eventually get pirated? Well, my idea is simple: Stop making games. It'll work. No more pirating can be done on new products, because, you know, there won't be any new products to pirate!
...
...
I got nothing.

How about do what LoL does?
Make the game FREE
...then add a ton of purchasable add-ons and features
It would be impossible to "pirate" something that's free, and if people tried to hack their account, the developers would have it on record when they got the massive boost due to online connectivity.

also
Captcha = Robbery temporary
ironic on a pirating thread...

 

[Jaime_Wolf]

The future is largely unknowable. It is very possible that unbreakable DRM could eventually exist. It's questionable that it could exist given the current computing and legal environment, but both of those environments will necessarily change. Future architectures might make tracking of filesharing much more feasible or might make encryption less useful for instance.

And if you jump off a building, you might be able to fly. I wouldn't hope for it, and I certainly wouldn't try it, but you might be able to.

Just because nobody's been able to do it before doesn't mean it won't happen in the future, yes. A trite but pointless argument in this case.

The very concept of uncrackable protection is pretty laughable. They've already touted "uncrackable" protection a few times, but it's as viable as an unsinkable ship. We don't know the future, but we can reasonably predict certain things. Maybe someone will learn to walk on water (without assistance). We can't rule it out definitively, but the odds it will happen are pretty terrible. The odds that technology develops in such a way that one can create but not bypass or crack DRM is pretty unlikely. You have as good a chance as sucking the planet through a straw.

It's questionable that it could exist, period. Not in the current environment, in any real environment.

So basically, your speculation comes down to "because magic."

I disagree fundamentally.

In terms of cracking it and accessing the content, that's probably the case. I should have been more clear - I meant detecting people who have cracked it, which is considerably less unthinkable. Imagine something as simple as processors that track instruction sequences and send samples off to a database for comparison. It would be an unfortunate development to be sure, it would require a tremendous amount of overhead, and I imagine there would certainly be people producing hardware to get around it, but it would be much harder to avoid than current schemes. If we really do reach a point where computation speed makes overhead for things like this relatively trivial and we're in a similar political climate, these things are unfortunately not hard to imagine.