I have a feeling that a post is missing, or I read it somewhere else?
It was something about that companies have to make some kind of protection. If not for anything else, just for setting apart the legal and illegal versions if there's any chance for any level of jurisdiction. (copied it from an unedited post of mine).

If you are going to take people to court for pirating the game -- which is unlikely -- then proving that you implemented both detection and countermeasures can help when it comes to the judgement.

Several laws require that there were effective deterrents in place, no matter how minimal they were. Basically it's the difference between stealing an unlocked bike vs. stealing a bike secured by a simple lock; the second is considered worse because the action required breaking a deterrent.



Unless the OP is part of a business he is unlikely to ever encounter it. If the OP is part of a business that is willing to spend the fortune in suing pirates then it becomes a question for management to discuss with their lawyer.

I'm curious about these example you mention. Can you name any such DRM success stories?

Two of the Football Manager games contained quite friendly approaches one year after the other and this was generally thought to have been done quite well. Even if you google you can probably find (as I did when I was following it) positive reactions, debates where even naysayers are defending it and even comments along the lines of 'I hope they do it this way for next years release'. People actually asking for DRM was quite unprecedented.

Alpha Protocol from the same company did an even friendlier implementation of the same, however by that time the solution (and I can't remember the name of it) had been cracked. Alpha Protocol was therefore cracked quite quickly and the nice DRM was really overlooked, which is a shame really because it could have set quite an example for the industry. However the original Football Manager that used this didn't have a crack for several months. There were 'cracks' out there...but they didn't work that well and you can imagine how much interest that result generated.

Either way, these are examples where the limits of the DRM were quite reasonable and nobody was 'punished' as people like to say. The solution was based on 'online' but there was also a workaround for those who didn't have an internet connection. Sega even removed the DRM when it was deemed to have done it's job, which is a really good attitude to take considering online DRM because it means the games can be played 10 years down the line.

Good DRM is possible but it really requires taking the legitimate customers needs into account in full and it requires effort and a good attitude from those enforcing the DRM. Most DRM has just overlooked this, hence why it's just a bad word nowadays.

I am usually pissed off by the "any idiot can crack it so companies are idiots to try to protect it" attitude.

For the record/if it makes you feel better, I know what you mean. I have a basic objection to the same statement, not because I am offended by it...it's more because the statement is commonly used and really...trite and irrelevant.

Really, it's quite a logical statement - if it's cracked so quickly then indeed why bother? Only, for the statement to actually have relevance it would have to be true all the time...and there are success stories out there. Unfortunately some people would even go as far as saying that being crack free for almost a year rendered the effort of putting the protection in to be pointless though, which of course would certainly not be true in that case.

Bear in mind that there's a lot of PR noise behind protection. A lot of this 'it's evil' type of thing is indeed trite, but ultimately the source of such comments is really one of people trying to generate negative PR because they feel their rights are violated, or worse...they have some personal gain.

Often this isn't the crackers BTW. A lot of them are just interested in cracking, not piracy and others really are just interested in removing bad DRM which is somewhat understandable. Some of course use this as an excuse to crack and pirate but I genuinely believe this is a minority - most crackers are very decent and talented people.