Posted 09/28/08 at 09:02:56 AM by Justin Kerr

NBC has lost many battles over the past few years, but it looks as though it might actually win the war over its copy protected media. Executives from the company claim to have found a “template” for protecting their videos from piracy, and it appears as though it’s actually working. You may have noticed lately that copy protected content from NBC and others have been slowly drying up from video swapping sites like YouTube, Dailymotion, Veoh and even Soapbox. And as a result, NBC has been very vocal about the fact that it is generally satisfied with the new systems these services have put in place. As proof NBC cites its recent successes in controlling content from the both the Olympic Games and select Saturday Night Live clips. Clearly NBC views YouTube and other similar services as the primary battleground in protecting their content and attributes a large percentage of online video piracy to being committed out of convenience. According to Rick Cotton NBC’s general council; "What has happened up to now is the ability to access and download infringing content has been trivially simple, and the lesson it teaches people is that if it's that easy it can't be wrong,". NBC however seems to recognize that it needs to find alternatives to these services or risk pushing users to harder forms of piracy such as Bit Torrent. Arguably its full length episodes at both nbc.com and hulu.com do just that. Only time will tell if NBC’s main beef was truly over controlling its content, or simply locking it down to traditional distribution models.

Does the end of copy protected media on sites like YouTube put the death nail in user submitted video? Hit the jump and let us know what you think.

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2

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Software, copy protection, youtube, browser, nbc, olympics, Hulu

Posted 09/25/08 at 02:00:00 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

My question regards backing up games using tools like ImgBurn and Daemon Tools. I use ImgBurn to create the ISO from a disk and Daemon Tools to mount the ISO. But for some reason, with half of my games I get the message “Please insert the original disk” when I try to run the game from the ISO. My method works with older games but not newer ones. I understand that some of these games might have some kind of protection on them preventing me from running them off an ISO, but I paid for these games and I should be able to create backups of them. Do you know how I can back up my games so they actually work?

Gotta go forward to go back, Christopher - hit the jump for the answer.

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3

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games, backup, copy protection, ask the doctor, iso, daemon tools, imgburn

Posted 09/16/08 at 10:35:37 AM by Paul Lilly

Game publisher Electronic Arts has been catching a great deal of flak over its decision to saddle Spore with SecuROM inspired DRM. What was to be a hotly anticipated creature creator game now stands as a product to be made an example of by angry PC gamers who have the nerve to want to be treated like a consumer rather than a potential thief. Well over 2,000 Amazon 'customer reviews' have Spore pegged with a 1.5 star rating, most of which feature angry rhetoric over Spore's DRM, which limits users to three activations As one reviewer put it, "this basically means that you are actually RENTING the game, instead of owning it."

But is EA being unreasonable? The publisher claims the three PC limit essentially represents a balance of meeting the needs of the largest portion of its user base while still limiting piracy. EA notes that, according to its own stats, less than 25 percent of its customers ever activate a game on more than one machine, and those that wish to activate on more than three accounts fall into the under one percentile.

Hit the jump to see what else EA had to say on the matter.

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31

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games, drm, copy protection, Electronic Arts, EA, Videogames, spore, securom

Posted 03/30/08 at 03:01:57 PM by Zack Stern

Hollywood math: HDCP + AACS = PITA²

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0

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drm, encryption, mpaa, copy protection, HDCP, bd+, aacs, slysoft, anydvd

Posted 08/29/07 at 12:40:00 PM by By Mark Soper

Apparently unfazed by its 2005 music CD rootkit fiasco, Sony's MicroVault USM-F fingerprint reader/USB drives install a rootkit on your PC. Should you worry?

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10

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windows, sony, malware, antivirus, rootkit, copy protection