What is Copy Protection?
Copy protection comes in many forms. Its primary purpose is to prevent a person from making a perfect copy of the original. Since the creation of CD burners this technology allows copyright owners to prevent someone from making copies of their intellectual property and either giving them away for free or selling them at a cheaper price without paying royalties to the copyright owner.
The binary information can always be copied, so the manufacturer makes the operation of his program dependent on the presence of some physical key which cannot be copied. He does this by changing his software so that it cannot run unless some sort of initialization is performed, adds additional program code, called the guard module, which carries out the necessary initialization if and only if it detects the presence of the physical key. In a few words : “Copy Protection is a modification to the original code to make it dependent on some external action, a guard module to provide the necessary action when it detects the key & the key itself.” How does it work? All copy protection schemes must have these three parts in order to work. If any part is missing, the scheme fails : Dependency on External Action The original software must be changed in some way so that it will not run without the action of the guard module. This could consist of merely including calls to the guard module in th
“Copy Protected” discs are non-standard discs on which corrupted information was added to a multimedia section on the discs to prevent their use on computers and computerized devices, to prevent copying of material from the disc. Unfortunately for the consumer, these discs will not play on computers and may not play on some car CD players, DVD players and older CD players. Click here for additional information.
