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Protecting Games before they hit the street

According to this BBC article some 50,000 copies (or about $3 million worth) of the game were being downloaded at one point on Sunday, August 1st, two days before it was scheduled to appear on store shelves.

Something is needed to protect this intellectual property even during the development cycle not just after it’s boxed and being placed on shelves. One technique we are looking into at Uniloc is investigating how to do polite machine activation that puts the brakes on mass distribution without the strict “one license – one machine” mantra that is seen on so many of the consumer software publishers activation systems.

Polite activation’s psychology is to capture every copy of a game on every machine (ie know where they are) but don’t police the copies until the copy count gets really stupid. Its pretty easy to see the difference from a gamer who owns his own in home multi-player network and a posting on a P2P network… and then just turn the offending serial number off…. The bottom line is to not confuse fair use with an excuse to force every punter out their to pay for a copy of a game for every machine they own or want to show off to a family member.

What say you… are we off our rockers? Please comment we’d love to hear what you say about this…

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