Only customers hate DRM, pirates remove it – this is how one developer summed up the current state of software protection from piracy. In summary, the current state of anti-piracy in the PC game industry is:

1. DRM efforts have largely failed to protect vendors’ legitimate rights because they are rapidly cracked
2. They have contributed to destroyed customer relationships and trust by impinging, inconveniencing and even impugning honest customers
3. Annoyed and hostile gamers publicly vent their outrage and fury on game suppliers and DRM suppliers via portals, blogs and message boards
4. Impacting honest users tends to shift their sympathy towards the pirates rather than the developers and publishers. In effect, onerous DRM legitimizes piracy – because with pirated copies you avoid the hassles DRM imposes

How did technologies and efforts designed for the benefit to the industry instead become the enemies of the software business? And how do we fix it? This whitepaper draws from multiple sources across the PC Games industry to answer these questions and it can be downloaded from http://www.byteshield.net/byteshield_whitepaper_0005.pdf

ByteShield, Inc. http://www.byteshield.net