> I'm by no means an expert on copyright law or copy protection, but I think
> that using any method other than writing directly to the MBR with those copy
> protection measures would be illegal because writing to a file (registry,
> wine-only proprietary db or any other type of file) as opposed to writing to
> the mbr like the copy protection is supposed to could potentially reveal
> data that the copy protection companies don't want being revealed, and
> therefore that would end up making wine a possible target for aiding
> circumvention. Sure there are tools out there that crackers use that read
> the mbr and store it in a file, so that they can circumvent the copy
> protection, but that has nothing to do with wine.

Could you not say the same thing for vmware or any other virtual
harddrive application?

Technically yes, but the difference is that VMware actually writes _everything_ into that one file vs wine proposing to write just what is written to the boot sector into a file..

The reason it is different, is because it is much more difficult (if not impossible) to tell what is boot sector and what isnt if you have a file that contains an entire drive's worth of data.