but this brings fort the legal issues.
If the re-implemented driver only allows the user to play the game, and not to make a perfect copy of the CD, there is no legal issue.
On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 15:13, Ivan Leo Murray-Smith wrote:
but this brings fort the legal issues.
If the re-implemented driver only allows the user to play the game, and not to make a perfect copy of the CD, there is no legal issue.
I don't think there's any legal issue anyway. There are no laws against cracking copy protection unless you're in the states and it's got encryption.
Now, pirating stuff *after* you broke the protection is illegal of course, but we have nothing to do with that, and besides, in practice I doubt it'd help anybody who did want to pirate stuff.
It might be possible to reverse engineer the current safedisc 1 and 2 protections and include the code in wine. The problem is that the new version (a snapshot of it was used at the time in flashpoint) is less nice. Nowadays when you for example use a crack the game works or doesn't work. The new safedisc is really nasty. When you apply a crack (or perhaps our upcoming safedisc driver) the game starts up no matter if the crack is really correct or not. During the game you will know if the crack was correct or not. When you play using an incorrect crack the game will slowly become unplayable. For example the keys to finish the level will disappear or you can't aim anymore..
Perhaps the "solution" is to write a wrapper to load secdrv.sys and friends. Perhaps in a way like that ntfs emulation project works (it uses a reactos kernel) or perhaps using an emulator like qemu.
--- Roderick Colenbrander thunderbird2k@gmx.net wrote:
Perhaps the "solution" is to write a wrapper to load secdrv.sys and friends. Perhaps in a way like that ntfs emulation project works (it uses a reactos kernel) or perhaps using an emulator like qemu.
Yes it should be possibe to adapt the work of Jan Kratochvil's Captive NTFS project to let you load the safedisk driver under Linux rather than the Windows NTFS driver. I have not tested loading the safedisk driver under ReactOS but I dont see why it wouldn't work.
http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/
Thanks Steven
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On Wed, 5 Nov 2003 02:29, Mike Hearn wrote:
I don't think there's any legal issue anyway. There are no laws against cracking copy protection unless you're in the states and it's got encryption.
You want to be careful here. There's also laws in Australia against bypassing a "technological protection measure". Actually, the laws are against "manufacturing" a "circumvention device" (as well as some other commercial conduct in relation to such devices). If Wine included software that checked and used the copyright protection information on the CD, there would be no problem, but if it were to fake it without checking the CD, there would be problems with some activities in Australia.
On the other hand, *using* a circumvention device is legal.
See: Sony v Stevens [2003] FCAFC 157 http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCAFC/2003/157.html
And the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) ss10, 116A http://scaleplus.law.gov.au/html/pasteact/0/244/top.htm
As for cracking the copy protection by modifying the code, that is creating a derivative work, which is also potentially infringing, but this will depend on some fairly fiddly details of laws that will vary a lot from one country to another.
El mar, 04 de nov de 2003, a las 16:13, Ivan Leo Murray-Smith escribio:
but this brings fort the legal issues.
If the re-implemented driver only allows the user to play the game, and not to make a perfect copy of the CD, there is no legal issue.
I think that the actual status is even worse, because now only the people with a modified exe can to use wine to run it (what includes to the pirates, but not to the people who owns the original :(
Regards, Carlos.
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Carlos Lozano -
Ivan Leo Murray-Smith -
Mike Hearn -
Roderick Colenbrander -
Steven Edwards -
Troy Rollo