this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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Valve's DRM was inspired by an exec's nephew, who 'used a $500 check I'd sent him for school expenses and bought himself a CD-ROM replicator… he sent me a lovely thank you note' (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
47 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/24356878

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[–] [email protected] 98 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I had a friend back in the early 2000's who did this.

He paid for this way through school by abusing the schools T1 access and pirated shitloads of movies and would dump them all to DVD-Rs and then sell them on ebay. He wouldn't make exact DVD rips, he instead would fill the DVD with tons of different movies or shows and sell them as collections. He did especially well with anime, which was difficult to access in the US at the time.

He later went on to be an electrical engineer at Boeing.

I also remember people hating Valve at first for this DRM scheme, and it's also weird that people forgot that Steam itself is a minimally invasive form of DRM.

[–] [email protected] 72 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Back then everyone had enough sense to hate all DRM.

Now they'll complain that Linux sucks because it can't play the harry potter game

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I pirated that game just so I could critique how god damned bad it was.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

buying a game doesn't give you the right to be cruel.

both things are free. Enjoy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

When I tell people Lemmy is like the old internet, I'm going to use this specific comment chain to demonstrate it.

[–] [email protected] 98 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (10 children)

What does she mean there was a "generational shift" that led to people burning CDs? Back in the floppy disk days, everyone was copying floppies—I remember when my grandfather bought a Mac to use at home, and immediately his friends at work loaded him up with copied disks. Which generation is she thinking of that wasn't pirating a ton of software?

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Generational shift means kids bad and stupid. That's all.

A tip for millenials: Whenever you cringe at zoomers for their dumb tiktok dances, remember the badger song and realise every generation is stupid and cringe.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Or just search millennial humor on TikTok and die. Recently tried watching SNL with the family and I cannot understand that humor at all.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Man, any of that comedy central pop comedy stuff... Older movies too, Adam Sandler, Chris Farley... I don't get any of it and that stuff pretty much was my time. It's like people just acted really stupid... There was not any comedy to it, it's just feels sad.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

You don’t like Chris Farley? Not all of his stuff but some of it is funny in Billy Madison

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

Same, I think some people find some things funny and some don't and it isn't all about generational cohort

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

I've never heard of any badger song.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Badger?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Gotta be this

It predates YouTube and would loop forever.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I thought it was gonna be the horse song

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What’s the horse song

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Hehehehe yeah you put it on full blast in your buddy’s dorm when he’s down the hall in the bathroom

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Mushroom

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

MUSHROOM!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

That’s so funny that millennials cringe at zoomers, because I have always found millennials to be infinitely more cringe than zoomers have ever been.

[–] prodigalsorcerer 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Don't copy that floppy!

I think the generational shift was mostly that the previous generation just didn't have or use computers at home, and suddenly they were everywhere. Most households just didn't have a computer until the late 90s or early 00s. By then, floppies were on their way out, and burning CDs was all the rage.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

For a class project in college, I made a 5-disk raid-0 out of floppy drives and demo'd the performance by playing a compressed version of "don't copy that floppy" for the class. Thankfully my lecturer had a sense of humor lol.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

There was a period of time where a game being on CD was enough to prevent most copying. Games would read data off the disc, and some of those that didn't need to still required the disc to be in the drive.

When CD burners became cheap enough for everyone to own, they needed new methods of DRM, like authentication, and custom burning methods that couldn't be copied the normal way.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

CDs absolutely influenced the scale and speed of it. And it was a generational shift that went from piracy being something that wasn't well understood and mostly a niche issue for music and movie lovers ("home taping is killing music") to something that impacted all types of media.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

MP3's sped up copying of music. As for games though, they increased in size because of CD's so that countered any speed up.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

Yeah I'm not sure "generational" is the correct term here. It was often the same people living through those eras (and beyond) who were doing the pirating. It wasn't a generational shift in that different generations were necessary for CDs to get copied; everyone in every generation was changing how they operated as technology changed. Piracy naturally evolved with the times. Because of course it did. Why wouldn't it?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

right? I had more games for my C64 than any system since

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The heady days of using Copy-b and Copy-c in the Commodore 64 days. Back when floppies were really floppies.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Friend of mine we by to the store to buy c64 games on tape. Took them home, copied them using a thing that would connect to datasette units at once. Went back to the store to return our exchange.

After a few rounds of this, the store said no more exchanges

Then he recorded a few seconds of silence somewhere on the tape and said 'but it's defective'.

Man. We were high rollers.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

I made so much money in high school downloading MP3s or anime from Napster/Kazaa/Limewire and burning then to CD/DVD since I was, like, the only kid in town with a computer, access to the internet, and a DVD burner. I remember getting asked how my parents let me get away with it and I was like "my dad is the one who taught me how to do it!" He was always borrowing games or music from co-workers. He got the DVD burner to make copies, since DRM was basically non-existent at the time for a majority of games. S'how we had Quake!

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago

Same. We even had a music store in the UK, called Music Zone, this place would let you buy a CD and if you didn’t like it you could return it and get a refund and then rinse and repeat.

As for parents. Mine had no clue what I was doing on the computer, but even when they learned due to all the people coming to the door, they were pretty chill.

It got bad when our ISP would charge us for excessive downloads.

[–] sik0fewl 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Of the 50ish Amiga floppy disks we had, I think Bubble Bobble was the only one my dad actually bought.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If you don't mind me asking, were you on dial up, DSL, or coax?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

IIRC, we first got DSL when I was just leaving junior high. Or maybe when I was a sophomore. I really don't remember when, but when I was doing most of this downloading, it was on DSL. When we still had dialup, I couldn't even reliably play UO all weekend (first-world problems, AMR?), because we only had 1 phone line and someone would eventually need the phone.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, downloading on 56k was not fun. My average per song was 1 hour, which I thought was decent considering it was free. My house got an additional line just for internet.

We eventually got a coax modem, I was at high school at the time when we went high speed too. I felt like I was in the future. Lol.

What I missed was losing access to AOL sites though but now that I look back, those were kinda trash.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Oof. I'm guessing your modem wasn't actually connecting at 56k then. Or anywhere near it. I was able to get a 3-5 megabyte mp3 in about 12-20 mins max using my dial up service. This is using Napster.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

I never thought to check my speed when I had a 56k modem. Interesting.

You are probably correct that I never got full speed.

[–] SplashJackson 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

UO, respect.

Kal Ort Por

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Kal Ort Por

Hehe reminds me of my Hide macro. I would make it bow 3 times and say "Kal Ort Por" before hiding, so people would think I teleported away when being chased by PKers in Felucca. 🤣

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 week ago

Obligatory Goldberg link since lots of people these days are still unaware that SteamWorks DRM is easily bypassed these days (you don't even need to patch the files, you can just bypass it).