Yo ho ho and a bottle of ROMs! Nolan Bushnell, speaking yesterday at a Wedbush Morgan Securities conference, advised attendees that a new chip, shipping on new PC motherboards, will finally eliminate software piracy at home and abroad. According to the report on GamesIndustry.biz, the new chip is such a foolproof system that software publishers will even begin to see profits from markets in Asia and India — areas where, currently, piracy is rampant and unchecked.
Bushnell told conference-goers, of the new chip:
What that says is that in the games business we will be able to encrypt with an absolutely verifiable private key in the encryption world - which is uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords - which will allow for a huge market to develop in some of the areas where piracy has been a real problem.
I’m all for folks getting paid for their products, but don’t underestimate “people on the internet,” Nolan. Rest assured, there will be do-it-yourself guides to circumventing your awesome chip within a month. Yes, it’s very likely that this new “foolproof” measure will thwart a few casual pirates, but the people it’s mostly going to thwart, as always, are your loyal, paying customers.
Maybe there’s something about this chip that I don’t know, but I’m going to assume that the way it works is that the software will bind itself to the machine based on the chip’s unique ID. Congratulations, anyone whose motherboard needs to be replaced! You get to buy all your software again! You must feel great about this unique opportunity to stimulate the economy. What’s that? The companies will allow you to reinstall their software after a lengthy, time-consuming, and frustrating re-validation process? That’s nice of them! It’s lucky that they won’t ever stop supporting your particular favorite game or go out of business or anything. Goodness knows that would be a pain!
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