If you have legally purchase a copy of copyrighted material what can you do with your copy.
No! As much as some large corporations would like
to have you believe, it is not illegal to circumvent copy protection to
"computer programs and databases, protected by access control
mechanisms that fail to permit access because of malfunction, damage or
obsolescence."
In other words if you legally own a copy of a
program and cannot access it because the protection scheme
malfunctions, is damaged, or is obsolescent, then your are allowed to
circumvent that protection scheme. This does not mean you can
make copies to sell or give away; that is a violation of copyright and fair use.
For example, a while back I purchase a copy of Darkstone, which featured SafeDisc copy protection. This copy protection scheme is flawed in that some CD-ROM drives (such as my Pioneer) could not successfully read this disc. I have paid my money for a copy of game which I cannot access. With the exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act from the Library of Congress it is perfectly legal for me to circumvent SafeDisc.
I'm not the only one with problems with SafeDisc. If you believe the numbers on Macrovision's website, that it is 99% compatible (I don't think that number is that high) and it is on 140 Million discs; then users of 1.4 million CDs can't access the programs they have legally purchased! At fifty buck a CD that represents a total investment of $70 million.
It can cause a blue screen of death on XP system. You also have to be an adminstrator to install, or remove the program. Good job! I pay fifty bucks for a program to crash my computer.
We are aware of a potentially serious compatibility issue that is resulting in system instability/blue screen on Windows XP and Windows 2002. Currently, this issue seems to be appearing in some newer game titles. We have confirmed that a particular version of Macrovision's Safedisc 2.0 that ships with many newer game titles is responsible for this compatibility issue. Microsoft has been working closely with the Macrovision development team to address this issue and a resolution has been accomplished. An updated driver that corrects the issue is currently available for download at http://www.c-dilla.com/support/safedisc.html.
Also, it has been reported recently in PCGamer that disabling SafeDisc will result in a 20% improvement in speed (that's an extra 5 to 10 fps).
Those pesky End-User License Agreements that you always just click "OK" on without really reading. Most if not all limit what you can do with a particular program.
As stated in "Section 6" of the Microsoft End-User License Agreement (EULA)... you are allowed to make a backup copy of the product for archiving purposes only. However, the original program CD-ROM is still required to install or run the program.2
Pardon me for asking but what the hell good is a backup copy when you still need the original to install or run the program.
Two solutions present themselves to the problem of backing up a game CD. One is how to back a working backup copy of the disk itself. The other is to modify the program code to bypass the CD verification during startup.
It appears that making a CD or bypassing the copy protection is legal. This will likely void your EULA which then tries to take away your rights to your copy. The courts have yet to decide if the EULA's (especially those you cannot review before buying the package) are legal.
I am not a lawyer, this is just the interpretations of the law as one rational and reasonable citizen sees it. I definitely have no moral qualms about bypassing copy protection for software that I legally have purchased. Now, if you are looking to obtain a copy without purchasing it then that is both illegal and immoral.
