Viewing Thread:
"Eradicate Piracy"

How many people only a bought a playstation when it surfaced that, a little chip or "Cheat cart" could let them play back-up games, which a mate of a mate could get. With-in a couple of years of this the cd-r market was in lift off. But wait who made the best cd-r's and the best cd-rw drives to back up Playstation games, Sony. Sony knows fine well that it made a back-door killing on the playstation through piracy. 75 million ps's sold worldwide, but the number of games sold is minimal for a figure this size. Sure it would have made more money if everyone had bought all of the original games and piracy ad never existed, but in reality it wouldn't. Now everyone knows someone with a CD-r drive, everyone knows someone who copies games and anything else worth making money from. Even sales on the dc picked up once the news that pirated games had been produced whilst the n64 fell by the wayside. But at least Sega had made a valiant effort to curb piracy by producing GD-Roms. One of the first big news stories about the ps2 other than record numbers being bought worldwide, was the fact that it could be chipped. Piracy is a scurge on the face of gaming, even the most law abiding of people seem to have a disregard for thier morality when it comes to piracy. I'm sure once the ps2 drops in price that sales of pirated games, cd-r's and cd-rw drives will again hit record levels worldwide, as people will not be so worried about having to replace faulty ps2's out of thier own pocket. But at £300 each they'd think twice. Here is where console manufacturers are in a catch 22 situation, high console prices and low software prices inhibit piracy, but they make very little money, as do the games firms themselves. Low console prices and high games prices sends piracy through the roof. Sony made a lot of money out of the Playstation because early on it was expensive and there was little piracy, no one had really thought of it. Now, people will hold off buying games and consoles until it is as cheap as possible foe them to break the law but still make great games.

But how does the games industry stop piracy???

You really don't have much of a clue do you??

How much can they be? It would be very small, and nothing like as sophisticated as a camcorder's

A digital camcorder has a ccd head, you plum.

Just upgrade the laser detector slightly. It just uses a very small part of a camcorder.

Yep, but a laser cannot read wavelengths of light, can it! You would need to put a ccd into the drie head.

A CD is purple because it only reflects blue and red light. So, shine yellow or cyan light onto the disc and if you get back light at the same wavelength as green it's authentic. Simple.

How can you read the colour of a cd? You would need to put a ccd head into the cd drive and the cost would go through the roof, it may be a good idea but it's not the way the PS2 works, which was my point.

But still, why isn't it a good idea to read the colour of the CD?

Do you know that black CD-rs have been on sale in Dundee for almost 3 years, you're playing catch up slowly.

I realise that every medium; Floppy, DVD, CD or MD has a TOC that indicates what format it's in.

The thing is, a TOC can be pirated, but the colour of the actual disc can't. Do you know, a black CD has only just come out on the market now?