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Replying To:
Remember Lotus 1-2-3 (none / 0) (#1)
by Anonymous User on Thu Oct 02, 2003 at 10:10:34 AM PDT

In the 1980's, a friend of mine made part of his living by installing Lotus 1-2-3 on PC/XT hard drives for his clients so that they would not need the original floppy disk in the slot ALL THE TIME when it was being used. This was the Lotus copy protection scheme and it was awful. My friend had patched Lotus 1-2-3 so that it did not look for the floppy at all. He made sure that there was an original 1-2-3 disk for each machine, to be perfectly ethical, but he didn't actually have to do that. It's just that he was an authorized Lotus distributor and his edge was making it work better on his client's computers. As you say, DRM only hurts the honest customer but does not deter a real counterfeiter. All the counterfeiter needs to do is bypass the DRM checking code for the copies they sell. If they actually did a good job of this, I might be more inclined to purchase a DRM-crippled version instead of the official DRM-encumbered version from Symantec.


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