[RincewindTheWiz]

GTA3's 1.1 patch was intentionally without any protection. There are lots of games where the protection (mostly safedisc 2) is disabled in a later official patch, presumably either because they got fed up about customers complaining they couldn't use their legally bought games with their own dvd/cd/cdr-drives, or maybe because they don't think it's worth the expensive upgrade of safedisc protection when the game has been out for a year and won't sell in any great numbers anymore. You should ask the companies themselves, but they probably won't tell you. Maybe in this case the new safedisc version wouldn't work on too many legal customer's drives ? The GTA3 patch was not an accident, since there never was a 1.1 patch released that had a safedisc copy protection, nor was there a v1.2 or later patch released with safedisc protection.

As a counter example, we have the 1.14 english patch for Arx Fatalis. As some people in another thread have discovered, some gamer sites hosted a patch that was released too soon by JoWood and didn't include the Securom New protection. You can see this was accidental because they also released a protected 1.14 patch that's on lots of other sites. I don't know if the unprotected patch is still up anywhere, but I'm convinced they made a mistake there. Since there never was another patch for GTA 3 that included copy protection, and no other version of the same v1.1 patch WITH copy protection, we can assume that they decided they didn't need that safedisc version anymore. Since they released that 1.1 patch within the full price cycle of the game, my only conclusion can be that they had way too much problems with that safedisc version.

Edit : to get back to Flashpoint, it's very probable that Codemasters decided they didn't need safedisc anymore since the game is now effectively no longer a best selling, full price game anymore, and believe me, including safedisc 2 in their official patches must have cost them a lot more money to be paid to C-dilla.