The Paradox of Copy protection!

[Marxian]

In recent weeks I have bought OpFlash, MS Train Sim, Conflict Zone and Emperor, and all failed to work on either my NEC DVD drive or my HP9100i burner. This I can only attribute to my hardware's inability to read these games.

The irony is that a real hard core pirate would no doubt have a rig that can detect and copy such games, while a poor ba####d like me is penalised for doing the right thing!

Being in country Australia I have to make a 200km round trip to EB for my games for the local 'Harvey Norman' chain doesn't take back games if they work on their ninja systems, which of course they do.

The paradox is that while a pirate has probably copied these games to his heart content and not paid a dime, the game companies, the resellers etc. have all missed out on a cut of my $90Aus, when I had to take back these games!
Sure I could buy a new drive that reads these but what happens in 6 month when Safedisk3 comes out? Will I have to get yet another drive?

Sure I could trawl for hours looking for a no-cd patch and get another one for every update of the game but why should I have to? And there's no guarantee that these cracks are available or even work for a particular game! In the case of Emperor, I can't even get the setup screen so I can't even use a no-cd patch!

Frankly it sucks big time and I shudder to think how little my respectable rig may be able to play over the next few months!

The pirate lives on, the revenue from legit users dries all because of crap unreadable protection!

There surely has to be a better system! After all, ####ing with the CD itself seems harldy a good idea.