[DECtalk] decTalk and speech-fx-inc

[Don]

On 7/23/2019 6:11 AM, Jayson Smith wrote:
> So in the end, even though you never denied me the use
> of my car in any way, shape, form, or fashion, you're still guilty of theft,
> because you have benefited from that which was not lawfully yours to use.

"No one was USING the lobby of the bank, last night, officer.  Being homeless,
I figured it would be a nice, safe, warm place to sleep.  I was going to
make sure I'd left -- and cleaned up any mess I might have made -- before
the bank opened, in the morning!"

> Now to address your recent message about matter replication being commonplace.
> Obviously if and when matter replication at a level anyone can use becomes a
> reality, there will be a major disruption in many industries. For a while,
> people will replicate anything they want, anytime they want. But eventually,
> laws would be put in place to control the sale of replication technology and/or
> punish illegal replication. And manufacturers would probably try all sorts of
> tricks to defeat replication technology, and we'd be right back where we are
> today with digital goods (books, music, movies, software) where there's a war
> going on between those who make these products and those who would make a quick
> buck by selling, giving away, or just using illegal copies.

A lengthy anecdote follows.  skip ahead for the "bottom line"

The early 1980's was the heyday of video arcade games.  Players wanted
new games almost every week!

An arcade piece would cost the owner/operator about $2000, at the time.
Not a small investment when you figure you need 8,000 quarters just to pay
off that initial purchase -- before you've even started to turn a profit!

It takes a fair bit of effort by a number of people to create a video
game -- not to mention the manufacture, marketing and distribution!
There are circuit boards to be designed, debugged and manufactured.
Graphics for the on-screen action.  Graphics to adorn the cabinet.
Marketing materials, advertisements in trade magazines, etc.
Software to implement the game play.  Audio and sound effects
to complement the visuals.

And, you're always facing the risk of whatever is "in" suddenly becoming
"out" in terms of player tastes.

One way to cut those costs and development times was just to clone
someone else's work!  Maybe make some cosmetic changes to the
cabinet's graphics.  And, change the sounds or "character graphics".

And, definitely, change the copyright notice displayed on the screen!

You don't have to be greedy; you can reduce the price of your product to
reflect your lower costs!

Think about it... legitimate vendors are competing with their own products
at a considerable pricing disadvantage!

So, you can either leave that market -- which leaves the counterfeiters with
nothing to copy and leaves the players crying because they've nothing NEW
into which to drop quarters.  Or, you can try to make your product more
difficult to COPY -- as well as pursuing legal remedies against the foreign
garage shops that are knocking out those copies.

This led to a variety of techniques meant to thwart copiers.  Hardware was
designed with custom/proprietary components that the counterfeiter couldn't
obtain off-the-shelf.  Software would carefully check itself for signs of
alteration ("Hmmm... the copyright notice is not what it should be! And,
PacMan should be YELLOW, not PINK!").  Even if these efforts didn't
prevent counterfeiting, they increased the time that it took for the
counterfeiters to make it to market.  Hopefully, too late to eat into
YOUR sales.  Hopefully, so late that the players had lost interest in
the game and thus deprived you of the sales to support your INCREASED
effort at copying the original.

The ultimate zinger was to hide even the anticounterfeiting technologies
so the counterfeiter never completely knew if they'd all been bypassed!

If the game just STOPS and says "I refuse to operate because I have been
tampered with", then the counterfeiter keeps working at bypassing
the mechanisms that cause the game to refuse to operate.  On the other
hand, if the game puts up some token resistance and then APPEARS to
have been successfully compromised, the counterfeiter stops looking
for any further protection mechanisms.

Those can then manifest themselves in more intermittent ways.  Like
causing the game to crash, unexpectedly, 3 minutes into play.  Or,
swapping the left and right sides of the display so left becomes
right with no forewarning.  Or, subtracting points from the player's
score instead of adding them.

These things hit the counterfeiters' accomplices -- the folks who purchased
the counterfeits!  They've paid money for a game that players are now
avoiding, due to its flakey behavior!  Instead of getting a deal on
a low-priced game, the owner is now stuck with a lemon.

This seems like it solves the problem.  But, it's now increased the cost
(effort) to create the game.  All that effort put into protecting the
design COULD have been put into a second game.  Or, make the game
available sooner.

And, because the flaws are intended to resemble bugs in their intermittent
nature, you never are really sure if there's a bug remaining in your design
or if the bug is in the protection system mistakenly thinking your genuine
machine is, in fact, a tampered copy!