It keeps surprising me how far the software, games, music and movie industry is willing to go in a battle they can never hope to win. While each new copy protection appears to be hacked within a matter of days, the only thing these kind of unasked copy-protecting schemes are achieving is seriously annoying or even causing damage to customers buying the legal version.

The whole Sony rootkit debacle is a good example of this, but now also the anti-software copying software made by the company StarForce is causing controversy. The company is now even threathening to sue the weblog BoingBoing for publicing criticism about this software.

For me all this controversy is reason enough to first check this list before buying a game. Better be safe than sorry and perhaps this way the entertainment industry learns that it is not smart to annoy just those consumers who ARE actually buying legal copies.

Very funny to see that every copy protection ever invented is bound to be hacked very soon. Now a very ingenious coder has opened up all versions of the PlayStation Portable firmware for homebrew applications, including the 2.6 firmware I am running on my PSP. Maybe I now should give homebrew a try.

Read further here for more information.