Agree with you 100%. And technically, you are allowed by law to do A for any media you purchase. Why noone has sued company X for preventing home backups, as allowed by law, is beyond me.
You know what I am going to do now... I am going to sue EA games... or some other company... for not allowing to make back-ups of my games for personal use
I actually have some older games in my collection with instruction cards that tell the purchaser to make a backup copy. Of course, that was in the day of floppy disks that would die if you looked at them cross-eyed, but still...
Those were the days.
Actually, copy protection methods were still common, especially for the Atari 800 and Commodore 64 (and surprise, surprise: especially on EA games titles!). The CP methods usually worked by introducing weird sector errors that the drives could read past, but if you tried to copy them, the disks would look "bad" to the copy program and thus would halt the copy process.
I'm having trouble with my old C64 drives -- none of them really work. The heads on every unit I have are out of alignment (around 8 units!). You know why? Well, a common form of C64 copy protection that used bad sectors would cause the drives to stutter over and over a single spot, trying to re-read a bad sector. Over time it would knock the heads out of alignment, requiring repair. Unfortunately, it seems that most commercial games were copy protected with the method that screwed up your drive. That's just downright shitty. Sounds a little something like Sony with their rootkit stuff, eh?
Copy protection: "Ruining Computers Since 1982."
But hey, meanwhile, as the copy protection was ruining the disk drives of average consumers, the methods didn't stop the pirates at all. About four years ago, I acquired (kinda by accident) a huge collection of literally thousands of pirated C64 games on hundreds of floppies, all nicely categorized and indexed by their former owner. Too bad I can't use them because my drives are screwed.
