Not that I know of; hence most of us can copy disks with the minimum of difficulty.
I'm thinking aloud here, but assuming it's for a DVD of images could you burn them as a DVD movie/slideshow. It would then need to be ripped rather than just copying the files off a data DVD. Obviously lots of people can rip DVDs but it's more hassle and you'd stop a few people doing it.
i am a bit behind with techno stuff.. didnt used to be.. when i wrote my own software i used to damage a sector on the floppy disk so if trying to copy then most copiers would stop/fail.. but also a routine in the software to check for a bad sector.. if copied and sector fixed as seom would (its either fail or auto fix and copy) ..then software fails as couldnt find bad sector.. brilliantcant do that on a DVD but thought some bright spark would ahve thought of summat by now..
EDIT - WARNING, NERD CONTENT!
'damage' is an interesting word in this context, unless you mean physically damage by sticking a pin through it or similar. In software you could send the wrong sector size when doing the format (DOS used a value of 2, meaning 512 bytes, but the nec pd765 controller used in PCs and compatibles allowed sizes from 1 to 6, which equals 256 to 8192 bytes) which would make a subsequent normal read fail, or change the data rate while the format operation was happening which would make part of the track unreadable, or even simply put an entry in the file allocation table saying the sector was damaged (that's the easiest to do).
None of this would stop an image being copied from the floppy, as provided the operating system could read the part of the disk the image file was on it could copy it somewhere else without caring if the damaged sector was present or not. It only worked if there was software on the disk that checked the sector before it would allow anything to happen.
This stuff pays my billsI don't have a solution for you with image files. To achieve it would need the images to be in proprietary format of your devising with your own bespoke viewer that understood that format, then the viewer could include code could check for a valid 'licence key' (nowadays either in the form of a USB device or by verifying certain information about the computer in use, which means the viewer software has to be installed to the computer in question and only used from there). All in all a lot of work, which is why we only deal with people writing their own programs rather than people producing audio / video / still images.
its not a great way.. its not for bulk disks and this was too many yrs ago to count on an atari computer using 720k floppy disks![]()
Rapscallion said:Regarding copy protection, how have microsoft managed to stop pirating so successfully?
Lolwot?
Edit - a more useful response.. It's easy to copy one of their disks like anything else, I think ms activation process has made it harder to run a pirated licence key though.
OK i'll rephrase, how have microsoft prevented the use of copied dvd's on xbox 360's that connect to xbox live.
And don't you think they've been successful in battling piracy?
And don't you think they've been successful in battling piracy?
The Xbox is capable of reading part of the DVD which computer drives can't read and write back in the same way. So you can't copy the DVD and make it look like an original.
Rapscallion said:I thought it maybe something like this, but surprised that the countries known for piracy haven't cracked this and distributed large quantities of pirated xbox games that can work on an unchipped xbox. North Korea, i'm thinking of you...
2 interesting srticles on north koreas dollar forgeries:-
Vanityfair North Korea’s Dollar Store
NYTimes No Ordinary Counterfeit