Quote:
Originally Posted by wgrimm
It's surprising that no one has mentioned "DRM" in the context of the awful "Don't copy that floppy" days. Copy protection schemes were used by many companies, like Lotus, to "protect" their IP. So, if you had bought a copy of, for example, WordPerfect (another company that used copy protection on distro floppies), and your install floppy went bad, WordPerfect would charge you full price of the program to replace it.
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WP would replace installation disks for a nominal fee provided you sent them the originals - I speak from personal experience; I was the IT manager of a company in the late 80s which used WP. It was people who had "lost" their original disks who had a problem. Given the level of piracy of WP (it was arguably THE most copied program at one time) it seems to have been a pretty reasonable support policy for the time. It wasn't so much individual piracy which was the issue; a far bigger problem was the issue of a company buying one copy of the program and then installing it on 100 PCs. That's what led to the formation of software industry associations like FAST and BSA which paid "bounties" to employees who "informed" on companies using unlicenced software.
Virtually everyone used copy protected floppies at one point, especially for games. It was a running battle between the various "bit copiers" and the companies devising new ways to protect software. Piracy certainly isn't a new phenomenon.