starforce reply by nerva - will answer him directly now

[nerva]

Indeed, the rules are the rules.

As we've stated countless times, we despise software piracy, which should be obviously if you remember that we're developing and maintaining software ourselves, so we honor every developer's choice to demand payment for his work.

That being said, there are other reasons than the fact that we don't want our software to be used to rip off other developers. Some people consider Daemon Tools to be on shaky moral ground at best - see all copy protection manufacturers, for example - and if we aided anyone in circumventing their copy protections (even if it were morally just), we'd pave their way for sueing us.

So please, even if you own the game, stick to the rules and don't talk about cracks et. al.. If a publisher decides not to support x64 - and be it only because of the copy protection - that sucks big time, but we cannot change that decision and we may not help you do it anyway. Sorry.

Would you please elaborate then on the purpose of your application in light of your previous statement? Do you realise that more then a half of DT users use it for handling pireated ISOs? Would you consider cooperating with copy protection developers to ensure that your application is used only for back-up of legal copies?
We respect DT team, as they are trained professionals. But DT more likely works against CPs than together with them to prevent piracy. Sure DT makes user's life much easier, allows them to store original disk in safety and playing from HDD and comply with some countries laws. But at the same time this is the very comfortable tool for pirating. Isn't it?

Understanding that:
- user have rights to have back-up
- user should have back-up
- it is much nicely to have legal disk in rack than in drive every time you want to play
...the latest version of StarForce has easy "back-up copy" technology and could be turn on by publisher during protection. All details in press-release soon.