No technology has played a larger part in the way digital media – including games – is distributed and consumed than the Internet, and its effect on piracy and the efforts to counteract it has been profound. In its earliest days, ‘Net connectivity allowed those who knew how to use it to connect via BBS, putting hackers and crackers in touch with each other and allowing them to share ideas. Now, of course, most PC owners have some form of Internet connection, many at speeds that would have been ludicrous even as recently as the mid-’90s, giving them access to entire copies of cracked games that have been made available via IRC or peer-to-peer network.

The industry is certainly facing its most serious challenge in its long fight against piracy, and it’s been interesting to see what stances have been taken in the past few years. EA’s efforts with Mass Effect and Spore are not all we’ve heard of server-side copy protection; Valve links copies of its games – store-bought or downloaded – to its Steam service, while massively-multiplayer games like World of Warcraft require unique product keys for login. And it’s certainly not going to be the last we’ll hear of it, either, as more and more users acquire faster Internet connectivity and more and more games make use of downloadable content and other online-specific features.

Read more here about the history of Copyright Protection.