Yeah one comes up as the first result of a google search. Antiviruses usually go crazy on sites like gamecompyworld or gameburnworld but from my experience, the cracks/no-dvd patches are mostly false positives and usually work for any game I need them for.

I've caught zone alarm lying to me about origin IP of attacks (and they weren't spoofing). What bothers me more is, there were times i got reported attacks when i was running a server, reported as originating from IP X, connecting to local port Y, only for me to find out that it was my localhost connection to a server that was getting blocked. So i'd report people to ISPs, and i even got a few messages back from ISPs that they had terminated accounts based on my Zonealarm logs. I was mortified when i finally tied my server hosting trouble to zone-alarm and bad reporting information. I still feel really bad, even though I didn't know any better, because people lost their internet due to a bug in zone alarm falsely reporting information as foreign when it was merely blocking local connect tests to my own servers (which also made tracking my issues with running those servers very difficult).

Demos are expected to quit working, though, so no.

I'd rather go to the root of the problem: DRM is not the main cause for IP getting lost to time (it is just a symptom really), its lack of caring.

I'm pretty sure that if those that actually created intellectual property (programmers, artists, designers, writers, etc) actually controlled its distributions, far less of it would become completely inaccessible in time (not saying it wouldn't happen, but it would be rarer).

The problem arises once you introduce the business person who see the product not as a work of art, but as a 'money in, money out' cash cow and that person owns the product.

From that point on, the product (let's call it as that person sees it) will see the light of day for as long as it can generate good revenue and the moment that stops, it gets tossed to the side like yesterday's thrash (they will literally invest zero effort in preservation, it would cost them money or at the very least, some effort). Doesn't matter that in many cases, thousands of human hours got sunk in creating the product, if it can't make good revenue, it's thrash to them.

The best is always when the creator(s) can own the IP. That's why I'm in favor of things like guaranteed minimum income to financially empower content creators and give them greater independence. Get rid of the parasites already.

If you buy a digtial version (like what GamersGate sold) it plays from executable.... i also have the disk version but the digital edition 1C released works flawlessly in 10x64 ;)