Why wasn't this removed? I really have to look at the digital manual every time I want to launch the game? I play in fullscreen. When I minimize the game to try and open the manual from Galaxy, it doesn't open. I just don't understand why this simple DRM wasn't removed from the game?

Would you like some cheese with that whine?

I'm with you there. Heck I played this growing up and I always found it rather a bother to deal with. I'd love if someone had a little mod of some kind that disabled it. Mind you, back in the day people just traded .txt files they printed out and saved the cracking for stuff like the monkey island code wheel, but still.

You can load a saved game directly from within the ScummVM GUI.
So just start ScummVM, and directly load a saved game.
This way you won't have to solve the copy protection again.
You will have to solve it once though.

GOG could in theory remove copy protections, but they would have to get permission by the publisher.
ScummVM doesn't remove any copy protection, unless it was done in an originally released version through the interpreter, because of legal reasons.

There is no chance whatsoever that disabling a fricking "which word is on page x" copyright check from the 80's is going to get a single company to sue GOG over it. It's hard to even count it as "copyright protection" in this day and age. In any event, there are alternatives and I suggest checking out my own thread for workarounds. Ignore the dire warning about causing dreaded "unexpected glitches" in SCUMMVM, because neither patch operates using SCUMMVM (and besides that, SCUMMVM is open source, so anyone can make a custom build specially designed for their own hacks anyway, which is entirely valid).

https://www.gog.com/forum/kings_quest_series/copyright_protection_in_kq4

For educational purposes, the 1997 King's Quest Collection had an issue with an incomplete KQ4 reference table. The issue with script 701 can be remedied by extracting the file and replacing these hex values.
43 4C 08 -> 32 1E 00
0E 00 38 -> 00 00 38

It's been about 12 years since I made those changes, so my memory is a bit fuzzy on what it does. Follow these (unsupported) directions at your own risk.

Piss off and mind your own business

That did the trick for me. I found an old cached webpage on which R.W. Todd showed how to edit the disassembly of script 701 so that the copy protection question would accept any answer and I tried to follow his guide, but I couldn't get SCI Companion to compile the 701 assembly code, even the code generated by SCI Comp itself, the compiler kept giving me syntax errors.

I'm not sure what this fine edit of the machine code does, I could compare the disassembly of the edited code with the original, but it'd take a long time to find out what part was changed. It might be a return instruction, which ends the script before the copy protection question.

LOL! You sure told me!

Yeah, just like you "told" the OP.

Darn, it's a shame that knowledge is lost forever. Oh well, best we all move on.