anti copy protection for distribution

#1 My understanding is that copy protection is an illusion. It will be broken the first day. It takes little effort for a black hat hacker to modify data in an exe to make it bypass any copy protection. The only way I really know to do this is require contacting a server with an account. If you track the users and someone connects with a stolen account or connects with a bogus account you can nail them. Like I said it will be broken as well unless contacting the server is part of the game play. WOW is an example of that scheme. You can't play without contacting the server. However, copy protection of the executable will cost you money and ultimately will not prevent theft of your game.

Also, make sure you provide a checksum on your website for the users to compare against. That way you can prove that executables with viruses did not originate from your website. Some people feel the need to put viruses in software on the net so people can get viruses when getting "free stuff".

Even Microsoft with all of their "phone home" tools for their Windows software has not been able to stop software piracy.

Maybe GG can chime in on this one as they probably have a good perspective on this.

#2 My advice would be to release your game as steam only. As far as i know there really isn't a way to properly hack steam to get free games and b able to play them online. Someone might correct me on this tho, even if someone did hack the game make it so if the person does not have an account and a cd-key they will not b able to access the game at all

#3 Honestly, the best method I came up with a while back for judging 3rd party DRM software was Google.

Use searches like:

"name of software" Hacked/crack/etc (most of the time this will get you ways to crack the DRM of the DRM software itself for people using pirated versions of the DRM software, but can lead you down a trail to vulverabilities)

"name of any special files it may insert, .dll/etc" hacked/crack/etc (this will usually get you the best hits for cracking a product using the DRM solution)

If those searches turn up hits within the first pages and they're pretty easy things to do to apply a crack (keep in mind your target audience here), then it's probably not the best DRM solution to use. If the steps to apply the crack are rather involved, then it's a safe bet that the solution will prevent casual cracking (which the best you can really hope for).

Couple that with what impact it may have on your end user and you've got a way to score the solutions you evaluate.

#4 @Scott,
I like that approach. Practical "Are people cracking this drm?" test.