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ByteShield™ Releases White Paper Entitled "Is Anti-Piracy the Cure or Disease for PC Games?"

Gamefest, Seattle, WA, July 22, 2008 – ByteShield Inc., a leading provider of user and developer friendly software usage management, today announced the release of a whitepaper entitled “Is Anti-Piracy/DRM the Cure or Disease for PC Games?”

“Only customers hate DRM, pirates remove it – this is how one developer summed up the current state of software protection from piracy” said Jan Samzelius, CEO of ByteShield. “In summary, the current state of anti-piracy in the PC game industry is:

1. DRM efforts have largely failed to protect vendors’ legitimate rights because they are rapidly cracked

2. They have contributed to destroyed customer relationships and trust by impinging, inconveniencing
and even impugning honest customers

3. Annoyed and hostile gamers publicly vent their outrage and fury on game suppliers and DRM suppliers via portals, blogs and message boards

4. Impacting honest users tends to shift their sympathy towards the pirates rather than the developers and publishers. In effect, onerous DRM legitimizes piracy – because with pirated copies you avoid the hassles DRM imposes.”

How did technologies and efforts designed for the benefit to the industry instead become the enemies of the software business? And how do we fix it? This whitepaper draws from multiple sources across the PC Games industry to answer these questions and it can be downloaded from www.ByteShield.net.

In effect ByteShield’s technological approach to protecting software acknowledges that any protection created by man can eventually be cracked by man given sufficient time, effort and hardware. The real issues are the number of hurdles involved, the time to overcome each, whether they must be overcome one at a time or can be programmatically overcome. Conventional software protection technologies (Copy Protection/DRM) are often based on only a few hurdles and usually cracked quickly. In contrast ByteShield Software Usage Management (SUM) has high numbers of multiple hurdles, including removal of small but critical pieces of the code it protects and replacement of them at run-time. A cracker is forced to find and ‘fix’ one piece at a time. Even if a cracker can ‘fix’ each independent and different hurdle, each one will take a certain amount of time and if there 1,000, 10,000 or even 100,000 pieces of code need to be ‘fixed’, one by one, then the total cracking effort required will simply be too great to be worthwhile. ByteShield’s technology not only achieves this novel approach to providing the strongest software protection available but does so with extremely low or no performance impact on the execution speed of the protected software.


About ByteShield
ByteShield is the first affordable, software-based, strong solution that actually works and is user and developer friendly. Once usage is managed, various new business models can enable additional revenue generation (e.g. rental, subscription, SaaS). ByteShield, which is a privately held California corporation, was established in September, 2004 with headquarters in San Francisco, California. To find out more, visit www.ByteShield.net or call +1 415 420 6636.


Press Queries:
Lauren Koziel 

Strategic Reach PR 

+1-303-487-7406
lauren@strategicreachpr.com

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