Hi there,

As a potential consumer very concerned about intrusive copy protections, I'm desesperatly trying to have a definite summary of how the protection used by Stardock games works.

By digging from various sources, here what I have understood :

- The game on the DVD has no DRM at all. Period.
- Stardock does no use disk-based protection techniques. The disk is not used as a dongle and didn't need to be in the drive.
- However, after the game is updated after a certain patch, the game requires an activation to work. This activation can be done online or, for an offline computer, be performed by copying/pasting a bunch of numbers in an email (obviously on another machine), then copy the replied file in the game folder.

- The activation system is a classic hardware tying mechanism that works like this
1) a hash value is computed to represent the hardware on which the game will run. It may be based on numerous elements like MAC address of Ethernet card, CPU model, HD Drive volume label, Windows key number,... This hash value cannot be "reversed" (that is, find the hardware parts which corresponds to this number), but only to identify that the hardware the game has been activated on is the same, and that the game hasn't been happily copied around. I supsect the details of the information gathered during the process to be confidential.
2) This hardware hash value is then sent to a Stardock-operated server, along with the user serial number.
3) This server checks in its database about this serial and hardware numbers. It applies some "reasonnable use" rules to detect if the serial is being pirated or not: is the serial is on the blacklist, is the game has been installed more than x times on y different hardware, etc... A moderator said Stardock does not comment on the specific of the rules.
4) If everything is ok (valid serial and no unreasonable use detected), the server issue a authorization number that is saved in the game folder. This number is computed so that it works only with the given serial and harware hash numbers.
5) Each time the game is runned, the hardware hash number is re-generated and the game looks if its matches with its stored serial and authorization number. If it is consistent, the game launches, if not, it asks for autorization again.
- A consequence of this is, if a game is archived with Stardock Central to be installed on another machine, then the game will require activation on this new machine, even if it has been activated on the previous machine.

Am I good or did I miss something ?