GAME THEORY

to the rules of copyright that had traditionally applied to books, music
and other creative output.

It was clear why this could happen: in the past the public was not
in a position to print an unlicensed copy of a book or produce pirated
pressings of an LP, as it did not have the machinery to do it. And if
it did, this machinery was cumbersome, stationary and easy for law
enforcement to track down, in the name of intellectual copyright.

Code or software was different. After graduating from the cassette
machines on which the first computer games for domestic use were
written in the early 1980s, it was produced on floppy disks, CDs, DVDs
and ever-shrinking hard disks. By this time, the Empire of Commerical
Software Producers attempted its first strike-back by inserting pieces
of additional code onto their product, which sought to prevent unau-
thorised copying of their material. CDs and cassettes routinely included
digital locks.

While understandable as a tactic, it backfired. As far back as 1982
another German teenager, who later went under the enigmatic hacker's
moniker of MiCe!, finally persuaded his parents – against their better
judgement – to buy him a computer for Christmas. But having spent
all that money, they refused to give him a penny more for games, not
understanding that without the games' software, which was written on
cassettes at the time, the computer was useless as far as their son was
concerned.

He found that the only way he could use the computer was to borrow
software from friends and then copy it. On one occasion he discovered
that the cassette would not copy. He tried everything imaginable, but
his computer crashed every time. After days and nights of frustration,
he finally spotted a bit of code at a specific point on the tape, which
had no apparent function. And then it dawned on him: it was blocking
the process! Once he had understood this, MiCe! was able to experi-
ment by rewriting the code in different sequences until one night –
bingo! – he cracked it.

Early gamers like MiCe! were inspired to crack the locks because
they were addicted to gaming, not because they wanted to make money.
The copies were passed from gamer to gamer, giving birth to The
Scene.

It was still a laborious and time-consuming process as it involved
physically copying the code onto a new cassette. Nonetheless, the