Commodore 64 Software - Software Piracy

Software Piracy

The C64 software market had widespread problems with software piracy. This was perhaps due to a number of significant factors. The efforts of warez groups to remove software copy protections was probably the main contributing factors to rampant software piracy. The large Commodore 64 user base, as well as encouraging software companies to develop for its huge market, possibly also attracted software pirates who attempted to amass large libraries of pirated software. There were many kinds of copy protection systems employed on both cassette and floppy disk, to prevent the unauthorized copying of commercial Commodore 64 software. Practically all of them have either been worked around or defeated by crackers, however.

Many BBSs offered cracked commercial software, sometimes requiring special access and usually requiring users to maintain an upload/download ratio. A large number of warez groups existed, including Fairlight, which continued to exist more than a decade after the C64's demise. Some members of these groups turned to telephone phreaking and credit card or calling card fraud to make long-distance calls, either to download new titles not yet available locally, or to upload newly cracked titles released by the group.

Not all Commodore 64 users had modems however. For these people, many warez group "swappers" maintained contacts throughout the world. These contacts would usually mass mail pirated floppy disks through the postal service. Also, sneakernets existed at schools and businesses all over the world, as friends and colleagues would trade (and usually later copy) their software collections. At a time before the Internet was widespread, this was the only way for many users to amass huge pirated software libraries. Also, and particularly in Europe, groups of people would hold copy-parties explicitly to copy software, usually irrespective of software licence.

Several popular utilities were sold that contained custom routines to defeat most copy-protection schemes in commercial software. (Appropriately, Fast Hack'em—probably the most popular example—was itself widely pirated.). Pirates Toolbox was another popular set of tools for copying disks and removing copy protection. Tapes could be copied with special software, but often it was simply done by dubbing the cassette in a dual deck tape recorder, or by relying on an Action Replay cartridge to freeze the program in memory and save to cassette. Cracked games could often be copied manually without any special tools. In Europe, some hardware devices, colloquially known as "black boxes" were available under the counter that connected two C1530 tape decks together at the connection point to the C64 permitting a copy to be made whilst loading a game. This overcame the difficulties in direct dubbing of later games using the high speed loaders that were developed to overcome the very long load times.