Does anyone else laugh out loud at this term? 'Copy protection'. Yeah, since when has it actually done what it's supposed to? Yet gaming companies keep throwing money at SonyDMC, StarForce and others when it never, ever works. Just makes me shake my head.
Strictly speaking, it does work. I haven't looked at it extensively for several years, but I studied methods of disc copy protections back at the uni. I would imagine the more modern copy protection schemes still leave a physical imprint on the disc itself (bad sectors was a common one) that the program .exe will pick up and know the disc is original. Copying the disc cannot re-create this physical deformity, so the program knows the disc is not an original and does not run.
That's basically the essense of copy protection, to require the "original" disc. Cracks are workarounds, obviously, but the basic method does what it's supposed to, just that it doesn't matter in the end. Of course, people also erroneously use the term "copy protection" when referring to DRM
Copy protection is pretty quickly becoming outdated in the age of digital distribution, so DRM/activations are becoming more common. But in the older days before everyone and their dog had high speed internet and there was no digital distribution, copy protection was everything since publishers needed more to prevent physical copying of disc contents
