Larian Studios Forums Beyond Divinity (English) General Boy, that was fun! Purchased and returned.

This would appear to be illegal, assuming these files are installed without user knowledge. It would qualify the copy protection, in my mind, as a virusmalware et al. Therefore the manufacturers of any gameCD or otherwise would be liable to prosecution under distribution of computer virus related laws.

I come to this conclusion since theres no telling what exactly these "drivers" might be doing in addition to validating a game installation, and preventing you from making a backup. They could be collecting data on your computing activities and sending them back to the company so they can inform the authorities of (what they consider to be) any inappropriate backing up of CDsDVDs. They could be monitoring the websites you visit. Who knows? We all know the power that can be contained in just a few K of code, having been through Sasser and other recent virus attacks, and this code is no exception.

From another game review...
Black Mirror uses a copy protection system provided by
StarForce. On Windows98SE, I encountered two severe
problems, both of them related to some device drivers that
were installed by the StarForce copy protection software:

Uninstalling the game does NOT remove the StarForce drivers;
this is completely unacceptable behaviour. I have complained
to Dreamcatcher and demanded that they provide me with
facilities to remove the drivers. Dreamcatcher has since
sent me a program called "sfclean.exe" that appears to remove
them.

The StarForce device drivers conflicted with the device
drivers for my USB memory drive, and caused my machine to
crash (BSOD) whenever I plugged in my memory drive. This
problem has not yet been resolved by Dreamcatcher.

Contact Dreamcatcher if you have uninstalled your game, and
find any of these files remaining on your disk: prosync1.vxd,
prosync1.sys, sfhlp01.sys, prohlp02.sys, prodrv06.sys

star-force drivers need to be updated at every Windows Service Pack. They rely on undocumented features of the OS which are subject to change at any time.

Don't believe me?
http://www.3dgamers.com/news/more/1061548782/#details

From http://www.star-force.com/index.pht...gory=107&type=5 (i.e the FAQ)

This means the publisher needs to provide support for years to come for their star-force protected game. If they don't (which is what usually happens), then on the next ServicePack/windows update, your computer will throw a nice Blue screen of death at you, and you will not be able to play a game you paid for.