My biggest issue with StarForce is that more often than not the games I have with it on have needed patching before I could play them because StarForce wouldn't let me access my legally bought disk as at the time I was using a slightly old CD drive that it didn't like. That really annoys.
I am far more against internet validation, though. Does anyone seriously believe that all computer companies everywhere can be totally trusted not to use this to gather user information? I sure don't! That's without some clever hacker getting into the system and using it to backdoor into our computers, which is more than likely going to happen sooner or later if internet validation becomes commonplace. Anything that compromises computer safe practise is a bad thing, and worse if it can be exploited to gather private info.
Reasonable copy protection I have no problems with at all. Internet validation is distinctly unreasonable, even without the risk of games becoming unusable if a company goes bust - which many do, as has been pointed out already by others in this thread.
