Piracy floodgates open on N-Gage

N-Gage news by Chris Lamanna, published on Friday 14th November 2003

Nokia’s aspirations in the games industry have been hit by a major setback
this week, as pirates worked out how to break the protection on N-Gage game
cards, leading to the posting of the full range of software to the Internet.

The only substantial difference between N-Gage games and any other games
designed to run on Symbian mobile phones (such as the high-end Nokia Series
60 phones and certain Siemens devices, to name but two) is that N-Gage
titles are supplied on SD Card media with supposedly secure encryption to
prevent copying of the titles.

This encryption has now been broken, and images of the games have been
posted to the Internet - allowing N-Gage owners the ability to download the
games to their phones for free, and even more worryingly, allowing owners of
other Symbian phones the ability to play N-Gage titles on their devices.

This will come as a serious blow to Nokia, since it will not only damage the
tie ratio of the N-Gage deck by encouraging piracy on the device, but will
also make the device far less attractive to owners of other high-end phones.

Nokia is understandably furious at the breaking of its protection, and has
vowed to “aggressively pursue” the hackers responsible - as well as working
to shut down websites which post the software used to effect the crack.

“We are treating this very seriously,” a Nokia spokesperson told technology
news website The Register today. “As soon as we saw these claims posted on
the Internet, we started to investigate.”

While the company’s desire to track down those responsible for breaking the
N-Gage copy protection system is understandable, we’d be dubious about how
much good it’ll do them. A similar witch-hunt for the person responsible for
breaking the DVD protection standard (which also aimed to remove copies of
the resulting software, DeCSS, from the internet) proved ultimately futile,
and completely failed to prevent the onset of widespread DVD piracy.

However, Nokia is also hoping to rectify the damage in other ways, it
seems - telling The Register that it is committed to strengthening its copy
protection system in the future, and that forthcoming N-Gage titles will
take advantage of specific features of the N-Gage platform, thus rendering
them unplayable on other devices.