It seems to me that more publishers are moving to removing their copy protection after a certain time has gone by. So pretty much about 1 or 2 years after the initial sales run has finished, they come back in and patch out the copy protection for the convienience of their consumers. However, there are still too few of publishers that do this. Personally, I'd rather see some way of the copy protection system automatically removing itself after a set period of time so that I need not still dig up that CD of a game that I installed 2 years ago that I might want to play.
I forbid myself from buying Anno 1404 because of the tages system, and their insistance that they will NEVER add the ability to de-authorize a computer that the game is installed on so that the user can install it on another one of their computers (you know, after the initial x number of their computers has had the game installed and or re-installed due to adding hardware to the computer, or change of operating system etc), however I am weak, and the majority of my friends online (we are all city building gamers) don't care (except for installing Starfart, that is the only one that none of will allow on our comuters), and bought the game and were having a great time with it, so I was weak and bought it. Honestly, I love it, even though I know I will have to contact Tages the next time that I do some major hardware addition (time to upgrade my CPU is coming up before the end of this year), or whatever else invalidates it.
Anno 1404 is really just too good of a game to pass up, even if technically, Im only renting the game since I don't currently have unlimited installs on my own computers.
