I hate CD keys and Cd protection

One recent version I loved was Uplink by Introversion - they had a card with hex on it - if you decoded the hex it was a fixed (dev?) dump of some memory that looked as though it was used in the actual game: You could make out parts of some words, like "Welcome_to_the_tutori" (al).

Added to this it was a very retro, very grass-roots and very easy to rip-off method of copy protection, and pretty easy to guess as well (it asked for a row and a column, and usually it was '80', '64' or some hex value between these two, or 'FF'.

Made you feel more hacker-ish, which only added to the game

 

One solution

Just release all games as open source...