Although your tone is rather snide, I'm going to try to give a serious answer. But first two questions: Do you think the OP should:
1) Live with the inconvenience.
2) Put unnecessary wear on the optical drive.
If the facts are as the OP stated, the maker of the software will suffer no monetary loss due to piracy. Such a case would amount to format-shifting. Yes, I implied that the reasons for anticopy measures are to discourage piracy. But it is evident they can also inconvenience people who own legal copies of payware.
I'm not sure how to strike a balance here. I have no doubt some people have from time to time posted similar questions and misrepresented their intentions, when their real purpose was to steal. But even so, there are other sites where they need not lie about it.
Perhaps this forum would benefit from some explicit rules:
1) Warez. What is warez? Intellectual property (IP) obtained in a manner that explicitly or implicitly violates copyright or license for the IP.
Do not ask for warez.
Do not link to warez.
2) Fair Use. What is "Fair Use"? Despite what content providers or lawyers may tell, you, if you legally own IP on digital media, you have legal rights including:
a) Making backups
b) Format shifting
c) Time shifting (specifically applicable to televised content).
Fair Use rights evaporate when you sell the media in question. Fair Use applies only to legally owned media, it does NOT apply to rentals or borrowed media.
I'll give you another example when the efforts of the owners of IP to control access to their IP can unnecessarily inconvenience legitimate customers:
Region Coding, both of commercial DVD_Video discs and of players. I own several videos that are not region 1, they are not available in the US. (One is the Hong Kong version of Hero, region 3, with subtitles in elegant English, not the contemptible colloquial English subs on the US release. The dubbed audio is even worse, give me the Chinese with subs.) To play them I have to do a firmware hack on my DVD players and/or defeat their copy protection, making a region-free copy. Since all of but one of my set-top players are not region-free hackable, I'm reduced to making a backup, not just for safe-keeping, but to play the damn things at all.
Then there's region-coding enhancement (RCE), which prevents region 1 discs from playing on region-free players. This is on WB and Columbia releases. So, to play DVDs on my solitary region-free player, I'm in a bind. I back up the DVDs first, making a region-free copy.
I could give other examples, but that should suffice. Just because the owner of the IP puts restrictions on the media doesn't mean I have to roll over and accept them. I offer no apologies.
Now, any more questions or constructive comments?
