A new software update for the Oculus Rift VR headset that was supposed to “curb piracy and protect games and apps that developers have worked so hard to make” has actually had the opposite effect. Whoops.
The creator of the Revive hack, which had allowed HTC Vive owners to play Oculus-exclusive programs before Rift’s latest update, has now released a workaround which restores functionality to his code.
Revive’s creator, Libre VR, tells Motherboard that “the original version of Revive simply took functions from the Oculus Runtime and translated them to OpenVR calls...the new version of Revive now uses the same injection technique to bypass Oculus’ ownership check altogether. By disabling the ownership check the game can no longer determine whether you legitimately own the game.”This is the thing about DRM: it may stop honest, paying customers from using the products they've paid for, in the ways that they feel are reasonable, but it does very little stop actual pirates, who can usually find away around it. Even when that's not really something they really even want to be doing:
Libre VR later added on Reddit that “This is my first success at bypassing the DRM, I really didn’t want to go down that path. I still do not support piracy, do not use this library for pirated copies.” He also told Motherboard that “if he finds a workaround that doesn’t need to disable the ownership check, he’ll implement it.”I'm reminded of the formerly paying Canadian Netflix customers, who are reportedly considering a return to piracy, now that Netflix won't deliver the same content to Canadian as to their American customers. Or the legion of Canadians pirating Game of Thrones, in large part because HBO won't make HBO Now available north of the 49th parallel.
Note that we're not talking about people wanting something for nothing, here. Canadian Game of Thrones fans are willing to pay for Game of Thrones; they're just not willing to pay for everything else on HBO Canada to get it. Canadian Netflix customers were paying for the service, only to find the service that was being delivered to them had been rather drastically curtailed.
Early adopters of Revive want to buy games from Oculus... they just want to be able to play them on any compatible hardware, something Oculus used to be OK with... until they discovered that Vive was going to actually give them a run for their money, at which point they suddenly weren't so OK with it.
So much for those principles, eh, Palmer Luckey? GG.