It all started with chinese unlicensed cartridges.

Then the CD era came and you could borrow 200 hundred PSX games and make a copy of all those games in your own computer.

The DVD era came, and alongside came the DRMs, but after a short time (except for the GameCube), modchips made piracy once again possible on consoles.

Now we have proprietary DVD9 and Blu-Ray, with new DRM schemes and protection mechanisms. Looks like hackers around the world will have a hard time, right?

Wrong! In less than one month after release, you can already find Xbox360 games in peer-to-peer networks. Not that you can do anything with it right now, or should even think about downloading it, illegally.

Usually, I would expect the same modchip/pirate dvd duo for Nintendo and Microsoft next-gen consoles. Since Sony's will be using Blu-Ray proprietary format, unless the games can be crunched in 9GB dual-layered DVDs, I can't see the same happening. Sony scores a good one here.

Now, let's compare it with PC piracy. You can get pirate CDs/DVDs on the streets, or download disk images from websites, P2P, FTPs, IRC etc and burn them at your own computer, just like before. Most protection mechanisms have already been cracked and you can, most of time, find a fixed executable in less than twenty minutes, what can be compared to the modchip solution for consoles.

But nowadays, you don't even need to burn these disk images. There are dvd emulators for windows (and linux can do it natively) that create a virtual device and stream the data directly from the hard drive. Now think how many disk images you can fit in a 200Gb barracuda.

Ok, back to the consoles, and the whole point of this post.

Next-gen consoles are approaching the looks of a personal computer. CPU, GPU, USB ports and HDDs.
Now, how long until a firmware hack makes it possible for the consoles to run games from it's hard disks?

Not a problem for Nintendo, since there isn't a real HDD on it's next-gen console, just 512Mb flash memory, too small and slow for this.

Well, we can take the Xbox360 out of this as well, since the consoles HDD is really small compared to the disk size, and would fit only a couple of games. But possible anyway.

One of the features of the PS3 is that it might use bigger HDDs, making this approach possible as well. And since you won't be able burn your own BR disks, this would be the only possible way to pirate a PS3 game.

I do not support piracy, but I don't expect the next-gen to be any better than current in this fight, unfortunately. It's a real problem with no real solution, right now.

It's a shame that a lot of good developers devote their time to this. Proof of that is the number of already cracked protection schemes for PC software. Almost every protections were cracked in a matter of months.

Today, this protection hurts more the consumers than those who use a "fixed" executable (StarForce comes to mind), but I won't discuss it now.