Software cracks
Software cracks is reverse software engineering. It is the modification of software to remove protection methods. The distribution and use of the copies is illegal in almost every developed country.
There have been many lawsuits over the software, but mostly to do with the distribution of the duplicated product rather than the process of defeating the protection, due to the difficulty of proving guilt.
In the United States, the passing of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) legislation made cracking of software illegal, as well as the distribution of information which enables the practise.
The first software copy protection was on early Apple II, Atari 800 and Commodore 64 software. Game publishers, in particular, carried on an arms race with crackers. Publishers have resorted to increasingly complex counter measures to try to stop unauthorized copying of their software. Definition: Software cracks
A piece of software being distributed anonymously online has successfully cracked part of Microsoft’s anti-piracy technology. The software can strip off the protections that prevent a song from being copied an unlimited amount of times. For the article and other, related articles: CNet news