According to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, PC game piracy will be a thing of the past thanks to new stealth encryption chips embedded in your computers.
“There is a stealth encryption chip called a TPM that is going on the motherboards of most of the computers that are coming out now,” he added.
“What that says is that in the games business we will be able to encrypt with an absolutely verifiable private key in the encryption world - which is uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords - which will allow for a huge market to develop in some of the areas where piracy has been a real problem.”
Bushnell did note however that movie and music piracy can not be stopped. “If you can watch it and you can hear it, you can copy it.”
“Games are a different thing, because games are so integrated with the code. The TPM will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay.
“As soon as the installed base of the TPM hardware chip gets large enough, we will start to see revenues coming from Asia and India at a time when before it didn’t make sense.”
Result for: huge market
The Japanese mobile carrier Softbank has announced that it has signed a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Japan later this year.
There was no details on pricing, availability or whether the deal was exclusive for the country.
Softbank has about 19 million subscribers in Japan but still lags decently far behind NTT DoCoMo and KDDI in market share.
Although the Japanese are a huge market for the iPod line of media devices, the iPhone may not be so impressive to a country whose cell phones are years ahead technologically then ours.
Regardless, rival NTT DoCoMo spokesman Shinjiro Minami added that his company was unhappy at the turn of events as DoCoMo had been trying to ink a similar deal for months.
“The user interface is very attractive and it’s a product that’s likely to draw Apple fans in Japan,” he added.
So far this year Apple has struck deals to sell the iPhone in over 20 new countries, including markets in Asia, Australia, Europe and South America.
