PC Floppy Copy Protection: An Interview With Robert McQuaid

This post goes hand-in-hand with my article on Vault Corporation's Prolok copy-protection technology. Perhaps the most important historical legacy of Vault Corporation results from the lawsuit they initiated against Quaid Software, makers of the backup software CopyWrite.

CopyWrite was capable of duplicating Prolok-protected diskettes with the help of a bundled utility called RAMKEY. Vault sued Quaid Software seeking an injunction and $100 million in damages.

The resulting court case, Vault Corporation vs Quaid Software, was decided in Quaid's favor and established an important legal precedent protecting the rights of end users to make backup copies of their software without restriction.

Robert McQuaid, founder of Quaid Software, was kind enough to agree to the following interview.

How did you decide that Quaid Software would target the software backup business?  You could have done something less exciting, like make a spreadsheet or database program.

I was in touch with a small computer store that wanted a copy program they could sell to every user. I produced a program called SafeCopy that copied several of the popular copy-protected products of the day.  I agreed to let the store sell it for royalties.  It soon became clear they did not intend to pay anything, but it would be easy to sell myself because friends wanted to buy it even when I was not trying to sell.  I redid the user interface and thought about a new name. The cleverest name I found was Copy3PO. It was too much of an attack on the competition. Eventually I used CopyWrite.

Was Quaid Software basically a sole proprietorship, or did you have other programmers or partners?  Staying on top of all the different copy protection techniques seems like a lot of work for one person.

I was the founder and there never was another shareholder or corporate director.  Keeping up with new copy-protection methods was a full-time job by itself. After over a year of doing all the programming and management myself.  I decided I needed another programmer.  My tongue-in-cheek job requirement was for the world's second-best programmer.  I found Frank Klein, who stayed with Quaid until it broke up.

Central Point Software was clearly your main competitor, with their Copy II PC product and their hardware Option Board.  Did you have any communication with CPS at any time?  If so, were you viewed as a colleague or was it more adversarial?

I had little contact until my first notice of the Vault suit in a phone call from Mike Brown of Central Point. He evidently realized that a court decision against Quaid would ruin his own business, and he offered advisory services from his own law firm at no cost to Quaid.  I made use of the service a few times, and it was helpful.

What copy-protection technique gave you the most grief, or at least took the most resources to defeat?

It was Prolok.  They hid their operation within an encrypted area.  There was no practical way to get into the vital area by single-stepping or breakpointing the program.  They seemed to think that it could be penetrated only with inside information from a Vault employee.  I developed a diagnostic tool that allowed me to let the program run until it hit a patched interrupt, the one doing disk I/O, then could display the program. 

It was a neat tool that allowed display of memory as data or instructions.  It could even scroll through memory in disassembled form.  With this tool it was easy to run Prolok to the point where it was doing its copy-protection check.  Later the diagnostic tool was marketed as Quaid Analyzer.

I had encountered Quaid Analyzer while researching Quaid Software, but didn't know the history of its development. Productizing your own internal tool sounds like a savvy move. Was it a successful product?

Sales were nowhere close to CopyWrite, but it had a good user reception. A friend explained to me that you are not really successful until people steal your stuff. The instructions for Quaid Analyzer were on the diskette itself. A Singapore firm marketed a pirate version with a nice-looking printed copy of the manual.

The famous court case you were involved in, Vault Corp vs Quaid Software, established an important precedent confirming consumer rights under copyright law.  It also might have been Vault Corporation's last Hail Mary.  The court case must have been very costly for you, emotionally and financially.  How much did the court case impact you?

Vault was already in bankruptcy when they initiated their suit.  I spent a hundred thousand dollars on the defense.  Here are a few incidents from the litigation:

Vault needed software to read and write their own disks, which they got by pirating it from the IBM BIOS. Before the suit began an employee of Vault called me to explain how the piracy was accomplished. […] Eventually this same employee was fired, while still owed back pay.  He began an action in California before the agency charged with resolving this kind of dispute.  Two years later after the suit was publicized he called me back and explained that California had adjudicated the matter in his favor, but he had despaired of getting his money because of the financial condition of Vault Corporation.  I testified by deposition, but not in person in the courtroom.  Apparently Vault had informed their lawyer that I could only have succeeded in copying Prolok with inside help.  The Vault lawyer asked me about my contact with Vault employees, and instead of the insider leak they expected, I told the story above.

We sent five expert witnesses to the trial.  Quaid paid travel for all five, and an expert witness fee to four of them.  One refused a witness fee.  At the trial the Vault lawyer forgot to ask the first witness how much he was paid.  He asked the second, the one who took no payment.  They did not dare to ask the question of the remaining three.

There is one part that fills me with guilt to this day. The software industry had long dreamed of shutting down copiers with litigation.  The decision in my case could not have been more favorable to copiers even if I had written it myself.  This convinced the software industry, and the music and movie industries, that there would be no relief through the courts as long as they followed Vault vs Quaid.  In 1996 they switched from litigation to legislation.  The result was the horrible Digital Millennium Copyright Act enacted without opposition in 1998.  I feel that in some way I am the godfather of this awful development.

Vault Corporation infamously self-destructed with the announcement of their "Prolok Plus" product, which, according to an article in PC Magazine, planned to either format a pirate's hard disk or install a 'worm' on their system.  It led to Ashton-Tate and other clients dropping them.  Do you recall this announcement and the resulting drama?

I received several unsolicited calls about Vault.  At one point the computer magazines were full of stories that AT&T was contemplating buying into Vault for $50 million.

One evening I got a call from the person at AT&T whose job was to evaluate Prolok.  He said he had a Prolok-protected disk and CopyWrite, and asked me how to make a copy.  I told him what to do.  A half-hour later he called back.  He had made the copy and it worked.  He had one last question.  If someone wanted to make a copy of a Prolok disk with your software and give it to a friend, would he be able to do so? 

I said that is not what our software is for, but if someone wanted to do that, there would be no technical obstacle in his way.  From that day forward, there were no more stories of anyone buying into Vault.

The above incident may be why Vault decided to sue Quaid instead of Central Point.  Another expert called me around that time to remark that if it was not for what I was doing they (Vault) would be in fat city now.

When I mentioned the worm to my lawyer, he promised to work it into the legal case, but at the trial the judge refused to allow any mention of the worm.

It's been nearly 4 decades, but copy protection is still as hot a topic as ever.  More and more software is moving to an always-online subscription model.  Video games are being wrapped in complicated (and controversial) VM-based protections like Denuvo.  What are your thoughts on the rights of software consumers today?

We are going downhill.  The personal computer revolution promised to free people from the tyranny of time-sharing on utility computers.  With cloud computing we are back where we started, at a higher technical level.  I have not wasted my time reading the cloud terms-of-service, but I am confident they give the tech companies the right to snoop on your activities.

Do you have any fun anecdotes about your time working in the software industry in the 1980's, or anything else you'd like to share?

I once had an opportunity to talk on the phone to a person on the Softguard team.  I have forgotten how the call occurred.  Unlike Prolok, who acted like bullies, the Softguard man sounded like a normal person, just doing a difficult job.

I can give you a story about development. There were several dozen copy protection systems that we had to recognize specifically. I was afraid that with continuing revisions, the ability to copy old systems might be lost. We used what I called a monster disk, one where every track implemented a different one of the specific methods. Checking that a new version of CopyWrite copied all tracks correctly ensured that we would not lose functionality.

Thank you for your time, and for giving us a fascinating look into the Quaid Software story.

Thank you for bringing back this long-forgotten story, unknown to today's copyright advocates and experts such as Cory Doctorow and Michael Geist. The fight over copy protection ended in a few years with a victory for the copiers. We are fighting the same battle again, this time the restriction is called Digital Rights Management, DRM. Progress is a lot slower this time, as farmers fight for the right to repair their tractors, cell phone owners fight for the right to replace their batteries and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sues for the right of technological free speech.