Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell believes Piracy will be a thing of the past thanks to a new chip, I say never say never me hearties!

At Wedbush Morgan Securities annual Management Access Conference yesterday Mr Bushnell spoke of a new encyrption chip known as TPM.

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.

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.

This chip is not the savour of all media though, Bushnell points out that movies and music are different because “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.

Piracy is of course a double edged sword, because the current anti-piracy technology today would not exist were it not for the fact people are willing to crack protection measures. Countless times we have been told that product X is copy proof only to have it not only broken, but split wide open by professional pirates.

While I can accept this new chip will certainly stop the pirates dead, it will only be a matter of time before someone creates a counter measure. I do not believe that it will be the final solution and it would be naive to assume so.

Source Games Industry