What sort of copy protection exists on a retail Leopard DVD?

[archer75]

I see people talking about doing installs from the Retail disk which must mean there is no copy protection on that disc otherwise they would have to use a hacked copy? It seems the only issue is EFI?

 

I was discussing this with a person on another forum and he says:

 

You run OS X on an EFI machine, sure the kernel will not panic and most of the system will start, but the interface won't, including the dock, the finder, and some other key things that are quite important if you really want to use the OS.

 

The protected binaries are encrypted by a key, and that key is in the system management controller chip in every real mac. Sometime during the boot process, one of the kernel extensions grabs this key out of the chip and allows the kernel to decrypt the pages for these protected binaries when they are run.

 

Now, this is ABSOLUTELY a copy protection method, and will be protected by the DMCA, even though it can be broken by either reading the key out of the hardware and decrypting the binaries, or replacing the kernel extension responsible for doing the decryption, with one that contains the key. The fact that it doesn't prevent someone from running OS X who has not paid for it or has no serial number (there isn't one) is irrelevant. It does prevent stock OS X from running on even a compliant EFI machine, and that is all that matters, to actually get it to run you have to get around the encryption.

 

This is what the hackintosh people have been doing for quite a while, and i suspect it is exactly what psystar is doing. Either way, there is no way to run stock mac os x on non-apple hardware without getting around that encryption, because those things simply will not run unless they are decrypted, and once you do that you have circumvented Apples protection method.

[Superhai]

Now, this is ABSOLUTELY a copy protection method

 

It is not a copy protection, but it is a protection method more like the zone/region system found on dvds. There are no protective methods that restrict you from copying the contents of a retail dvd, and if you have a mac it will play just fine even tough it is a copy.