You guys know how much we love articles from German developer Schadenfreude Interactive (Cthulhu Karts, Accordion Hero, Grand Theft Ottoman) on sister site Gamasutra - well, there's a new one named 'Copy Protection Racket' online, and it's just... yaaay.

The piece "discusses how to find appropriate copy protection for your game, from dongles through 'scratch 'n sniff' to startling modern Russian methods", and starts out: "Lothar (our art director) came to me one day with a problem. Ordinarily he would go to our chief technical officer, Bruno, with these things, but Bruno was away attending the Beard & Mustache World Championship in Berlin (just attending, not competing – my mother can grow more of a mustache than Bruno can). Anyway, Lothar had found copies of our games available for download on BitTorrent."

Thus, the Germans venture deep into the PC copy protection world, discovering Russian firm, uhh, NovaHammer: "NovaHammer’s CEO Sergei Glazunov arrived with three hulking assistants in matching black Members Only jackets and sunglasses. They declined to take them off (the jackets or the glasses). Mr. Glazunov introduced the men as Dmitri Karamazov, his brother Dmitri, and his other brother Dmitri. We offered them coffee cake, and since it was just after 10 am, beer. I began by asking them a little bit about their business. “We protect your things. That is our business. Protection.” “My things?” I asked. “But we make computer games.” “Oh, of course. We can protect those too.”"

We're sure those NovaHammer guys remind us of someone, we just can't put our fingers on it...