Protecting the game's media is one thing, and that's completly possible with either Vishnu or Phoenix Game Protection.
Protecting the game from being copied amongst friends/pirates is pretty much impossible. Reducing the copying is possible, some companies have had much less issues than expected when not using any copy protection
at all for the game, cannot remember who told me this though...
But for example, Good Ol' Games sell, as pretty evident from their name, old games for the PC. Their approach is sort of; "we hate DRM (digital rights management) protection as much as you, and therefore make our games free from any such protection."
I can't speak for everyone, but I think that's a very good approach to things. As honest as most people are on these boards, aren't you honestly tired of always having to dig out your game-disc and put it in the disc drive just because the copy protection requires you to? Perhaps you've had issues with your new comp, and have had to reinstall a game title several times. Some games have protection that prevent you from installing and using your serial more than say five times. Bioshock had this at release, for instance, but it was later removed in an update, I think.
So perhaps we shouldn't seek out the most effective and most expensive way to protect our games, perhaps we should just save that time and money for other things. A lot of advanced protection solutions are very expensive, without it you might save enough money to cut a few bucks off of the retail price for your game? That way the customers will be happy. A lower than usual price is always appreciated, especially among students, whom are a big part of the market. And a low price doesn't mean it's a bad game, look at the Penumbra-series, for example. They're pretty cheap, but really great games.
