From
this article:
"The way StarForce and a couple of its cousins does this is one of the more disturbing developments in the videogame war on piracy. StarForce installs a hidden driver onto your machine along with the game itself, without any explicit warnings. This driver is required to play the game and is not uninstalled with the game. It also has a rather disturbing tendency to re-install itself after either manual removal or cleanup using a provided tool that has to be hunted for across the Internet.
These new protection systems do not simply protect software from direct attempts to pirate it - they also proactively search out potential piracy threats on one's system and then prevent them from working. Programs such as Nero and Alcohol 120% are obvious targets here, though I have seen far more erratic and often times seemingly random tantrums taken by these systems. These range from disabling the recording device in Windows Media Player, to preventing access to the CD drive both on the software and hardware side. I usually find myself pressing the button to open the CD drive and then having to log out of Windows for it to do what it's supposed to!"
"In an interview with Firing Squad, the makers of StarForce strenuously denied the fact that their driver causes problems to all but a slim minority of user systems. They then went on to state that the EULA covers them and the publishers from all liability of damage done by their copy protection. In other words, 'we state that it doesn't cause problems, but if it does, we're covered by the EULA and you're not.' "
Just some interesting excerpts from an article entitled "The War on Game Pirates" that I found by googling.