PES2Card - Protected Cards

There have been lots of queries about what card protection is, why its there and how to circumvent it. Below these three questions are addressed to the best of my ability.

Which cards are protected?

No	Title
17	Super Mario
26	Snoopy
34	Snoopy Sport
	Smurf
	Disney cards

What is card protection?

Card protection is a mechanism that enables the manufacturer of card card to make that card readable only by embroidery machines. This is accomplished by special encoding of the embroidery card. One can consider this software protection. When this facility was invented there was only one card module on the market: the PE Design card module. The PE Design File Utility knows about the special encoding and informs the user that the card is not an embroidery card. PES2Card informs the user that the card is protected.

Why are some cards protected?

The reason for protecting cards is normally obvious. For the ones mentioned above I can see immediately the reason in the Copyright area. The manufacturer of those cards will have to pay a fee for every card produced to the holder of the copyright. One can understand easily that this fee will be higher when users can read and modify the designs on a card versus users can embroider the designs only.
Another reason for protecting a card can be that the owner of the design doesn't want users to be able to modify the design. When users are able to read and modify designs, this can lead to deviating pictures of what the licensing company uses as a trademark (f.e. Disney).

How to circumvent card protection?

The only way to circumvent card protection is to get written permission from the manufacturer of protected cards to read one or more protected cards. The PES2Card utility will, after permission has been granted, be changed to read one or more protected cards. So far Brother has not allowed PES2Card to read any of the protected cards. This is recently (May 26, 2000) confirmed.