[RightWhale]

I still have a couple VIC-20s around, and a couple disc drives. I haven't fired them up in a while.
I also have here, at hand, a pile of 8" floppies. There is a circle of holes in an uneven pattern like what you mentioned in each one. It was semi-annoying that they would work in a Tektronix, but not an IBM, and often enough not in any drive but the one they were written in.
That you can pop a floppy into just about any computer these days and find it readable is close to a miracle to me.

[mvpel]

If it's an 8" floppy, those holes are probably evidence of "hard sectors" rather than copy protection:

http://www.discinterchange.com/TechTalk_floppy_disks_.html
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There are hard sector and soft sector disks, with soft sector the most common. Hard sector disks have small holes punched in a circle near the center hole of the disk that mark the locations of the sectors on the disk. Soft sector disks write magnetic marks on each track to indicate the start of a sector. Most disks are soft sector; Wang is the largest user of hard sector 8" disks.