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DRM

Why DRM Sucks

April 14, 2011 15:31:58.000

Yet another example in the "What could possibly go wrong" files for DRM:

Thanks to a combination of DRM idiocy and technical and communications failures on the part of EA and Bioware, I (along with thousands of fellow EA/Bioware customers) spent my free time this past weekend needlessly trapped in troubleshooting hell, in a vain attempt to get my single-player game to load. The problem, it turns out, was the Bioware's DRM authorization servers, and as of Tuesday afternoon, the situation still is not resolved. For four days now, those of us who made the mistake of shelling out for Dragon Age:Origins (especially the Ultimate Edition) have been unable to play the single-player game that we paid for. And the unlucky souls who bought the game on Friday haven't yet seen it work properly.

DRM is a fairly complex scheme that makes a number of assumptions about how things should work. If anything breaks down along the way, you just get locked out of stuff you have a legal right to use. In my exercise room, I ended up setting up an ancient PC in order to share a connection with my XBox (the Wifi adaptor for the 360 is priced really stupidly). Why did I do this? Because a few months back, when I was playing ME2, I noticed that the game started demanding a connection in order to authorize DLC (and thus let me play).

THis all leads to very fragile systems, with end customers being on the short, irritated end of the stick. And for what, really? Go google for cracked versions of games, and you'll discover that they are easy enough to find. All DRM does is stand in the way of legitimate users. The people willing to steal are doing that anyway.

I should note that this specific DRM issue was fixed by EA, and DAO apparently works again. That doesn't change the facts though.

posted by James Robertson

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DRM

It's the False Positives, Stupid

July 29, 2010 7:34:37.617

This is why I dislike DRM so much - it doesn't hit pirates at all, but it periodically slaps legitimate users in the face:

Valve, the company responsible for the game Modern Warfare 2, recently issued an apology to over 12,000 legitimate MW2 users who were accidentally banned from getting their first-person shooter on by the company’s DRM implementation.

The pirates manage to get around these issues easily enough; cracked games pop up on the net on or before the official release date. Which means that DRM fails miserably for the task it supposedly exists for. However, it sure does manage to irritate the crap out of legitimate users on an ongoing basis.

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posted by James Robertson

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DRM

DRM or Death

June 23, 2010 9:03:58.000

The more things change, the more they stay the same. New administration, same old panic over intellectual property. Apparently, a kitten dies somewhere every time a song is shared over p2p...

posted by James Robertson

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They Do Seem Desperate

June 10, 2010 8:17:16.000

Radio Head's frontman, Thom Yorke, believes that the major record labels are going down, and soon:

Yorke has now issued a warning to upcoming artists, urging them not to sign traditional record deals because they would be tying themselves to "the sinking ship."

I'm not sure whether his timeframe is right, but heck - he's in a better position to know than I am. Even if he's off in his timing, I think he's right in the broad sense. There's really no place for the labels any longer. They serve as a middleman in a market that has been disintermediating for years now.

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posted by James Robertson

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DRM

DRM Gone Wild

May 8, 2010 15:26:18.531

And you thought you owned your own equipment:

Hollywood will soon have the power to remotely disable the analog outputs on your set-top box, under a decision by federal regulators on Friday intended to prevent home recording of new movie releases.

This is supposedly to allow releases of movies to cable while they are still in theaters, but - you know they won't stop there. Also, this is the FCC, so I have a question for all of you net neutrality fanboys: exactly why do you want to put internet rules under the FCC? What makes you think that you'll get responsible management with this sort of thing happening? Yes, I mean people like David Weinberger, who are practically salivating at the prospect of FCC rules over the net.

If that does happen, I expect a "shocked" reaction when the net becomes a shadow of its former self. For the children and copyright holders, of course.

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posted by James Robertson

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DRM

How Not to Do DRM

April 19, 2010 6:53:07.551

I'm not a big fan of DRM period, but it really seems like Ubisoft brought the stupid to their implementation:

More than three weeks after the release of The Settlers 7, with the controversial 'always on-line' DRM, a lot of people still can't connect to Ubisoft's DRM servers. The forum threads where people can post if they are unable to connect keep growing daily. One reason for the lack of fixes or responses from support seems to be that the people responsible were on vacation during the Easter holiday, despite the promise of 24/7 monitoring of the servers

If your plan is to require a "phone home" by the software, then you have to make sure that someone is there to, you know, answer the phone :)

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posted by James Robertson

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DRM

The Convoluted World of DRM

March 19, 2010 13:31:37.582

You have to love this: Valve hasn't added the latest Ubisoft games to their UK store (although they have arrived on the US side) - supposedly due to the "always connected" requirement of Ubisoft's latest games. The amusing part of that is that Steam requires either a constant connection or unsafe credentials handling in order to play - makes me wonder whether the combined DRM schemes are somehow causing grief.

In any event, this is the perfect example of where DRM gets you - problems for customers, service issues for the vendor, and unforseen complications due to unplanned software interactions. Awesome, isn't it?

posted by James Robertson

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DRM, Illustrated

March 18, 2010 7:00:27.737

This comic is great - the complexity added by DRM adds so many possible points of failure that it's just not funny.

posted by James Robertson

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Is it Working DRM, or Extra Brittleness?

February 27, 2010 13:45:10.805

Slashdot reports on the DRM for Assassin's Creed 2 - apparently, if you don't have a working connection, it'll just stop working. Never mind all of the obvious issues with this from the consumer end (what if your ISP has an issue?) - what about the brittleness this introduces on the back end?

Remember, all of its code for saving and loading games (a significant feature, I'm sure you would agree) is tied into logging into a distant server and sending data back and forth. This vital and complex bit of code has been written from the ground up to require having the saved games live on a machine far away, with said machine being programmed to accept, save, and return the game data. This is a far more difficult problem for a hacker to circumvent.

While it may be harder to circumvent, it sure will be easy to tick off users. Say the servers have a problem - then every game owner is SOL. Say a DDOS attack is launched on those servers? In a way, the vendor has painted a target on themselves. I won't be a bit surprised if a few black hats take aim at it.

Going back to the client side for a moment, I see my XBox dropping offline fairly regularly for small amounts of time. Usually it's after it's been unused for a bit, but sometimes it just drops right in the middle of a game - I know this because the XBox notifies me. If I had Assassin's Creed 2, such periodic drops (and cuts from the game) would get to be really, really annoying. My desire to buy the game just about fell off a cliff.

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posted by James Robertson

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DRM

I'll Love it When this comes to Books

February 19, 2010 8:21:18.309

The war against common sense ownership rights continues:

Echoing the controversial measures announced by Ubisoft last month, Sony has revealed that users of SOCOM: US Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo 3 will need to register their game online before they are able to access the multiplayer component of the title.

It gets worse:

Furthermore, in a nod to recent plans implemented by EA, anyone buying a pre-owned copy of the game will be forced to cough up $20 to obtain a code to play online.

I brought up books in the title because e-books could run into the same kind of "no sharing" buzzsaw - which would be very different from the centuries long practice of passing books around we have now (Jasper Fforde touched on this in "The Well of Lost Plots", actually - you have to read it to see how, because explaining it would give away too much of the story).

Anyway, on games - we trade games back and forth with friends (once a game is done, it's usually done). The industry apparently wants that practice to stop. Like book sharing, I don't think it's costing anyone real money, but, like DRM for music, it's a bad idea that lots of industry types have gone "all in" on. Great.

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posted by James Robertson

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