Well since the company can't afford to train and assign a corporate harpy to each and every player, they instead put restrictive software that calls home and says, "yup, this guy's still ok". Should the software not be able to call home, like a spy under strict orders to lie low, the game will refuse to operate until given an Internet connection by which to phone home to command.
The funny thing about this is that most of their market will happily and quickly buy their games, but when they put in the screws, those same customers will refuse. However, being avid gamers and fans, when presented with the ability and opportunity to download a cracked copy, they are much more likely to do so since they will still want to play the game.
SO… Adding restrictive software to prevent piracy actually causes piracy. Too bad they don't understand that.
A not-so-suprising reaction from the gaming community:
This one ruling could derail future (and past?) RIAA lawsuits and make filesharing a whole lot safer for the masses. Interestingly enough, the judge also helpfully offered the defendant a bunch of other possible defences that they could have used which the judge (presumably) would have ruled in their favor with.
From the, we're so stupid, we don't need competition to put us out of business, department comes a story of a new Western Digital Hard drive that has DRM built in. It's an external hard drive which is advertised as making it easy to store and share your files, as long as those files aren't music or movies.
Don't buy these. If you did buy them, return them.
A fairly clever video maker has created a tutorial on copyright law using, of all things, Disney movie clips. It's humorous and informative which is a good combination
We all mourned the trial loss where the RIAA won a judgement of over $200,000 against a woman who claims she didn't even download anything. Whether she did or not, I support her appeal on the basis that $200k is excessive. Assuming she downloaded songs and shared them too, the amount of her penalty should be far closer to real damages, not some made up number.
Though shopping with Amazon is like dancing with a hungry wolf, for now they may be one of the best places to get music content. Certainly if you had a choice between iTunes and Amazon for the same music, Amazon would be the better choice.
The over 20,000 file-sharing lawsuits that have been filed over the past few years share a single distinction: not one of them has made it to trial. The RIAA is trying to keep Virgin Records, et al v. Jammie Thomas from a jury trial, filing a motion for summary adjudication on some specific aspects of the case.
…
A loss at trial would be even more catastrophic for the RIAA. It would give other defense attorneys a winning template while exposing the weaknesses of the RIAA's arguments. It would also prove costly from a financial standpoint, as the RIAA would have to foot the legal expenses for both itself and the defendant. Most of all, it would set an unwelcomed precedent: over 20,000 lawsuits filed and the RIAA loses the first one to go to a jury.
That pretty much sums it up. It would be so cool to see them lose. I wonder if the people who settled previously could join a class action lawsuit against them. Probably not, but that would be nice.
Digital rights management is a lie concocted to bilk the entertainment industry out of a fortune - it's time to wake up.
That is the truth. I could almost feel sorry for the industry, if they weren't using copyright lawsuits.
Cory is a guy who gets it:
Not one of them has ever stopped the widespread, unauthorised copying of media. Not one of them ever will.
Sounds like something something I might have said once. You would think these companies have at least one IT person both smart enough to realize this and gutsy enough to tell management.
Remember that the issue isn't that one smart kid can circumvent the censorship software, it's that one smart kid — maybe this one, maybe another one — can write a piece of shareware that allows everyone to circumvent the censorship software.
It's the same with DRM; technical measures just aren't going to work.
Duh. Whoever sells DRM to big companies is a criminal. A very wealthy criminal.
To compete with the current market leading in online digital music downloads (Apple), Walmart will be offering music for less money and with NO DRM. That means you can copy the song to any device you want, as many times as you want with no tricky, annoying software blocking you.
It turns out that Comcast thinks they have the right to control how someone uses the Internet. Bittorrents, often, but not always used to distribute copyrighted content is one of the types of filesharing that big nasty companies like the RIAA target. Whether in the spirit of cooperation with the RIAA or just to save a little money by preventing heavy Internet users from actually using the Internet, Comcast is throttling Bittorrent shares and actually blocking seeders (people who provide the content originally).
If this disgusts you, now is a good time to become a supporter of net neutrality.
Microsoft uses the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) tool, a piece of DRM software with a catchy marketing slogan, to spy on your computer and then make a decision whether or not your version of Windows is valid. Assuming that it decides it's not (even if it is), it will disable your computer. The best part of the deal is that on Windows XP machines, they slipped the "tool" into the list of critical system updates so that anyone who didn't bother to look over the list of installs on the last update (or just has fully automatic updating turned on), would get the software without knowing about it.
The point here is that people were worried that there's inappropriate software secretly installed with the game, and that much is true, it's just DRM, not an actual rootkit.
As Ars Technica puts it:
Systems like SecuROM attempt to defeat common modes of piracy, but are indeed loathsome to gamers, as they quite often cause problems for legitimate users who have paid full fare for their games. They also make it difficult for gamers to move game data to a hard drive for easier play and quicker access.
Sure, they are anti-consumer and they are annoying. But for now, SecuROM isn't a rootkit.
It's a step in the right direction. Remember, many people who download music are ones who wouldn't have bought it in the first place. These big companies lose a lot less on filesharing than they make it out to be.
This story makes me a little sad. It's true that Mod Chips generally allow you to play downloaded and burned music, but they also allow the very important ability to play import games and backup discs. There's no reason someone shouldn't be able to play a backup copy and keep the real game in pristine condition and there's no reason at all that these dummy hardware manufacturers should limit what language game we should be able to play. Why on earth would they limit their market like that. It just makes no sense to me.
Anyway, a bunch of mod chippers got raided, but it does say they were busted for primarily selling pirated games. The article makes it sound like the mod chips themselves were illegal, but they aren't.
