Now all you need to do is to get all your friends to stop the same purchases and have them tell all their other friends to do the same and maybe issue like this will not happen anymore.

Maybe a ESRB like label  big bold letters  with the  DRM folowed  by  a clock icon  with  the activation numbers  and  some sort of  internet required  logo    plastered  right next to the ESRB    :> 

Its a know fact that DRM does little to stop piracy and the big companies who think it does are obiviously out of the loop. Its like there all in a state of fear and are not really rationalising the problem and thus only angering there actual customers.

Then there the whole quality of the games themselves i dont know about you but i find fewer and fewer games to be of good quality let alone stand out by miles. It seems now that its all about graphics too i find that annoying.

Anyway i hope that gaming consumers decide to stop purchasing games with this rather aggressive DRMs of course i think given the climate we are entering atm people are less likely to purchase items they want over those they need. I kinda hope that forces game developers to make good games again and to listen to there customers abit more.

Good find Spartan.

Recently Yahoo Music pulled the plug on the service in Canada. With it went the servers that check for licensing of the product I've been using for the last three years. What a total pain in the a** having to undo all the DRM on all my tunes.

The service was great though, I could download and listen to the tunes shared to my Xbox 360 at the house for $6.95 per month. The last six months the selection was bad but overall it was good value.

This is all about the balance between different ownership rights. Your rights as a consumer to own the things you buy. And the publisher's rights to own the things he publishes - copyright. Copyright is a form of ownership - it is basically the right to own and distribute ideas. It's a type of what's called "intellectual property". It's the same type of property right as a patent or a trade mark.

The publisher of a game or a book owns the copyright. When you buy a paperback book, you own the paper, the ink, the covers, the glue. You have the right to read the words. But you don't "own" the content - the words. You do not have the right to copy the contents. If you want to publish a quote from a book, if you don't get the permission from (and possibly pay) the copyright holder, you have breached his copyright and he can sue you. You can sell the book to some one else. But you can't copy the book and sell those copies.

Software works in basically the same way. When you buy a game, you own the disc, the box, the manual etc. You can "read the words" - play the game. You can sell the game on. But you don't own the "words" - the code. You can't copy the code and sell it on. If you do you breach copyright and can be sued. In some countries, it is even a criminal offence.

What's different about limited activations DRM?

Well, imagine buying a book (from Amazon, say). You don't bother reading the copyright page (who but a nerd does that?). You've just finished it when there's a knock on the door. You open it and standing there is a man in a suit... He got your name and address from Amazon, who were obliged to give the publisher the details of every person who bought the book. The man in the suit is demanding you hand over the book so that he can paint over all the pages and make the words unreadable. Didn't you read the copyright page? The publisher states that he's licensing the copyright to you for the purposes of a single read only. After that, you have no right to read the words he owns.

But it's my book! you cry.

So it is. You still own the paper, the ink, the covers, the glue etc. You can still sell it to someone else if you want. The publisher will even throw in for free the paint that the man in the suit has just slapped all over your book.

So what's your problem?

In case the penny hasn't dropped, the problem is this.

Copyright is the right to own and distribute ideas. It is a very important right and should be protected. But the right to own property - a book, a music CD, a movie on a DVD, a computer game - is as important if not more important. A balance needs to be struck between these two rights. 

What is happening here is that the publishers are trying to shift the balance in their favour. And they have gone too far.

In a frankly misguided attempt to combat piracy (which I do not condone, by the way) they are trying to restrict the rights of legitimate owners in a way that potentially leaves them with something worthless.

And I think it will backfire on them.

See, the thing is that none of these things actually WORKS. If SecuROM actually stopped piracy dead in it's tracks, I could see the argument. But it doesn't. Spore is one of the most pirated games in history, and forget that 3-install limit. As a publisher, how do you justify spending money on DRM when it simply doesn't work?

That is a interesting question. AFAIK, the publisher pays money to another company to use its copy protection software. I wonder if that money is actually well spent, as always the game ends up being pirated, and always a certain number of people refuse to buy the game because of the copy protection. I am curious to see how the publisher justify the expense of paying for a sophisticated copy protection software like SecuROM. Does it really help sales more than it hurt them? And if it helps, does the increase in sales warrant the expense?