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Archive for the ‘Just my Opinion’ Category

SecuROM : Examining ‘The Beast’

January 19th, 2010

Cliff Riseborough

Mention its name on your average gaming or computer forum, and you’re likely to be greeted with a somewhat emotional response from most people. Let’s try it.

SecuROM.

Yep, that’s pretty much par for the course. It’s insidious, it’s evil, and it’s completely dead set against you. It’s out to ruin your day, ruin your fun, ruin your life.

It may sound like I’m just spewing hyperboles (always a fun game), but if you really believe that’s what I’m doing now, please perform the following experiment. Go to your favourite gaming or computer forum and make an innocent post asking what SecuROM is. Now, give it a day or two to percolate, brace yourself, and check back in to read the replies. And don’t be surprised if you see claims that SecuROM caused a user’s computer to spring to life and sexually assault their pet cat.

Is SecuROM perfect? No. There are legitimate compatibility errors for some people relating directly to the DRM. It has, in the past, used software blacklisting as part of its protection system. It installs itself along with a game, then stays behind long after that game has been removed from your hard drive. However, it also isn’t the demonic force or infection it is too often described as, either. So where does that perception come from?

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Posted in Just my Opinion

Tags: balance, Byteshield, DRM, EA, exaggerations, lawsuits, SecuROM, Tages

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Do you own your digital property?

January 18th, 2010

Brad McGraw

In a recent blog post at Public Knowledge Jef Pearlman quoted Michael Robertson who asked, ‘Do you own your digital property?’, and went on to say, ‘I know I sold you that, but you can’t play it on a portable device or put it on the Internet’ you’ve turned everything into a rental or a lease.’. This is exactly what the video game companies are saying. We now ‘license’ games, we do not own them.

Now there is an organization (DECE) that wants to start a ‘service’ that allows you to cross platform your media. That could mean music, movies, video games, etc. I would suggest going to my first link and reading that article for what that means. I am going to focus on video games and what I think DRM is supposed to be doing for the video game industry.

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Posted in Games, Just my Opinion

Tags: DECE, DRM, piracy, Second hand sales

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In Defense of DRM Vendors

January 13th, 2010

Brad McGraw

This is actually a revisit to an earlier article I wrote for a different web site. After I wrote that one there was a very large fuss made by some of the staff. Basically, the site was not able to do any work for a few weeks because of this. And this brings up a very important point; some people simply hate DRM, or at least specific DRM companies, because the big complaint about my prior article was that I used SecuROM as an example.

The article I originally wrote is below:

Everybody hates the DRM vendor. They are the ones putting ‘evil stuff’ onto our computers and being mean to us gamers with their restrictions. So gamers generally take a dim view of the DRM vendors and blame them for everything. However, is it really all their fault? Or are they just providing a service?

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Posted in Just my Opinion

Tags: Byteshield, DRM Vendors, EA, SecuROM, Spore, StarForce, Tages

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