digital rights management

Chris Knight's avatar

So… that whole thing about Electronic Arts’ new SimCity requiring a constant Internet connection to play?  EA told us that it was needed because most of the game’s processing takes place on EA’s own servers.  In other words: the official company line is that it is not possible at all to play SimCity locally on your PC or laptop.  And despite the horde of connection problems that players were made to endure throughout the past week, EA has insisted that they can’t remove the always-online obligation and that doing so would require coding up a whole new game.

Lies!  Lies!  All damnable lies!!

Electronic Arts, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.

The video gaming realm is reeling tonight after word surfaced that a hacker/modder calling himself “UKAzzer” has made SimCity completely playable in the total absence of Internet, for however long you want!

UKAzzer was able to enter ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

I’ve been under the weather most of the past few days (not with flu but it felt like it) so this blog ground to a screeching halt. That didn’t mean I was without entertainment though. For the most part that involved watching the FUBAR that Electronic Arts has made of SimCity since launching it last week…

SimCity, Electronic Arts, EA, Maxis, meteors, disasters
We built this city on DRM!

This is a SimCity game.  The fifth major one since the series launched in the late Eighties.  HOW in the name of all that’s good and holy does anybody… anybody… mess up a SimCity game??

EA did.  And the bustling metropoli promised to millions of players have in less than a week turned into virtual ghettos of riot and violence that even Amazon.com decided to steer clear of: the online retailer halted sales of SimCity for both physical and digital download versions.

Just like Diablo III...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Here’s a screenshot I just made of the Amazon product page for the new video game Spore, which came out yesterday for Windows and Mac computers…

How does a video game simultaneously occupy #1 on Amazon’s sales rank, and get hundreds of one-star reviews?

In three words: “Digital Rights Management”. People who purchase Spore can only install it on three computers. And apparently the DRM that is installed is continuously running in the system’s background even when the game isn’t being played, sucking up resources that could be used for other processes. I don’t think that BioShock‘s DRM last year was that bad (incidentally, 2K eventually removed the DRM from BioShock altogether).

And now Electronic Arts is being targeted with a massive protest by Spore players who have unleashed a wave of negative reviews for the game, in spite of the very favorable press the game has received ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

You’ve probably heard about how some people are taking their new iPhones and hacking them so that they can use carriers other than AT&T, run “third-party” software not approved by Apple, etc. Many or most (maybe all) of these folks are suddenly lugging around very expensive “bricks”, because this week Apple released an update for the iPhone that is disabling such modified phones.

I took a looksee through the licensing agreement for the iPhone. The thing is Digital Rights Management from Hell. From my understanding of the agreement, buying and using an iPhone is lifetime indentured loyalty to AT&T, if you want to keep using it. That’s beyond the initial two-year service agreement.

In light of my own recent experience with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it sure looks like Apple saw the rights afforded to people by the DMCA if they attempted to circumvent the software and contract, ...

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