I will not be having a Star Wars day today on May the Fourth and it’s thanks to Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). For people who wonder why I often blog about DRM - this is why we need to fight it. I bought LEGO Star Wars five or more years ago. It was OK, but I needed someone else to play with me because the game is pretty crap with just one player. So I couldn’t wait until I could share the game with one of my children. Scarlett saw a LEGO computer game on Youtube and wanted to play. PERFECT! I went to load it and, because Microsoft no longer supports SecuROM, I can no longer play this game that I paid money for! This is why I only buy books without DRM; why I only buy movies on BluRay, not Amazon - because the DRM is trivially removed. And now I buy games on GOG whenever possible because they sell games without DRM. Don’t flush your money in the toilet! Buy DRM-free!
Why is this an issue? Because the books you read can be used to discriminate against you or, in some countries, land you in jail. In the USA it could put you on the no-fly list. As soon as I get home I’m uninstalling ADE - I’d installed it for the possibility of checking out digital books from the library. Forget it! I’m sticking to the no-DRM books and physical books at the library.
In a lot of ways I really don’t care what happens in the video game console world. In the last 2-3 years I have rediscovered computer gaming. Actually, to be more accurate, game publishers have rediscovered computer gaming. I remember in my youth when the best of the best games came out for computers and the consoles were mostly just arcade ports. At some point the pendulum swung the other way and, other than the Civilization and Blizard’s franchises, gaming had mostly died. Whatever games were released on computers were an afterthought and pretty poor quality. I don’t know if it was the unusually long console cycle leading to a lack of graphics innovation or the success of Steam making publishers realize they couldn’t afford to leave money on the table or a combination of the two, but computer gaming is back in a big way. (And, I’ve been saying computer gaming because Apple has seen a resurgence in gaming unlike any it has seen since the early to mid-90s and, thanks to Steam, Linux gaming is finally becoming a thing that doesn’t need WINE) So everything but the console exclusives - Halo, Mario, Uncharted - now come to computers. If I’m going to have a computer anyway (and I will), why ALSO play $300-400 for a gaming console? In the years since I’ve bought my Playstation 3 it’s been used WAY more often for Netflix than anything else. A Roku box serves that purpose a lot cheaper.
Until now I’ve been quite against ebooks. Back when I was in college I had an iPaq and I downloaded the Microsoft reader to it. I bought about 3 - 5 books for it and, at first, I thought it was great. It would allow you to annotate the book and highlight passages. And it was electronic so I could carry a bunch of books in the space of my PDA. But it was one of the first times I was bitten by digital restrictions management (DRM). I had to reset my PDA because it got into a locked state. After that, I couldn’t read my books until I reauthenticated the PDA. After all, everyone out there is out to destroy authors and steal digital books, so they need to make sure I’m the one who paid for it. This worked the first time around, but the second time I needed to authenticate, the server refused to authenticate the device and I could no longer read the books. So I was out around $20. Imagine buying a regular physical book and then having it no longer work because it wasn’t sure if you were the person who bought it. Yeah, it’s pretty ridiculous.
As 2008 has proven - draconian digital restrictions management (DRM) does not stop people from illicitly using computer games. Spore, whose DRM was so bad they got ratings bombed on Amazon.com, was the most pirated game of 2008. The DRM caused hassles for legitimate users and did nothing to stop illicit use. This is always the case. Ever since the beginning of DRM on video games there have been people getting around it. These DRM schemes are not cheap. They are licensed from companies who tell the video game companies that this is the only way to protect their games.
