Draconian DRM, Speak With Your Wallet or Get Used to it.

At first, DRM was used in PC video games. It's software that won't let you play your video game without the disc in the CD tray. This was a minor inconvience that most people would put up with to avoid piracy. The real reason, however is to increase sales. See, with DRM you can't loan your buddy your CD and let them install the game and then they can play whenever they want. No, you have to have the disc to play. Over the years, DRM has evolved into being online at all times to play your video game, or online once a month etc. This is a problem for many people with bad or unreliable internet. No longer can you bring your labtop to the cabin or on vacation and play your favorite game after a day in the outdoors without internet access.

This poses a bigger problem aswell. No longer are you purchasing your game, your basically renting it. See, if the video game company decides that game is no longer as popular as it once was, or they are losing money with the servers, they can shut the servers down and that game you spent your hard-earned money on is useless.

This is all used as an excuse to prevent or combat piracy. I make the arguement it is promoting piracy. Why would you pay for a game you may only get to play a year until the servers shut down.

The worst part is that this isn't only limited to PC games. This model is being spread into the movie industry aswell. Ever rent a Blu-Ray? Notice at the menu it says at the top: "Connect your Blu-Ray player to the internet to enjoy extra features" or something to that effect. Some of the newer Blu-Ray discs won't play unless you are connected to the internet. To supposedly prevent piracy. Which in turn actually makes piracy more popular. Why? It's easier to pirate something than to jump through all the hoops DRM makes.

Thanks for reading.

You seem to be complaining that people or companies are trying to make sure they get paid for their work, their ideas, their inventions, their abilities, and that pirating is a right for one and all to use in order to not pay money for using them. Obviously, you have never created something that can be copied so you can see your hard work mean nothing. And of course, the picture we have of pirates is so fun.... swashbucking, dress crazy, drink and party, just basically having fun!!!! PIRATES!!!!! What could be better than to be a PIRATE! Rum, gold, and women! Firing guns, blowing things up, and being the envy of everyone! Forget the killing, the robbing and stealing, forget the short lives, the lives taken, the people maimed.... Pirates are just cool! Or....... not really. Just in the movies. I mean, who cares about the people that they killed and the loved ones missed. Who cares about the goods stolen from hardworking people.... everyone they stole from or killed deserved it, didn't they? Just rich people!

So pirating games is cool. Paying people for their creations and hard work is just silly. Stealing is fine! I mean, its just a game, right? It should belong to everyone! Or maybe, spend less time playing games so you can have a good job and pay people for what they worked hard for to create for your amusement? And then feel better about the games you play, if you have any morals and ethics, I mean. And if you are creative enough and can put work into an idea you might actually have some day, and slave over it in the hopes of a return on your hard work, maybe you can be paid for it too, instead of just being a drone for someone else. Or worse yet, just someone who sits on their rear and plays games all day and night and doesn't have a job but is more than willing to take from others to continue their pointless existence.

I agree, I did buy 3 of the same game though, this was back in the 90's/early 00's it was the first dungeon siege game. I bought them because I wanted to support the company. At the time I knew of "No CD" cracks and used them on this game, but I still bought one for each of us. To this day, well actually about a week ago, we still play it.

Originally posted by jaxnmarko
You seem to be complaining that people or companies are trying to make sure they get paid for their work, their ideas, their inventions, their abilities, and that pirating is a right for one and all to use in order to not pay money for using them. Obviously, you have never created something that can be copied so you can see your hard work mean nothing. And of course, the picture we have of pirates is so fun.... swashbucking, dress crazy, drink and party, just basically having fun!!!! PIRATES!!!!! What could be better than to be a PIRATE! Rum, gold, and women! Firing guns, blowing things up, and being the envy of everyone! Forget the killing, the robbing and stealing, forget the short lives, the lives taken, the people maimed.... Pirates are just cool! Or....... not really. Just in the movies. I mean, who cares about the people that they killed and the loved ones missed. Who cares about the goods stolen from hardworking people.... everyone they stole from or killed deserved it, didn't they? Just rich people!

So pirating games is cool. Paying people for their creations and hard work is just silly. Stealing is fine! I mean, its just a game, right? It should belong to everyone! Or maybe, spend less time playing games so you can have a good job and pay people for what they worked hard for to create for your amusement? And then feel better about the games you play, if you have any morals and ethics, I mean. And if you are creative enough and can put work into an idea you might actually have some day, and slave over it in the hopes of a return on your hard work, maybe you can be paid for it too, instead of just being a drone for someone else. Or worse yet, just someone who sits on their rear and plays games all day and night and doesn't have a job but is more than willing to take from others to continue their pointless existence.

edit on 17-8-2012 by jaxnmarko because: grammar and capitalization

Well, you missed the point completely. This isn't a pro-piracy rant. I never mentioned that once. I said it's becoming more popular because it's becoming easier to pirate then to jump through all the hoops in order to play a game legally. Honestly, if you don't know what your talking about then don't say anything or you'll look ignorant.

And FYI, I have never pirated a game or movie or anything. I have a job and video games are a hobby of mine. I'vve been playing them since the original Nintendo.

What if Ipods worked that way. And you can only listen to the music you just paid for at home because it won't work without detecting your ip address .

Thats what they are doing, restricting your ability to use your product where ever you want and lend it to whoever you want.

A product ceases to be theirs as soon as they take your money.

You can do whatever you want with it and if you want to lend it to a friend to download, It's yours to do so.

It's no more piracy than buying a few apples and sharing one is theft.

I agree with the OP entirely and I can't imagine too many gamers these days who would disagree. If some of these game servers go down, there will be a lot of people with games bought at full retail price and nothing they can do with them....for those who still have all the files stored client side in the first place. It is getting absurd for those of us who DO pay...just as you note.

Then please accept my apologies, SepticSheepHerder..... I misread your intent. In this day and age of piracy it gets crazy. Today I was in a toy store, buying a few things for my grandsons. I couldn't help but notice all the Chinese people in the toy store (I live in a resort town and with the increase in the standard of living in China and their new freedoms to leave their country and have vacations here, there are many many more visiting in the past few years) and I also couldn't help but think of what they might have thought, seeing so much of the stuff in that store was very likely made in China, and how little is made here anymore. We read all the time in the news how China flaunts international law in making illegal copies and pirating so much of the creative thinking that was initially done here. So when I saw your post.... I overreacted. Again, my apologies.

reply to post by randomname


'It's no more piracy than buying a few apples and sharing one is theft.'

I completely disagree. Giving someone an apple you bought is totally different than making an easily made though illegal copy of that apple and then distributing it so that the farmer that had to wait 10 years for the tree to produce apples, watered, fertilized, and pruned it, could make money off his investment.
Buying an apple and giving it away is not theft. Nor is buying a game and giving it away. Copying the game is totally different. If you wrote a song and hoped to get royalties to live on, and found out only one record was made and all the rest were copied illegally, would you work hard at another? Paying producers, recording studios.... and so on? If you created something like TinkerToys, and hoped to make money selling it to kids, and found that China was selling it here cheaper than you can, and put you out of business, is that fair to you? There is a reason for these laws. They protect NOT only the creators, but the reason TO create. It takes a long time and a lot of money to make a game. There may be little incentive to create without reward. And then.... who would make the games?

Originally posted by jaxnmarko
You seem to be complaining that people or companies are trying to make sure they get paid for their work, their ideas, their inventions, their abilities, and that pirating is a right for one and all to use in order to not pay money for using them.

If he wants to complain let him complain. The DRM results in the pirate version being superior to the version which someone paid for.

It's a legit complaint imo which has little to do with the morality of piracy (imo).

DRM is a tricky subject.

On one hand it is completely unnecessary, seeing as how most are cracked anyway, they usually hurt the actually buyers more than the pirates because pirates will always find a way to pirate while legit customers are thrown under the bus if god forbid their net goes down.

But on the hand, people deserve to be paid for their work and have a way to make sure they get that pay check. Taking off DRM would not make it more pirateable but it is a nice peace of mind tactic distributors can offer game makers.

What it comes down to is quality. History has shown that all games will be pirated, but if you make a genuinely good game, people will buy it.

The simple solutions is to stop making games that people don't want to buy. Switch to digital distribution, to cut the cost of distributing them, (i.e. Stop charging 60$ for a game just because it's on a cd) and people will buy it.

Steam is on the rise because it adopted a business model that fits the budget of casual and hard core gamers alike. In fact it's most popular games (Dota 2, Team fortress 2, Counter strike...etc) are free if not cheap and make their money off in game items.

DRM brings to mind the Sony BMG CD rootkit scandal where the software interfered with the way Microsoft Windows operating systems played CDs. It would install a rootkit on your computer which created vulnerabilities for other malware to exploit on your system. When the rootkit software was detected and recalled by Sony it seems that RIAA stepped in. Last May the defunct P2P file-sharing program LimeWire settled with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for $105 million.

RIAA wasn’t satisfied with that amount and still demanded that LimeWire owed $72 trillion in damages for copyright infringement. (Yes, you read that correctly “$72 trillion”) Judge Kimba Wood of the U.S. District Court denied the ridiculous claim, which she said was just shy of all the money in the world. The judge said RIAA wanted “more money than the entire music recording industry has made since Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877.”

DRM, RIAA, MPAA all come down to big corporations wanting money, influence and control to make companies do what they want, make countries do what they want, and make people do what they want. Soon they are going to want us to provide personal identifying information every time we access any type of technology, software or music - Oh that's right the masses already have Facebook!

RIAA/Tower-Records got nailed in a price-fixing scheme not long ago and the settlement they had to pay was only a fraction of the profits made from the scam itself but you don’t see that all over the MSM.

Trekkies, Star Wars fans, Firefly fans, Cosplay fans, Gamers, Music fans all define themselves and the culture they relate to by what is spoon fed to them by these predatory corporations yet everyone keeps going back.

Originally posted by jaxnmarko
Then please accept my apologies, SepticSheepHerder..... I misread your intent. In this day and age of piracy it gets crazy. Today I was in a toy store, buying a few things for my grandsons. I couldn't help but notice all the Chinese people in the toy store (I live in a resort town and with the increase in the standard of living in China and their new freedoms to leave their country and have vacations here, there are many many more visiting in the past few years) and I also couldn't help but think of what they might have thought, seeing so much of the stuff in that store was very likely made in China, and how little is made here anymore. We read all the time in the news how China flaunts international law in making illegal copies and pirating so much of the creative thinking that was initially done here. So when I saw your post.... I overreacted. Again, my apologies.

It's no problem. Kind of a catch-22. When a good game does come out, of course you want to support the folks that built it but you also don't want to justify the company for using draconian DRM. The company Electronic Arts for example bought out one of my favorite developers 'Maxis'. On the one hand, I want to support Maxis as they create some great stuff but I don't want to support EA either. I haven't purchased any games for awhile now because of DRM, nor have I pirated. I just wish more people would speak with their wallets and let the companies know that we won't tolerate this ridiculous DRM.

reply to post by SepticSheepHerder





the only person getting screwed by DRM products are the paying customers.


You have to remember, you are essentially voting with your money. if DRM becomes more and more apparent until it takes over all digital media, it isnt because it is a conspiracy, it is because people are still buying the god damn product either way. soo...

if the company selling the DRM product had a sales loss of 50% or more, you guessed it, DRM wont be on their next product.

Originally posted by jaxnmarko
You seem to be complaining that people or companies are trying to make sure they get paid for their work, their ideas, their inventions, their abilities, and that pirating is a right for one and all to use in order to not pay money for using them. Obviously, you have never created something that can be copied so you can see your hard work mean nothing.

I agree with your fundamental point - as a creator myself.

However, there are problems on both sides of the argument here.

Firstly, we do have a generation of people who think stealing is okay. They are ignorant to the work that goes into creating something, and they think that their products should be completely free. Obviously that is wrong and it needs to change.

However, Hollywood has been living in a dream land for decades, thinking it can continue to justify increasing billions in profits. A digital copy takes nothing to create. Once the original is made it can be duplicated for nothing as many times as you like.

When you hear about a Hollywood exec crying that he might not be able to afford to buy another house in the South of France again this year, and blaming society for not being able to increase his bloated lifestyle (for doing nothing but sit on his ass and dictate what the world will see based on how much money he'll make), it kind of becomes clear that the business model has failed.

Studios have long been guilty of living in a fantasy world, and the only reason they managed that is because they controlled the art. Now that the stable door is open and their horse has bolted their ridiculous monopoly has been spoiled, they're crying about it instead of adjusting to suit modern times.

Most piracy happens because of lack of availability and high costs. Internet piracy happens in the TV world because those media companies have refused to invest in providing their content globally. A TV show could be streamed live around the word via the internet. The hottest shows in the US could be made available to billions of people with a little investment. But they don't do it.

They are missing out on billions of $'s in advertising by not following this obvious path.

It's the same with movies. Why does a movie come out in the USA in June, and then maybe become available around the world two months later? Why can't that be made available on line at the same time?

People would pay for this.

I work in the adult industry on line, and this is a constant problem with adult content. But no studios are making their content available the way they should, the way the audience wants to see it. People don't want to sign up to be a member of a site at $30 a month just to see one video. They want that one video and the sites are not providing it. Hence you get people stealing and copying it.

The youth of today are ignorant to the facts when it comes to piracy. They don't understand that stealing the content inevitably means lower profits, which means lower quality, and it means others not entering the business. They are harming the quality of media by their refusal to pay for it. A business is not a charity.

But the companies are just as bad in their refusal to move with the times and give people what they want. If you resolutely refuse to adapt to the environment you fail. They are failing because they refuse to provide what the customer wants.

Are companies strong-armed into having to have DRM on their products?

Like say some random movie doesn't want any DRM on their product are they able to?

I could see this as a scam if for example, it doesn't stop piracy, but a company has to pay for the DRM anyway "by force" (unless they don't want their product pressed into a DVD/CD etc). I.e. some blu-ray movies demand an internet connection.