Spurning Spore Over Draconian Digital Rights Management?

The controversy bubbling around Spore's digital rights management "solution" is keeping blogs roiling and boards rocking as we near the one week anniversary of Spore's US sales debut. At issue: Spore, Will Wright's "universe in a box" computer game which I reviewed last week, can be installed a maximum of three times. After that, it's "everyone out of the pool," and you're at least a support phone call away from persuading an EA representative to spring the locks on your account and give you a new code to install the game again. (I'm assuming it resets your "three" count, but I haven't tried and confirmed it myself.)

(For an interesting technical angle on the issue, see Darren Gladstone's "Why Spore Won't Work" in this week's Casual Friday.)

Okay, let's get the activation specifics clear, because they're important. EA allows you to install Spore three times, but three times only. By comparison, Microsoft allows you to install Windows XP and Vista as many times as you like, so long as the hardware in your computer doesn't change too radically. You could therefore argue that Microsoft Windows is more consumer-friendly than Spore when it comes to using (and reusing) the product.

Welcome to the Twilight Zone.

Stick with me, it gets even zone-ier. Since Spore came out, reviewers have been flocking to the game's Amazon.com page in droves and venting their frustration with EA's copy protection scheme by slapping the game with a one-star rating. "Surely not that many," you're probably thinking. "Maybe a third? A half?"

How's 2,016 out of 2,216, or over 90 percent hit you?

"This basically means that you are actually RENTING the game, instead of owning it," opined one reviewer.

"The only practical purpose of the DRM, therefore, is forcing honest people to pay for the game again if they decide to upgrade their hardware, or get a new computer, more than twice," wrote another.

"No Way, No How, No DRM," reads the subject line of a third.

And so on, though to be fair, a certain number of the one-star reviews don't mention DRM at all, and instead lambast the game for being too easy or simplistic.

EA's response? "EA has not changed our basic DRM copy protection system," says corporate communications manager Mariam Sughayer. "We simply changed the copy protection method from using the physical media, which requires authentication every time you play the game by requiring a disc in the drive, to one which uses a one-time online authentication."

Okay. But wait. For all the grousing, isn't the DRM at least preventing rampant piracy of the game?

Turns out nope, it's not, and in fact -- according to Forbes, citing peer-to-peer research firm Big Champagne -- Spore's DRM may be spurring pirates on.

Writes Forbes:

On several top file-sharing sites, "Spore"'s most downloaded BitTorrent "tracker"--a file that maps which users had the game available for downloading--also included step-by-step instructions for how to disassemble the copy protections, along with a set of numerical keys for breaking the software's encryption. For many users, that made the pirated version more appealing than the legitimate one.

So the game's as pirated as ever, customers who legitimately paid for the game are more frustrated than ever, and EA's reputation (possibly along with Will Wright's, simply by association) is being tarnished by what certainly looks like a botched anti-piracy stratagem.

I'm personally up a creek without a paddle, because I routinely rebuild my Macbook Pro once every month or two, just because that's how we obsessive-compulsive nut-jobs roll.

Of course there's a simple fix for all of this, and plenty of precedent: EA can simply remove the activation limit on its back end servers. No potentially huge or invasive patch to download, nothing to test on their end, just a simple toggle on the server.

No fuss, no muss.

What say you, EA?

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