Tag: DRM

Did Spore DRM Cost Electronic Arts $25 Million?

Staci Kramer wrote an interesting take on the fact that Spore was apparently the most heavily pirated game in history — there were an estimated 500,000 downloads of cracked versions of the game from BitTorrent sites. At $50 apiece, Kramer’s take is that Electronic Arts left $25 million on the table in its efforts to make the DRM as draconian as possible.

Normally I’d take something like Kramer’s analysis with a grain of salt. I suspect a very large percentage of folks who downloaded the game from BitTorrent would have done so regardless of the DRM scheme that EA had in place. Moreover, aren’t anti-DRM folks always making the case that illegal downloads can drive real world sales, so EA may in fact pick up customers who download the game, try it out, and decide its worth $50.

That said, it was nice to see how quickly EA backpedaled. First they caved on the ridiculous three install limit. Then they had to switch gears on their one account per registration key nonsense. If they’re smart (and this is EA we’re talking about so who knows) they’ll wait until December and announce a Christmas present patch that removes the Securom DRM which obviously caused so much trouble to all those folks who uploaded crack versions to BitTorrent.

Given the bad publicity, EA would be smart to rethink its approach to DRM in time for the Sims 3 release (currently scheduled for February 29, 2009). That and maybe get WIll Wright to actually finish Spore so its actually a playable game rather than a half-assed tech demo for an amazing set of content creation tools.

HD-DVD DRM Broken

This thread at Doom9.Org is simply beautiful in showing how a small number of determined individuals can so quickly dissect and disassemble the latest and greatest DRM, AACS. This follows a different assault on AACS back in December by another hacker.

You have to wonder how much the movie industry pays for these DRM systems that are hacked and easily routed around as soon as they become even halfway relevant.

All that money spent screwing over customers with technology that genuine pirates can easily circumvent. Probably the same people green lighting new Ben Affleck movies are sitting in the back thinking “and we’ll protect it from piracy with DRM.”

Bruce Schneier on DRM

Bruce Schneier wrote an interesting essay for Wired highlighting the inherent problem of DRM which he likens to storing your valuables in a safe and then giving that safe to someone you don’t trust,

Think of a stored-value smart card: If the person owning the card can break the security, he can add money to the card. Think of a DRM system: Its security depends on the person owning the computer not being able to get at the insides of the DRM security. Think of the RFID chip on a passport. Or a postage meter. Or SSL traffic being sent over a public network.

These systems are difficult to secure, and not just because you give your attacker the device and let him utilize whatever time, equipment and expertise he needs to break it. It’s difficult to secure because breaks are generally “class breaks.” The expert who figures out how to do it can build hardware — or write software — to do it automatically. Only one person needs to break a given DRM system; the software can break every other device in the same class.

. . .

Separating data ownership and device ownership doesn’t mean that security is impossible, only much more difficult. You can buy a safe so strong that you can lock your valuables in it and give it to your attacker — with confidence. I’m not so sure you can design a smart card that keeps secrets from its owner, or a DRM system that works on a general-purpose computer — especially because of the problem of class breaks. But in all cases, the best way to solve the security problem is not to have it in the first place.

Do Consumers Care About Game Copy Protection?

ZDNet has an odd take and ECD Systems have an odd view on a study by the latter that found 28 percent of consumers avoid buying PC games that are copy protected. Both ZDNet and ECD Systems stress that only 28 percent avoid copy-protected games. Huh?

More than a quarter of consumers actively avoid buying a product crippled by copy protection and this is seen as validating copy protection? The last time I checked, the PC game market is rapidly shrinking and consolidating — maybe EA can afford to piss of 28 percent of potential PC gamers, but I doubt the rest of the industry can.

And the survey apparently didn’t bother to try to gauge gamer’s opinions on whether they would buy or pirate non-copy protected games. The real world evidence suggests that the lack of copy protection is not a sales killer. Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations II sold like crazy despite not having any copy protection. Why? Because the people who were going to pirate it were going to pirate it even if it had extensive copy protection, and those who were going to buy it went out and bought it anyway. (For the record, I went out and bought a copy, though I’ve never had a chance to play it much thanks to that other non-copy-protected game.)

Moreover, a significant portion of that 72 percent who don’t care about copy protection probably could care less because they know how easy it is to find programs and cracks on the Internet that will remove most copy protection schemes.

Sources:

Only 28% of US consumers avoid games with copy protection. ZDNet Research, October 6, 2006.

New Study from ECD Finds Only 28 Percent of Consumers Avoid Copy Protected Games. ECD Systems, September 28, 2006.

Kelly Applegate’s DRM E-Book Horror Story

Via Teleread (the best web site for coverage of e-book and related issues), I came across Kelly Applegate’s DRM horror story which basically recounts how she was screwed by actually bothering to pay for electronic editions of books back when Gemstar was running high,

As the ebooks had the ability to download, I continued
purchasing them. Then I bought a Nuvomedia Rocket EBook Pro. I loved
it. My library climbed to well over 500 purchased books and slowly I
got rid of my paper books except the “keepers”. (I would love to be
able to get those in electronic form because I prefer it but it is
way too expensive at this point.)

I have written to several authors about my delimma and many of them
have sent me unencrypted or in some cases replacement encrypted
ebooks to replace the ones I cannot either load on my ebook reader or
to enable me to read them on my computer with the new drive. The ones
that refused my request, I don’t bother with anymore.

At this point, I have invested a large amount of money in my
electronic library. I have been through the Gemstar fallout and they
still have MY books that I paid for that I can ONLY read on ONE ebook
reader (I have several). Because of the protections that have been
placed on the ebooks I purchased and not being able to read them on
the reader of my choice, I REFUSE to by any ebook that is protected.
And, I REFUSE to buy any ebook that I cannot get to load on my ebook
reader. I will contact a publisher before I purchase from them and
find out exactly what their books are made of. I, also, insist that I
be able to test drive the formats at their site because I have found
that often I order the HTML version of a book to convert to my reader
and it comes out with gibberish. So, I get another version and
convert it to HTML (Most often it is MS Reader converted to HTML)and
it is perfect for the reader. I have an Excel spreadsheet that I
maintain with the publishers and the formats I must purchase from
them to get the best copy readable on my ebook reader. A few
publishers have told me they will not replace ebooks and will not
accomodate me in any way. It’s their loss. I was going to buy 15
books from one of the sites that would not allow this so they lost a
chunk of change.

As I’ve said before it is pointless to buy an e-book unless you are able to convert it, one way or another, to a non-DRMed format such as HTML. Once you’ve got it in HTML, then you can convert it to pretty much any format you want. But if you don’t have it in HTML, you’re completely at the mercy of the DRM provider.

For example, Sony’s upcoming Reader looks like a decent e-book platform, but you’d be crazy to actually buy DRMed books in its native format given Sony’s history. Instead, wait to make sure it has decent tools to convert HTML files to its proprietary format, and then buy MS Reader books which are easily stripped of DRM and converted to HTML where they then should be easily convertible to a format that the Sony Reader can handle.

Yes, that is a bit more convenient, but a lot less convenient than ending up in the position that Applegate has found herself with hundreds of dollars spent on books that she cannot read except on the dead Gemstar platform.