Will Wright's SPORE makes customers angry (DRM inside)

[Ex-Cyber]

Has the DMCA yet been tested in the Supreme Court?

No. That means it is presumed to be valid law.

Does it apply in other jurisdictions?

Not directly, but the WIPO Copyright Treaty seems to mandate laws at least vaguely resembling DMCA, and such laws have been proposed in some countries (perhaps most notably Canada's Bill C-61, which was described as "worse than DMCA").

The DMCA is only as powerful as the courts willingness to support it...

Which is, thus far, somewhat mixed. Some decisions are encouraging (Lexmark v. Static Control Components; Chamberlain Group v. Sylink; StorageTek v. Custom Hardware), others are not (Blizzard v. BNETD; Macrovision v. Sima). Either way, it doesn't look like judges are jumping at the chance to strike down DMCA in general.

[xav1r]

BTW, before someone starts the corresponding thread, Red Alert 3, also by EA, will have that same DRM scheme as Spore does. Let the bashing begin.

[Aradreth]

You can pretty much assume all games developed by EA from now on will have this form of DRM. But with EA's ability to put out a product that works properly you might end up being glad that at least one part of the game works as expected. Hell you can think of it as two games, one that works (DRM) and one that doesn't. You complete your DRM adventure when you finally get the game to run and with each install the adventure becomes harder.

[Dragonlord]

Oh, this is going to be bad. Best example just happened yesterday. Tested the Stalker-CS patch 4. While version 3 worked not so did version 4. So had to wipe the game, reinstall, patch version 4. Still no luck. Another wiping, reinstall, patch version 3. Back to working grounds. Now what did this patch give us? 3 reinstalls ( including first installation )! Now imagine this happens with DRM 3-install limit. Patch they make fails for some reason? Kiss your game good-bye since you can no more fix it ( as another reinstall kills it ).

[xav1r]

Oh, this is going to be bad. Best example just happened yesterday. Tested the Stalker-CS patch 4. While version 3 worked not so did version 4. So had to wipe the game, reinstall, patch version 4. Still no luck. Another wiping, reinstall, patch version 3. Back to working grounds. Now what did this patch give us? 3 reinstalls ( including first installation )! Now imagine this happens with DRM 3-install limit. Patch they make fails for some reason? Kiss your game good-bye since you can no more fix it ( as another reinstall kills it ).

So if i understood, you currently can't play stalker CS because of patch 4? I ask because i want to play that game, but if its that much of a problem to play then i wont.

[Dragonlord]

It depends. From what I gather around the net this game ( or rather the engine below I suspect ) is rather touchy when it comes to hardware. I can play S:CS on my developer station here ( vanilla XP/SP2, just dev tools installed, no m$ pathces/updates ) with patch v3 without a problem ( well... Red Forest map gave me a run for the money but I assume it has been because I somehow broke the script unintentionally ) but with v4 crashes whenever I go into the PDA. Others with Vista seem to have troubles with any patch so far but you have to try. At last with a vanilla XP/SP2 and patch v3 it should work well. Just try to never break the script

[ivanovic]

And it looks like EA now has to face the result of their "oh so great" copy protection:
Spore's Piracy Problem

The sad thing is that I don't think that these number will make EA think about their system. Instead they will just say "ah, you thieves, you musn't do this and no, we are not even partly to be blamed for it".

I still vote for a copy protection like realized in Ankh2 (even in the Linux version). They include a codewheel which you have to use after some time of playing to solve one of the riddles. No cdcheck (even in the Windows version) and no DRM that is hurting the users. Beside this, this copy protection is non intrusive and platform independent. Sure, it will not kill every pirate since there are keygens emulating this wheel, but other copy protections do not work either...

[Kano]

Nobody "emulates" that codewheel. Usually those checks are disabled (or replaced by a decrypted exe). All is a matter of time.

[ivanovic]

Nobody "emulates" that codewheel. Usually those checks are disabled (or replaced by a decrypted exe). All is a matter of time.

Trust me, it is emulated. That is: this is a "normal" riddle to solve in the game, not a startup check. And creating a prog that acts as codewheel is rather simple, so this is a lot easier than modifying the binary itself.

[Kano]

Ok, in that case... Well you see I did not play it