While DRM has become an integral part of the entertainment industry, many of the enthusiastic gamers who agreed to fork out 50 US dollars and buy a legal copy of Spore were not prepared to live through the extreme DRM hell they got as a bonus. The opponents of DRM – such as the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation – suggest that it's rather misleading to call such limitations "rights" and that a more appropriate term would be "digital rights restrictions", since they often push beyond what is available under current copyright law and often result in anti-competitive practices. For example, if you have switched between regions on your computer more than 5 times, you may no longer be able to play any DVDs. He is an Open Society Fellow and writing a book on how authoritarian governments deal with challenges from the Web.ĭRM is not one of those uber-geek terms you could afford to live without if you ever tried to play a DVD purchased abroad on your laptop, you may have inadvertently run into DRM restrictions yourself. Instead, DRM has earned Spore the dubious honor of being the worst rated game of the year on Amazon, the most pirated game of the year on peer-to-peer networks like The Pirate Bay, and, quite possibly, the most telling example of how DRM hurts companies that promote it as much as it hurts consumers who buy products locked with it.Įvgeny Morozov is the founder of Poymeme.
In addition to weird creatures and breathtaking graphics, Spore features one of the most draconian systems of digital rights management (or simply DRM), which, in theory, should save the game from illegal distribution. Yet it is not the protests of the creationists or gaming-bashers that have triggered the current round of controversy about the game. OpenDemocracy's collection of DRM links is here Freshly released by Electronic Arts (EA) and designed by Will Wright, the designer of Sims, the best-selling brand in the history of gaming, Spore relies on a vast array of themes from evolution and genetics, a sure way to win the hearts and minds of nerdy gamers. Spore –"the most hotly anticipated computer game of the year" according to CNN-has quickly become the most controversial game of the year and, quite likely, of the whole decade.
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