Poor Spore
posted by Sarah O'Keefe
The new game Spore from Electronic Arts (EA) has been described as a cross between The Sims and Civilization, which sounds like months of lost productivity. Yay!

But although the game is selling well, there has been a remarkable backlash against its digital rights management (DRM) "features."



On amazon.com, Spore has a one-and-a-fraction star rating. But look at the reviews (a small sample is shown at right) -- they are all about DRM. The few reviews that focus on the game itself are much more positive.

Mac Slocum has an excellent article with more details on O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishing blog. He writes in part:

If the backlash to Electronic Arts' new game "Spore" serves as a sign of things to come, strict digital rights management (DRM) restrictions are transforming from consumer annoyances into full-fledged business mistakes.

Corvida at Read/Write Web has a similar perspective:

There's no doubt that Spore would've been pirated regardless of the DRM system. However, users of P2P networks are now encouraging others to pirate the game in order to teach EA a lesson. [...] We hope that EA will learn from this experience and the feedback of their customers.

The emerging consensus is that "overly restrictive" DRM will cause customer revolt. And "overly restrictive" is determined by the customers.

Labels: DRM

11:26 AM Permalink | |

 
No more DRaMa: DRM-free books
posted by Alan Pringle
O'Reilly has announced it will start selling some titles as ebook bundles free of digital rights management (DRM) in July. I'm sure a lot discussion went into that decision because we have grappled with this very issue for our Scriptorium Press titles.

When we decided to release our FrameMaker workbooks in PDF format in February 2006, we opted not to use DRM restrictions that prevent printing or that lock the file to a particular computer. It was not an easy decision to make. We don't want our materials to be pirated, but at the same time, we don't want to implement DRM that can make life difficult for legitimate users. (What if you get a new laptop and your PDF file is locked down to your old one?) We also did a survey a few months ago on digital books, and folks made it very clear they would avoid files with DRM.

With the recent release of our Publishing Fundamentals: Unstructured FrameMaker 8, we took our sales of digital books even further. For the first time, we are offering buyers the option of purchasing a new reference book as a PDF file; previously, we offered digital versions for older reference books that we no longer printed. Another change with this latest release is that buyers who get the printed version also get the PDF version free. As is the case with our other digital versions, the PDF file of Publishing Fundamentals: Unstructured FrameMaker 8 is free of the DRM restrictions I mentioned earlier.

Releasing our content without any DRM may seem foolish to some. ("You're too trusting!" "You're inviting people to steal your stuff!") That being said, DRM can be a huge hassle for people who actually paid for the material, and it also can be cracked. Those are two big reasons we have opted not to use it.

Labels: book, DRM

10:35 AM Permalink | |