In the piece I see that the two viewpoints regarding DRM are diametrically opposed.
On one side, you have the developer, who screams "It's my content, I can do whatever I want with it! You can't tell me not to put DRM, the dirty pirates* are going to bankrupt my company!"
On the other side, you have the consumer, who screams "What the fuck? Always-online and remotely disabled licenses? Can't even resell my used games if they're shitty / I don't play them anymore, and can't even transfer the game to a family member for him or her to try!"
They both scream. They both OMG HAVE RIGHTS!!1, which are mutually exclusive. They are incompatible.
The developer's copyright (recognised in many countries) is directly at odds with all consumer rights in all jurisdictions -- those consumer rights exist to shift the balance away from being totally in favour of the copyright holder and give a purchaser control over his or her possessions. Given that it is easy to make copies of digital content, copyright holders have had a dilemma. Either:
- they spend time and money continuously to find and nuke all unauthorised copies, which there can be many more waves of while trying to take the original wave down; -or-
- they spend time and money once to create a system that attempts to preclude the possibility that a consumer could even do anything they don't want the consumer to do.
The game developer has been granted a temporary monopoly on their work by the government in the form of copyright, and this arrangement entails allowing the consumer to do certain things with the work. But some game developers have converted this temporary monopoly into a "right to make money" on the work, instead.
The consumer's rights of resale and exclusive transfer (USA) are directly at odds with the creator's desire to restrict installation counts and game transfers. Each resold game is however-many dollars less in the game developer's coffers because the game developer is not the sole supplier of the game anymore and cannot extract money from each transaction made with the game. So the game developer makes DRM to tie down a single copy to a single PC and require more purchases for more PCs, or uses DRM to tie down a single copy to a single account. However, without resale, transfer or rental, the consumer will feel cheated if he or she is stuck with a shitty game, or one which provides only 2 or 3 hours of gameplay, and has been denied all recourse by DRM. Of course, you can't temporarily transfer a Steam game to a family member or friend to try out, either.
There is also the issue of server-based DRM (always online). Expecting to buy a single-player game, a purchaser then launches and plays the game, only to find out that his or her flaky Internet connection is causing the DRM to halt the game every few hours, or minutes. He or she cannot play the game while bored, on a road trip, business trip etc. where there is no Internet access. The user's expectations are broken (but technically they impinge on none of the user's rights). Years later, when the game developer decides that the DRM server costs more to operate than the revenue it brings in, and shuts it down, all legal owners of the game are unable to play. Before shutting down the DRM servers, game developers that are still in business (not bankrupt) do not publish patches to allow owners to continue playing, for fear of losing control over their work, despite their own finding that the game is not profitable anymore (!), so owners cannot continue to play their purchased games.
And then there is the right to create a backup copy for personal purposes and to guard against damaged media (many countries, including Canada and the USA). Developers have had their work copied illegitimately more than legitimately, so they have stopped trusting all users with this right. The logical consequence in the developers' mind is that, since the user should not have the right, then they are entitled to take measures to prevent all copying so as to retain the money they think they have the right to receive. However, the consumer is then faced with discs that he or she must rebuy as they become scratched and unreadable. He or she has the right to make a backup copy for exactly this purpose, but cannot exercise that right.
All of that, because the game developers assert that the protections offered to them by copyright law is not enough, and that therefore it's
impossible for them to do something other than take matters into their own hands and put the balance completely in their favour to regain the money they report having lost.
And then the game developers code their games, assuming that the consumer has already accepted not having the rights because the game developer says they shouldn't have them, so the code ends up saying you don't have the rights, even though the law says you do.
) on my LAN and they're older then dirt. I can play hundreds of games on LAN out of the box. In another decade I'll still be able to play those games on my LAN and remember them fondly. No one can play HG:L on a LAN. THAT is what DRM is. If commerce was a river, DRM is a dam.
Xdqwerty
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AncientBoi:
