Federal Trade Commission to scrutinize gaming DRM
Ars Technica reports that the FTC is getting ready to take a hard look at gaming DRM, setting up a town hall meeting to be held on March 25th. They’re currently recruiting panelists, and they say the meeting will, in part, “address the need to improve disclosures to consumers about DRM limitations.” The controversy over DRM came to a head in 2008 with the release of Spore and the multiple subsequent class-action lawsuits focusing on the SecuROM software that came with the game. Ars Technica says the town hall meeting will also look at “legal issues surrounding DRM” and “the potential need for government involvement to protect consumers.”
What horse shit. DRM is in no way something the government needs to be involved in. There is no protecting necessary. No one is harmed by DRM. DRM isn’t cutting people’s throats or stabbing their pets or stealing their Blu-Ray player. If the customer doesn’t want the product they don’t have to purchase it. Part of the product is the sellers attempts to restrict copying of the information stored on the CD, DVD, etc. Caveat emptor.
It is clear that this whole DRM thing is failing where it actually effects customers in a significant way. In fact it’s likely a vocal minority that’s actually leading to DRMs failure. Look what happened to the videogame Spore. Look at what Apple just announced yesterday. Many if not all of the providers of the music which they provide through their iTunes service have agreed to remove DRM from their songs. Most iTunes users however couldn’t care less. Seems fairly obvious given the populatity of iTunes and Apple products which must have been used (unless the DRM is broken) to play the purchased songs upto this point.
Until complete end to end solutions are created DRM will fail. Even with end to end solutions crackers and hackers will likely break the systems which they care about. The Xbox360 security is pretty good but a bug in the hypervisor allowed experts to break into the system. Blu-Ray, even with a dynamicly changing DRM system, has been continuously cracked.
While I disagree with patents, copyrights and trademarks and dislike DRM I fully support the property rights of the producer. If they wish to offer a product and that include methods to limit it’s use then so be it. The customer is fully in their right to not purchase it or purchase it and attempt to break those restrictions without fear of government interference.
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January 7th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
DRM killed my father.
January 7th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
I was wondering who would put that up first.
January 7th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
I’m really getting tired of hearing that. I think we need national regulations regarding whether or not people can post that.