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Two New Class-Action Suits Against EA Over DRM
In September, we discussed a class-action suit filed against Electronic Arts over the DRM in Spore. Now, two new class-action suits have been filed that target the SecuROM software included in a free trial of the Spore Creature Creator (PDF) and in The Sims 2: Bon Voyage (PDF). If this sort of legal reprisal continues to catch on, EA could be seeing quite a few class-action suits in the future. One of the suits accuses:
"The inclusion of undisclosed, secretly installed DRM protection measures with a program that was freely distributed constitutes a major violation of computer owners' absolute right to control what does and what does not get loaded onto their computers, and how their computers shall be used ... [SecuROM] cannot be completely uninstalled. Once installed it becomes a permanent part of the consumer's software portfolio ... EA's EULA for Spore Creature Creator Free Trial Edition makes utterly no mention of any Technical Protection Measures, DRM technology, or SecuROM whatsoever."
If uninstalling the free trial would leave your computer in exactly the same state as before, then nothing could stop you from free trying again.
I'm never buying anything made by Wil Wheaton again.
and lots of others like them should join them
What's to stop them from including a clause in their EULA allowing the installation of shadow DRM?
I've just stopped buying any of their games. Simple yes, but the easiest form of protest, and it works because they are right now down about £200 in lost sales from me.
I don't download them from piracy sites either, I just completely ignore their products.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Don't buy them and don't download them.
Just don't play them at all.
Gone!
How do you return software even IF it pops an eula explaining DRM on you at install time that you disagree with if the stores refuse to take back software with the seal that is broken?
I installed the Creature Creator back when I was still looking forward to Spore, and I was unaware of that the Creature Creator came with that crap too until today.
Does anyone know of a way to remove it?
Bullshit.
In a capitalistic economy, the best thing that a consumer can do is to vote with your wallet.
No company has to do business with you. Nor do you have to do business with them. If you do not like the way EA does business, then do not buy their games. I mean, who's going to die if they don't get a video game. It's just a goddamn game! I don't see what the problem is here. This class action suit is frivolous. And this BS of suing companies is only going to bite us all in the ass with increased costs all around to subsidize the legal profession. You don't think EA is going to eat the legal costs, do you?
God, some of you people need to grow up.
Why should I have to run Deep Freeze, or any type of software to return my system to a state before a program is installed?
Unless I give explicit permission for a program install something, then it should not be installed.
How is EA doing this different from anyone installing trojans, spyware, or virus?
Fight Spammers!
Does anyone have a solid description of specifically what this form SecuROM "installs", what it does, how it is harmful, and why it can't be removed?
Every time this topic comes up it becomes a "How dare they!" bitchfest so I've never been able to figure out the answers to the above.
I'm not saying that this is definitely just a pile of FUD combined with general anti-corporate hate against EA. But I'm leaning that way without real evidence.
The gaming industry does not listen to its customers, and has not for years. Before 'EA' became the monster it is now, it was called 'Electronic Arts', and in the early nineteen eighties it had a motto: "By gamers and For gamers". Sadly it has cast aside these noble intentions for over a decade. Like 'Lord British' with "Ultima IX", the industry cares nothing for its customers except how much cash can be wrung or extorted from them. The industry has also centralized into a de facto monopoly. As such their bad behavior has intensified as they now know that they don't care, they do not HAVE to care, as they think that customers can go nowhere else. It is this public be damned attitude that needs to be addressed. Obviousely the industry is not listening because it does not have to listen with its ears. Its ears were wired shut years ago. It only listens with its ass! Kick it hard enough and often enough and it will be forced to listen or go broke. We gamers need to realize that:
One: All the good games have already been invented
Two: There is a great deal of good old game software, like WarZone 2100 (open source now) out there that we can use
Three: We customers have the power to bring these monopolistas down by using the boycott.
Boycotting the monopolistas will eventually force them to take DRM out of their products, and to bring quality products back to a marketplace that has been bereft of them for years. Companies are increasingly putting 'eye candy' in products at the expense of playability..another gripe. Back to the point, DRMers will at first claim to be free of it, but many will conceal it and lie about it. The way to stop this is to demand that companies put up a 500 million dollar bond that instantly forfiets to all its' registered customers as soon as DRM is found concealed in their new products. Some may call a half a gigabuck as too excessive, but present day monopolistas are capitalized in multi-gigadollars American, and a half a gigabuck is the smallest present day amount that will cause real pain to a producer enough to force change. Remember these monopolistas are soulless present day BuchenWalders who take pleasure in forcing ninety years old grandmothers to live under bridges and freeze and starve in the dark all for 'the possibility of so called infringment'. Remember also that these monopolistas who hide behind the artists who create their capital often do not pay those artists anywhere near their due. These crimes by publishers are an old story run over from the music industry. Perfect example is the lowball 5 million bucks paid the Beetles for an early collection of their songs. One only need do a little googling to find other examples of cheating by the industry of their benefactors. Again, kick this industry monopoly in ass with boycotts until it hurts, and hurts enough to force DRM out of our machines. While we are doing that, we should also look to our fawning sock puppet politicians who are drunk with industry bribes. Yes bribes. Common folk do not 'contribute' near the amount that monopolistas do, and monopolistas do their bribing (political contributing) far more directed and get far better results. The way to counter this is with something that we gamers have that the monopolistas do not, boots on the ground. We can act personally and collectively to campaign for change, and for the political opposition of the lackeys of the monopolistas. We can to this for free, and collectively if there are enough of us we can make a difference. Maybe enough difference to give pause to these servants against the public trust before the next time some monopolista calls in a 'marker' from them.
This is entirely Barrack Obama's fault, can't you see that? IT'S IN REVELATIONS PEOPLE!
EA, the company where being banned from their online forum results in you being unable to play your puchased offline games.
I have personally stopped buying any EA PC games after spore and I know of other who have also. I am also aware that piracy for EA games have SPIKED after they started implementing the DRM scheme. You have to seriously wonder what is wrong with EA. While the games are still making a buttload of cash, They have to realize that they are probably not making nearly as much as they would if they had not implemented the DRM scheme. On top of that they are pissing off the fan base into rabid hatred for them, and motivating the fans to not only pirate the games, but to go to review sites and post negative reviews about the games because of the DRM. Buisiness 101 should tell them this is not a good business in the long run and if you are a shareholder I would suggest getting rid of the stock because this is going to come back and bite EA in the ass.
To waste their time on so fundamentally trivial a complaint as the DRM used to protect a free demo - is ludicrous.
Thanks to this article, I just learned that I got SecuROM from Spore Creature Creator.
Is there any way I can add support to the class action suit?
http://www.reclaimyourgame.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&layout=blog&id=17&Itemid=57 this site has all the information to contact the lawfirms handling 4 EA lawsuits over DRM covering Spore, Mass Effect, The Sims and other EA games
it doesnt take two monkeys to understand that placing something on someone's computer without their consent and knowledge constitutes not only a violation of their rights, but also an information technology crime, as same as hacking a pc.
but apparently it takes infinite amounts of lawyers to understand that as a company. or, EA's lawyers were TOTALLY stupid, or bloodless bastards.
this is 21st century, not wild west. enjoy your class action damages, jerks.
Read radical news here
Ok, looking at the complaint over Sims 2: Bon Voyage, the same allegations of not informing the consumer of SecuROM is made (including not making the user agree to it in the EULA, which is moronic in the extreme in my completely non legal advice opinion, EA may lose this on the basis of having crappy lawyers). In this case, ambiguity as to exactly what SecuROM does is lessened, since the primary plantiff's personal experiences are listed.
Allegedly, backup CDs of other Sims 2 games stopped working. Her USB flash drive and Ipod failed (I assume this means it busted USB data transfer altogether),. Forum posts of the time indicate numerous people having the issue after installing the Bon Voyage expansion.
There is not, as far as I can tell, any hard evidence linking the problem to SecuROM, since she neglected to try and duplicate the issue after an operating system reinstall, and 'Dell tech support said so' isn't really reliable evidence. These issues could be from another program, a virus other than SecuROM, or just a bug in the game (iTunes does similar things on occasion after all). Seems like a weak case, though they could be building a better analysis of SecuROM as I speak.
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
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I'm waiting for a DRM-using company to get so fully and completely ripped that no other company in the future will ever try it again. I'd hoped it would be Sony over their audio CD rootkit, but that lesson didn't seem to stick. Perhaps this will be the one.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Band together, plan out a distributed attack against EA in court. file multiple individual lawsuits for different charges for the maximum allowed in your small claims court area.
Basically a legal-system DDoS - no lawyers allowed in small claims court, and multiple suits (loss of property, trespassing, etc.) will be enough to bring up so many criminal charges against the company they'll likely lose their business charter and be sued out of existence by their shareholders.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
you wonder why they don't just use a write once flash drive with a drm chip in the drive that the software verifies when run...
It would be the same as a cd check but harder to copy
Essentially hardware drm
As long as it didn't install some drm software I'd be fine with that type of drm
Only recently I went back to my copy of STALKER - Shadow of Chernobyl only to find it was unplayable on my PC unless I downloaded a no-cd crack. I don't buy it when companies say "oh don't worry we'll make sure you can always play your game" since I've not had a satisfactory answer from THQ as to why my game won't run unless I use a legally dubious hacked version. It really puts me off buying PC games at all, and I know that I'm not the only one.
Some of us wanted to RTFA.
Their EULA says nothing about installing hidden software that will never be removed.
Even by agreeing to the EULA you don't agree to "all things not mentioned."
If so where would it end? Could they search my harddrive for credit card information? Format my harddrive on a whim? Store their own stuff on my computer without telling me? Of course not!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Their EULA says nothing about installing hidden software that will never be removed.
Even by agreeing to the EULA you don't agree to "all things not mentioned."
If so where would it end? Could they search my harddrive for credit card information? Format my harddrive on a whim? Store their own stuff on my computer without telling me? Of course not!
I would not be so sure. Especially if they've licensed their DRM from a third party, which I believe is the case with the stuff EA normally uses. And yes, they could if there were provisions in EULA allowing them to do so, not necessary in a form of "And, hey, we're gonna to install hidden software that you should not know about, gedit? Lol!" This is why EA itself clears EULAs of the software they use through their own lawyers.
If you read through EAs Terms of Service you are agreeing to pretty much anything they want to do to your computer. Its vague and broad and pretty much absolves EA of any wrong doing. I chose to vote with my wallet, I stopped buying their products few years ago. Hitting companies in their pocket books, especially in todays economy, is the way to go. Regards!
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
I haven't really played PC games in 20 years, but back in my day the procedure was to remove copy-protection checks from illicit copies of games before you redistributed them. Are people still doing this? Or is there something about the way that SecuROM works that makes it difficult to remove a game's dependence on the service?
It seems to me that not having to install irremovable malware would be a very strong motivator to install pirated versions of games, rather than the store-bought ones.
Breakfast served all day!
What EA and others need to do is realize that they have been sold snake oil. These anti-copy, DRM, and invasive copyright enforcement products SIMPLY DO NOT WORK. The are circumvented all the time. In fact its absolutely ridiculous that a money making entity would continue to spend money on a client-alienating product add-on that does not fufill its advertised intended purpose. This product does not function as intended and never has, the fact that companies like SecuROM and Starforce are still in business speaks volumes to their sales teams. Cheers to their exceptional sales skills, jeers to the stupidy of game producers for buying into it.
You must be new here.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I know it's like an open secret here, but why not just pirate the damn thing? I got started doing this in the 90's when it was hard, now even joe the plumber could do it. If you were really self righteous buy the game after you get the pirated one up and running. Not all downloads work, but at 90-95%, it's better odds then the DRM Crap. Side note, every once in a while to assuage my conscience I will buy a game (specifically if I liked the previous iterations) and even then I'm batting .500 at best. And I'm lazy, irresponsible, and disorganized so I loose those fucking cd's all the time. so I say fuck it.
...is a way to implement a KVM-style switch box for internal storage devices. A setup that would all the user to have multiple boot drives for the same system while keeping both unaware than the other exists.
This way, the user could install a separate OS license on each drive, then use one drive for games and other invasive software and the other drive for day-to-day mission critical use. Then, the user would simply shut down the system, hit the A/B switch, then reboot without the system being any the wiser as to what just happened. (Assuming the software on either drive doesn't modify the system firmware directly to test for this...)
8==8 Bones 8==8
Think of all the mod points that were wasted on this guy :(
Region coding is illegal there. So should all the companies be sued because someone can buy a US DVD and play it in Australia and the DVD is illegally region coded?
It is not necessarily illegal in the US (it isn't in the UK because it would still be a civil action). After all, you STILL bought the DVD and the DMCA allows breaking encryption for interoperability.
A serious question - does EA have to pay each person who bought the game a settlement figure, or would they have to put a big notice on game cases saying "This game contains SecuROM", or would they be barred from using software like this in the future (the best outcome imho)?
this looks to me like a case of unauthorized access under the (Federal) Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And that this unauthorized access has caused serious economic damage -- PC repairmen are decidedly not free!
In my non-humble opinion, some Sony execs should be doing serious jail time for their rootkit exploits. If they had, EA might not have done this. In the absence of that (or in addition to it), EA execs should be put in the slammer--for five years per incident, as the law specifies.
DISCLAIMER: I'm in that minority that doesn't use my computer for playing music, and in the smaller minority that doesn't use it to play EA-style games (I play KPatience, sometimes), so the axe I'm grinding is purely my interests in legal behavior, individual freedom, and Constitutional restraint.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
I have done this for my wife, who wanted to get Mass Effect. The problem is: it's a pain having to reboot every time you want to switch between playing and working.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
But you frankly should if stores forced you to wear video cameras on your head while visiting.
How would one who had installed one of those programs become involved in the class-action lawsuit?
EA is about the worst software distributor in the market today. After dealing with substandard half broken products for the past couple of years ive decided to never buy an EA title again no matter how interesting it looks. Whats worse is if you own an xbox 360 most of the new titles are published by EA consequently for the last 6 months my 360 has sat untouched. When the new generation microsoft console comes out i wont be buying it because 90% of the titles will be released through EA. Maybe when microsoft starts losing sales they will dump EA in the gutter like they deserve.
Why did the stupid Evil Assholes put SecuROM on a TRIAL version? Are they stupid or something?