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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."
While that rant was way off topic, let me respond anyway.
How about we use a more valid analogy. If my country was full of wild eyed lunatics who kept running across the border and blowing up bystanders in other countries, as well as blowing up citizens at home for talking to the wrong person, worshiping the wrong God or wearing the wrong article of clothing, would it be OK for someone to invade us? Yes, and I'd probably welcome it. That's the correct analogy that you should have use when talking about Afghanistan.
And a valid analogy for Iraq would be this: If my country was full of lunatics who also would kill people for the wrong beliefs, if my country was governed by a brutal dictator who put protesters through plastic shredders, launched unprovoked wars on neighbors Canada and Mexico and used chemical weapons of mass destruction on them (this equates to Iraq attacking Iran and Kuwait), and if that dictator further used chemical weapons in an attempt to wipe out all the black people and the Amish (equatable to Saddam's genocidal reprisals against Kurds, an ethnic group, and Shiites, a religious group), and if that dictator appeared to have a continuing desire to get more WMDs and never showed anyone he destroyed the ones he had, would it be ok for someone to invade us? Umm... yes! And again, I'd be out welcoming it!!
While I don't know your particular political orientation, I can guess that you are probably liberal. So here's a question for you to try out: why was it wrong for Bush to go into Iraq, but right for liberal President Bill Clinton to go invade Bosnia and Kosovo? If you claim we have no valid security interest in Iraq (I think everyone knows we had one in Afghanistan), than we sure as heck didn't have one in Kosovo! That was nothing but a pure nation building/police exercise which, if it was handled at all, should have been handled by the Europeans, since it was at best a minor regional squabble in their backyard and didn't involve either attacks on us (Afghanistan) or repeated invasion of other countries and allies (Iraq). But liberals never complained about that. They only complain about Bush and Iraq because it is the fashionable thing to do, and he's in the wrong party. Try using your brain for a bit, and make sure you use some more valid analogies in the future.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
You see this from a quite different point of view as the residents of the country.
Go talk to some russians who lived there during communism and its fall. You'll find that a large amount of them don't like Gorbachov at all, and like Putin, which is near the reverse of how the rest of the world thinks it should be.
Why? Because to most citizens practical matters vasty outweigh everything else. I suspect that if you walk to enough people, you'll find that a large amount of them wish Russia to be large, rich and powerful, civil liberties and openness be damned. People like Putin because he brings the country closer to that ideal, and are willing to ignore some things for it.
In places like Iraq and Afghanistan I suspect that however bad things were, a large amount of people didn't think they were doing too badly. Sure there's a dictator, and there are no liberties to speak of, but even under such conditions many people can get by fairly well. When you barge in, start blowing up things, burn their field and kill their children, you might be surprised to learn that they're not going to thank you for it.
Same can go for the US, btw. Many Europeans currently think you're completely nuts, the "land of the free" idea is long dead, and were it a smaller and less powerful country it'd probably be looked at in the same way as Iraq with Saddam in power. Now think a little, were somebody now to invade the US to remove Bush from power, citing the decreasing civil liberties, attacks to other countries, torture in Guantanamo and so on, would you welcome them?
The election of Obama seems to have been received with relief and surprise at that "they finally elected somebody sane".