Federal Trade Commission To Scrutinize 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."

Comments

Woot!

[Notabadguy]

These kind of stories swing both ways, and we've had literally dozens of "Finally the pendulum swings the other way moments" that have amounted to nothing more than blips across the radar... But I can't help but optimistically wonder if this is the start of a trend fighting back against corporate abuse of us, the customer? For several years now, I (and probably you) have been inured to new stories about corporation X doing new thing Y to screw customer z, and the news story hasn't even batted an eyelash because we're not surprised. Now the RIAA is backpedaling, and DRM is getting an appropriate scrutinizing. =) Its a good start to 2009!

Re:Woot!

[Farmer Pete]

All that will come out of this is that the game manufacturers will be forced to put a tiny label on the box saying that it has DRM on it. You'll need a magnifying glass to read it, and you wont know what it means unless you are up on the subject.

Governments are smart

[aethelwyrd]

I'm sure the government knows exactly what its doing. They will have a bunch of town hall meetings, do a lot of research and studies, collect a lot of money from large corporations and then come up with a centralized DRM server that everyone will be required by law to use.

Consumers are in the driver's seat now.

[tjstork]

I think you could make the argument that a recession makes for extreme competition, and its quite likely that it could turn out that DRM simply has to be dropped because a) it requires more money to actually DRM enable a product, particularly in testing, and b) there might be enough of a critical mass of consumers shopping for content based on the absence of DRM.

We won't really have a complete victory, though, until we see Microsoft drop entering those silly license key numbers for its products.

Re:Consumers are in the driver's seat now.

[DarthJohn]

The problem is that you have to ask at all.

Re:At the bare minimum...

[Technician]

At the very least, the FTC should make it illegal to advertise any product infected with DRM as a "sale" as opposed to a "rental" or "lease". As it's impossible to own them, that's false advertising.

At the very least, the FTC should make it illegal to sell software that hides itself and makes it difficult or impossible to remove when you are done with it.

Uninstalling the game should not leave your PC in a reduced functionality state.

The FTC should also require the game to isolate the game functions from the rest of the computer functions. Playing a game and exiting should never leave your CD burner inop.