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Can You Fight DRM With Patience?
As modern DRM schemes get more annoying and invasive, the common wisdom is to vote with your wallet and avoid supporting developers and publishers who include such schemes with their games. Or, if you simply must play it, wait a while until outcry and complaints have caused the DRM restrictions to be loosened. But will any of that make game creators rethink their stance? An article at CNet argues that gamers are, in general, an impatient bunch, and that trait combined with the nature of the games industry means that progress fighting DRM will be slow or nonexistent. Quoting:
"Increasingly so, the joke seems to be on the customers who end up buying this software when it first comes out. A simple look back at some controversial titles has shown us that after the initial sales come, the publisher later removes the vast majority of the DRM, leaving gamers to enjoy the software with fewer restrictions. ... Still, [waiting until later to purchase the game] isn't a good long-term solution. Early sales are often one of the big quantifiers in whether a studio will start working on a sequel, and if everyone were to wait to buy games once they hit the bargain price, publishers would simply stop making PC versions. There's also no promise that the really heavy bits of DRM will be stripped out at a later date, except for the fact that most publishers are unlikely to want to maintain the cost of running the activation, and/or online verification servers for older software."
Can You Fight DRM With Patience?
I realize that this is in the game section but allow me to recount a story from not two weeks ago. A story in which I almost threw my XBox 360 through the goddamn wall. I have one machine that runs Windows XP and connected to that via cat5e cable (shared internet connection) is my XBox 360. In order to share my media (about a TB of MP3s and Videos -- all very legal unless it is unlicensed video), I need to have this Zune software installed. Fine. I had installed it a while ago and though somewhat resource intensive in its UI and "bus service," it worked.
.NET libraries related to the Zune software (the bloat is really hilarious) and all updates. Reinstalled everything. Still not working.
... you guessed it ... DRM user files. What I did to cause my DRM files to shit the bed, I'll never know. Is it hashing something with a unique processor string? Was it the extra two gigs of RAM I also added? I don't know. I do know I wasted the better part of a night and did not get to watch Zap ask if they have beer on the sun.
... because I bet resetting your DRM files in your user directory make those files undecryptable.
Then I upgraded my computer's CPU from a single core to a quad core. I decided to rip my newly acquired MST3K licensed DVD of The Final Sacrifice to watch Zap Rowsdower in disgustingly high definition (better than my VHS rips anyway) across a network on multiple devices.
The Zune software stopped working. Blew an error box whenever I started the service.
I reinstalled the Zune software. Nope. I went to Microsoft's support. Searched everywhere. I uninstalled the
Finally I found that my error code was related to me not having valid
The fix was simple. You had just had to run some executable in Windows that re-initialized all your DRM files. So I tried to run it. Guess what. You can't run it if you don't have valid DRM files in your Local Settings directory. So I deleted them. No luck. Same behavior as if I had tried to start Zune. So I Googled. And I searched my OS hard drive for anything with 'drm' in the title. Curiously enough, my Netflix installation had some executable to the effect of drmreset.exe. At this point, I would try anything. I tried it and it worked. I couldn't believe it.
Now, I'm thinking it's good I didn't use the Zune software to rip anything to DRM encrypted format
And what caused all this? I still don't know. Was it because I had the Netflix silverlight crapware installed to watch Netflix? Was it because I had XNA installed as well? Was it simply a CPU upgrade? I have a masters in computer science. And this is the shit they expect your regular consumer to figure out.
In my unfortunate above example, DRM is unavoidable. I couldn't "wait" that out. I couldn't watch streaming media on my game station. Something that should "just work" was hilariously disabled by none other than DRM. It's everywhere. Especially in gaming. This is just one story of DRM inhibiting my ability to enjoy something I paid money for. And it pisses me off. To the point of slowly migrating away from gaming. If you haven't had to tangle with DRM and you're a gamer, just wait. You will.
My work here is dung.
How does waiting for a publisher to loosen DRM equate to fighting DRM?
Gandhi and King taught non-violent resistance, but you can win against human beings. You can't win against a profit motive.