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Battlefield 4 DRM Locking Out Part of North America Until EU Release
An anonymous reader writes "On the whole, Battlefield 4 had a reasonable launch. The have clearly learned from their past experiences with Battlefield 3 and, more notably, SimCity. Still, some customers are unable to access the game (until, presumably, October 30th at 7PM EDT, 39 hours after launch) because they are incorrectly flagged by region-locking. Do regional release dates help diminish all the work EA has been putting into Origin with their refund policy and live technical support? Should they just take our money and deliver the service before we change our minds?"
But at least region locking prevented piracy! Oh, wait... http://thepiratebay.sx/torrent/9118685/Battlefield_4_Update_1-RELOADED
Well, at least a fix is released!
This seems to be tied to certain ISPs, especially Uverse. They claim they can't verify it is a US IP address, even though I'm in indiana and the IP clearly comes up under a US company's IP block (AT&T). The first EA person actually had the nerve to tell me my ISP programmed the release date wrong. The second one said it would be fixed in an hour. Finally after getting a manager he said they are aware of the problem and can only wait until 7pm tomorrow. I asked why don't they just completely remove the lock outs to let people play the game they paid for, acknowledging that some regions may get early access. That was "impossible". I bet people pirating the game are playing just fine, I feel like a fool for parting with $100 for the deluxe edition. Not buying another EA game. Some have suggested using a VPN service to somewhere else in North America that the Origin virus can verify you to North America properly. Silly...
today is spelling optional day.
You totally missed every little bit of my point. (And no, it has nothing to do with you not understand terms like theft vs infringement.)
The entire fucking point of DRM is to prevent piracy. It prevented it not at all. The pirated copy is out before the legal copy for much of the world. However, it did massively inconvenience many paying customers. People pirate for lots of reasons; It is free, it is not supporting "the man," it is "l337!" But there is one other big reason now; The pirated version is a superior product! I know lots of people who buy a game, has trouble installing, and then get the pirated version so they can play. It doesn't take much of that before they just skip the painful step of bothering with the legal copy...
Meanwhile, a lot of other Aussies (myself included) have used VPN services to activate and play the game yesterday and today... as well as using them to avoid paying the 50% Australia tax! ;)
... wait, what?
Actually, the law HAS changed. Originally, copyright was for a much shorter time (14 years, renewable for another 14 years if the creator was still alive), but in modern times the length has been pushed so far that the "for limited times" part of the constitutional clause that gives the U.S. government the authority to CREATE a copyright law is, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant. Anything you see created today will still be copyrighted long after you die.
Unfortunately, this makes the public domain a nearly worthless concept; copyright is limited so that things will eventually become public domain, but with copyrights so long, nothing relevant to modern society belongs in it. Hell, we have entire forms of media that will never have a single item enter public domain until you are dead, buried, and dust.
My sig can beat up your sig.