The old Maxis "games" (SimCity, SimEarth, SimLife, and so on) had a bit in their manuals about how they were toys, not games. You had to make up a goal if you wanted to actually play a game with them. It seems like Wright still has that philosophy about design, and people who liked the old Maxis toys and the Sims will probably like Spore too.
DRM doesn't work. You may have noticed that, regardless of how draconian the DRM on Spore is, people are still pirating it (and had it out almost a week before it was in stores). Therefore, DRM is only hurting the paying customers- I bought the game and considered using a cracked version to keep DRM off of my system because I don't want to risk losing access to my game just because a server goes down. In the end, DRM encourages piracy, not discourages it.
Look at Galactic Civilizations II, which only had a CD key, no software DRM. The publisher said it was fine for people to install it on multiple computers. It did fine, and if the comments people posted online were true more people were buying it that would have pirated if it had DRM.
The acts of paying for an internet connection and a computer, setting up a server and a domain name, and put these html pages unsecured upon that server is an act of publication. That interpretation is why Kazaa lady got nailed. The thing being published is not a browsing experience, it is a text file. I can use any tool I wish to view and interpret that text file, be it one I downloaded or one I wrote myself. This case doesn't really relate to the Kazaa lady being convicted based just on "making available;" since their servers transmit a copy of the page to any machine that requests it, they are actually giving you a copy in addition to making one available. Thus, there's no doubt that they've granted you a copy even without resorting to the questionable "making available" theory. I'm in complete agreement that once they've given you that copy you can view it in whatever you want.
Slashdot Mirror
The old Maxis "games" (SimCity, SimEarth, SimLife, and so on) had a bit in their manuals about how they were toys, not games. You had to make up a goal if you wanted to actually play a game with them. It seems like Wright still has that philosophy about design, and people who liked the old Maxis toys and the Sims will probably like Spore too.
DRM doesn't work. You may have noticed that, regardless of how draconian the DRM on Spore is, people are still pirating it (and had it out almost a week before it was in stores). Therefore, DRM is only hurting the paying customers- I bought the game and considered using a cracked version to keep DRM off of my system because I don't want to risk losing access to my game just because a server goes down. In the end, DRM encourages piracy, not discourages it.
Look at Galactic Civilizations II, which only had a CD key, no software DRM. The publisher said it was fine for people to install it on multiple computers. It did fine, and if the comments people posted online were true more people were buying it that would have pirated if it had DRM.