The American DMCA has many faults, but one of the more serious faults found within is the so-called "anti-circumvention law". This law essentially makes it illegal for Americans to bypass electronic locks, or "DRM", on content they own. Such a law gives unlimited power to content owners, and strips any and all rights from consumers, even rights explicitly laid out in law. This is not a "fair and balanced" approach to copyright.
Before we pass a similar law here in Canada, we must first ask ourselves what the purpose of such a law would be? The industry groups tell us that these locks are meant to protect against piracy, and that anti-circumvention legislation is therefore required to protect their intellectual property. If the goal is to prevent consumers from copying software, movies, and music, then we need pass no further legislation, for these acts are already illegal in this country (with the obvious exception of the private copying act of 1998). The act of copying such intellectual property is already illegal, and there is little sense in making it "more illegal".
DRM has extremely dire side effects. DRM stands for "Digital Rights Management", and that's exactly what it does; it controls what rights a consumer does and does not have over the media the consumer has purchased. But these are rights determined by the content provider, not by law, and the revocation of these rights becomes the province of private industry, which has already demonstrated a total disregard for consumer rights.
For starters, there exists no DRM scheme which does not also generate vendor lock-in as a side effect; music purchased on Apple's iTunes Music Store can only be played on computers running Apple's iTunes software or on Apple's iPod line of portable music players. Some DRM schemes, such as Microsoft's now defunct "PlaysForSure", are lice sensed to multiple manufacturers. However, even though you can buy multiple players from different hardware manufacturers that support PlaysForSure, when purchasing one of these players you are essentially locking yourself into Microsoft's music store.
Microsoft's PlaysForSure is an excellent example, by the way, of the problems inherent in a DRM scheme, because Microsoft has recently closed its authentication servers down [4]. This means that millions of people who bought music from Microsoft can no longer move that content to new audio players. If these consumers loose their existing audio players, or their players or computers break or are sold, then all of the music these people have purchased - music which they own - will be irretrievably lost. The only option these people have is to buy the media they already own a second time.
By enshrining digital locks and DRM in law, you ultimately give license to the content industries to write their own laws where copyright is concerned, because any rights given to consumers, even rights given explicitly under law, can be revoked by the application of a digital lock. Rights such as the "first sale doctrine", the ability to enjoy content on the player of your choice, the ability to format shift media from one format to another; all of these are taken away by almost every existing DRM scheme.
Many DRM schemes, especially in the realm of computer software, do not explicitly enumerate which rights they revoke in a clear and transparent manner to the consumer. Many times consumers are not even aware of the restrictions imposed upon them until they attempt to breach those restrictions. Rarely are consumers trying to breach these restrictions with criminal intent.
It is also important to point out that most such electronic locks are ultimately pointless; as soon as a single user bypasses the lock and posts the content to the internet, the content can easily be copied by all. Such locks will also always be easy to bypass because, from a technical standpoint, the underlying principal of such a lock is inherently flawed. All DRM schemes are based on encryption. Encryption, at it's most fundamental,
Only Microsoft could figure out how to take the distributed power of the internet and modern technology and turn it into some sort of perverse distributed Big Brother.
I can certainly see the use of such a technology. I wouldn't mind putting my phone in a mode where it would automatically switch the ringer off and switch to vibrate whenever I walked into a theater, for example.
But, if for example I were a medical professional, I might want the ability to opt out of "digital manners", because saving lives is far more important than being polite.
The "proof of insurance" example is particularly scary. I can envision a world where half of our cars and ambulances stop working because the DrivesForSure authentication server is down.
From the Microsoft FAQ:
"In the event of the collapse of civilization into a Mad Max-esque dystopian future, we will issue a patch on our website that will allow your car to continue to function."
Careful; Spore comes with product activation, so you better make sure you know what you're doing when you install it under Wine, otherwise you could end up wasting an activation or two.
EA has "scaled back" the copy protection. Now it's almost the same as the copy protection on Bioshock, (both use SecuROM) except no license revoke tool to transfer the software to another machine, and not as many activations allowed. Three activations maximum.
What's really strange is that a lot of people seem to be OK with this. I think, basically, EA said "We're going to cut off your head and your arm if you play this game," and everyone cried out "That's horrible!" So EA said "Ok, ok. We won't cut off your arm," and everyone rejoiced.
In 2002 Alaska produced 984,000 barrels of oil 17% of US oil production, or about $137 million worth of oil (at current prices). This is just one year of oil production, and obviously doesn't include natural gas or other energy resources found in Alaska.
Alaska was purchased for $7.2M in 1867 (about $100M adjusted for inflation).
In other words, if not for Seward, you'd be spending more than the purchase price of Alaska every year to import oil.
Here's another quote from a dev, posted two days later:
"The limit on the number of installs is solely intended to prevent casual copying of the game and sharing of license codes. If you have more than three machines that you want to play the game on, send an email to support@playgreenhouse.com explaining the situation and we'll up your limit straightaway."
And, if you check the EULA, it says you're only allowed to install 3 times. So, evidently the "limit" has now been determined.
I don't understand why they'd claim they'd be "flexible in resetting or increasing the limit for paying customers." Does that mean that not paying customers only get the default three installs?:P
It's worth reading, although I'd be curious to know if anyone has actually tried installing it more than 3 times? If I have to call them to get them to add more activations to my account (which is what the guys from Hot Head were saying in their own forum IIRC, can't find the link right now), then I'm not interested.
Yes, you can install the Mac and Linux version of the game using the same key. At that point, though, you'll have used up all three of your activations.
As for my "information", it's from the EULA. Read it.
The guy from Twenty Sided has a post up which talks about some of the distinctions between they're DRM and the stuff from EA:
It's worth reading, although I'd be curious to know if anyone has actually tried installing it more than 3 times? If I have to call them to get them to add more activations to my account (which is what the guys from Hot Head were saying in their own forum, can't find the link right now), then I'm not interested.
And "Flaimbait"? Really? C'mon. Even the people who don't think DRM is so bad think it should be disclosed.
Just a heads up; if you're thinking about buying the PC version, it has an online activation based copy protection system, with a three activation limit, same as BioShock.
Seems a bit hypocritical coming from the PA guys, but just be aware it's there before you decide to spend your cash on it. I, for one, will sadly have to miss this one.
The 10-day thing is required. Here's where it comes from.
BioShock released with an earlier version of this system; SecuROM with Product Activation. After outcry from people then, publisher 2K Games promised a "deactivation" tool (which isn't enough for me to rent their game, but I guess it was enough for some). The problem with this tool goes a little something like this:
Step 1: Install BioShock Step 2: Activate BioShock. SecuROM server now thinks you have "n-1" activations left. Your game is activated, and BioShock will never phone home again. Step 3: Ghost/clone your hard drive image. Step 4: Deactivate BioShock. SecuROM server goes back up to "n" activations left. Your game is deactivated. Step 5: Restore your harddrive from the image you created in step 3. Now your game is activated again, but the server doesn't know that, and still thinks you have "n" activations left.
This is obviously a bit of an onerous process to go through, but it isn't hard to imagine someone automating this process (or even just automating the important part; finding where the activation is stored on your drive, backing it up, and then restoring it after the deactivation process is finished updating the server).
I strongly suspect the "phone home every 10 days" was an attempt to "fix" this. If 30 different machines are all phoning home every few days with the same key, then you know people are using this (or a similar technique) to pirate the game, so you can ban the key and kill all those installs. Without the phone home part, this activation scheme is essentially worthless.
The CORRECT fix, of course, is to get rid of product activation, because it's stupid, invasive, and is pushing your formerly paying customers into circumventing your copy protection.
There's two parts to SecuROM; first, there's the "phone home and verify the key hasn't been banned every 10 days", and second there's the "when you install, you need to activate your product, which gives this particular piece of hardware permission to play this game permanently".
SecuROM won't let you activate the game more than three times. So, once you've installed/activated it three times, you're out of activations, and you have to call up EA and prove to them that you really own the game, and beg for more activations.
I agree that the Windows Product Activation scheme is terrible as well, however WPA is far more lax than the scheme on this game. With WPA you get your activations back after 90 days, and your hardware fingerprint is updated every 90 days as well, which means the slow and steady upgrade/replace that most people go through will not trigger a reactivation.
And, aside from the machine I play these games on (which is running XP), I am MS free. My work laptop is running XP as well (but, of course, without any sort of activation), but every day I'm sorely tempted to turn it into an Ubuntu machine. That will probably happen sometime in the next few weeks.
I suppose you want your old NES games to run on a Wii Umm... Old NES games do run on the Wii. They're running on an emulator, and you have to buy them again, and ironically they are protected by DRM, but you can still play them.
This would actually probably be the hardest way to go about doing this.
You need to trick the game into connecting to the wrong server. That's the easy part.
The game, though, likely has the public key part of a public-key-crypto system. The server will send a challenge encrypted with the secret private key, which authenticates the server to the game. In order to convince the game that you are the server, you need the server's private key, which will be almost impossible to get.
This isn't like cracking the blu-ray key; with DRM schemes, you have a disc encrypted with a key, and you have a player which has to know that key in order to play the disc, so the secret key is stored somewhere inside every player. Here the secret key is stored only on BioWare's servers.
You can alter the public key used by the game, to work with your private key, but if you're going to alter the game, you might as well just remove the part of the game that connects to server altogether.
I'd much rather deal with the "hassle" of putting the disc in the drive, than the hassle of calling tech support and explaining to them that, no, I'm not a pirate, yes I do have a real copy of the game, but my hard drive nuked itself, and this is my 4th install.
Steam has no limits on how many times you can install your game (with the exception of BioShock, which uses both Steam and it's own DRM system). I can reformat my Windows drive once a month, and I can still play all my Steam games. I can try installing my Steam games under Wine to see if they work, and if they don't, no worries; I just delete them and install them again under XP.
According to Derek French:
> I believe that the SecuROM settings are for up to 3 activations.
So, install 3 times, and then no more installs for you, you dirty pirate.
According to the linked forum, there will be a max of 3 activations.
I don't know how many times I've reinstalled NWN on my machine, but it was WAY more than three. In fact, when I first installed NWN, I had horrible frame rate problems (eventually fixed by installing on C: instead of D:), and I reinstalled that game more than three times on the first freaking day.
I will never purchase software that uses an activation scheme. These software companies are saying "Pay us money, and buy our product, but our product will phone home and ask if it's OK for you to use it. Don't worry, though, because we'll make sure our server says it's OK." Talk about a shady deal...
Ever since I upgraded, every now and then I think "Why is the text input so small?" and I try to resize it, only to once again be reminded that I cannot.
As the parent said, booting the system from a live CD will let you in. If this person used Firefox's password manager (and assuming he didn't set a master password), you can reset his account's password from the live CD, then log into the laptop as him, and use Firefox to connect to hotmail, gmail, etc... You could even use Firefox's "Show Passwords" to recover the passwords, if needed.
I think part of it is also that the Japanese voice actors are really good voice actors, which put a lot of emotion into their delivery. You might not understand the words, but you can often understand the overall attitude and tone without subtitles, sometimes even meaning.
I suspect a lot of dubbed anime, on the other hand, is using cheap voice tallent, because really it is a pretty small market.
For a really good example; Dominion Tank Police in the original Japanese is pretty funny stuff. Not the best anime in the world, but some good laughs in there. The dub is outright boring; my wife fell asleep. In the Japanese version, there's a religious member of the police force who is basically comedic relief, whereas in the dub for some inexplicable reason he speaks in old english, and everything that came across as irony or humor instead comes across as preachy and dull.
Slashdot Mirror
The American DMCA has many faults, but one of the more serious faults found within is the so-called "anti-circumvention law". This law essentially makes it illegal for Americans to bypass electronic locks, or "DRM", on content they own. Such a law gives unlimited power to content owners, and strips any and all rights from consumers, even rights explicitly laid out in law. This is not a "fair and balanced" approach to copyright.
Before we pass a similar law here in Canada, we must first ask ourselves what the purpose of such a law would be? The industry groups tell us that these locks are meant to protect against piracy, and that anti-circumvention legislation is therefore required to protect their intellectual property. If the goal is to prevent consumers from copying software, movies, and music, then we need pass no further legislation, for these acts are already illegal in this country (with the obvious exception of the private copying act of 1998). The act of copying such intellectual property is already illegal, and there is little sense in making it "more illegal".
DRM has extremely dire side effects. DRM stands for "Digital Rights Management", and that's exactly what it does; it controls what rights a consumer does and does not have over the media the consumer has purchased. But these are rights determined by the content provider, not by law, and the revocation of these rights becomes the province of private industry, which has already demonstrated a total disregard for consumer rights.
For starters, there exists no DRM scheme which does not also generate vendor lock-in as a side effect; music purchased on Apple's iTunes Music Store can only be played on computers running Apple's iTunes software or on Apple's iPod line of portable music players. Some DRM schemes, such as Microsoft's now defunct "PlaysForSure", are lice sensed to multiple manufacturers. However, even though you can buy multiple players from different hardware manufacturers that support PlaysForSure, when purchasing one of these players you are essentially locking yourself into Microsoft's music store.
Microsoft's PlaysForSure is an excellent example, by the way, of the problems inherent in a DRM scheme, because Microsoft has recently closed its authentication servers down [4]. This means that millions of people who bought music from Microsoft can no longer move that content to new audio players. If these consumers loose their existing audio players, or their players or computers break or are sold, then all of the music these people have purchased - music which they own - will be irretrievably lost. The only option these people have is to buy the media they already own a second time.
By enshrining digital locks and DRM in law, you ultimately give license to the content industries to write their own laws where copyright is concerned, because any rights given to consumers, even rights given explicitly under law, can be revoked by the application of a digital lock. Rights such as the "first sale doctrine", the ability to enjoy content on the player of your choice, the ability to format shift media from one format to another; all of these are taken away by almost every existing DRM scheme.
Many DRM schemes, especially in the realm of computer software, do not explicitly enumerate which rights they revoke in a clear and transparent manner to the consumer. Many times consumers are not even aware of the restrictions imposed upon them until they attempt to breach those restrictions. Rarely are consumers trying to breach these restrictions with criminal intent.
It is also important to point out that most such electronic locks are ultimately pointless; as soon as a single user bypasses the lock and posts the content to the internet, the content can easily be copied by all. Such locks will also always be easy to bypass because, from a technical standpoint, the underlying principal of such a lock is inherently flawed. All DRM schemes are based on encryption. Encryption, at it's most fundamental,
Only Microsoft could figure out how to take the distributed power of the internet and modern technology and turn it into some sort of perverse distributed Big Brother.
I can certainly see the use of such a technology. I wouldn't mind putting my phone in a mode where it would automatically switch the ringer off and switch to vibrate whenever I walked into a theater, for example.
But, if for example I were a medical professional, I might want the ability to opt out of "digital manners", because saving lives is far more important than being polite.
The "proof of insurance" example is particularly scary. I can envision a world where half of our cars and ambulances stop working because the DrivesForSure authentication server is down.
From the Microsoft FAQ:
"In the event of the collapse of civilization into a Mad Max-esque dystopian future, we will issue a patch on our website that will allow your car to continue to function."
Careful; Spore comes with product activation, so you better make sure you know what you're doing when you install it under Wine, otherwise you could end up wasting an activation or two.
EA has "scaled back" the copy protection. Now it's almost the same as the copy protection on Bioshock, (both use SecuROM) except no license revoke tool to transfer the software to another machine, and not as many activations allowed. Three activations maximum.
What's really strange is that a lot of people seem to be OK with this. I think, basically, EA said "We're going to cut off your head and your arm if you play this game," and everyone cried out "That's horrible!" So EA said "Ok, ok. We won't cut off your arm," and everyone rejoiced.
In 2002 Alaska produced 984,000 barrels of oil 17% of US oil production, or about $137 million worth of oil (at current prices). This is just one year of oil production, and obviously doesn't include natural gas or other energy resources found in Alaska.
Alaska was purchased for $7.2M in 1867 (about $100M adjusted for inflation).
In other words, if not for Seward, you'd be spending more than the purchase price of Alaska every year to import oil.
Here's another quote from a dev, posted two days later:
:P
"The limit on the number of installs is solely intended to prevent casual copying of the game and sharing of license codes. If you have more than three machines that you want to play the game on, send an email to support@playgreenhouse.com explaining the situation and we'll up your limit straightaway."
-http://forum.playgreenhouse.com/jforum/posts/list/45/302.page#3569
And, if you check the EULA, it says you're only allowed to install 3 times. So, evidently the "limit" has now been determined.
I don't understand why they'd claim they'd be "flexible in resetting or increasing the limit for paying customers." Does that mean that not paying customers only get the default three installs?
The guy from Twenty Sided has a post up which talks about some of the distinctions between their DRM and the stuff from other companies:
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1677
It's worth reading, although I'd be curious to know if anyone has actually tried installing it more than 3 times? If I have to call them to get them to add more activations to my account (which is what the guys from Hot Head were saying in their own forum IIRC, can't find the link right now), then I'm not interested.
Yes, you can install the Mac and Linux version of the game using the same key. At that point, though, you'll have used up all three of your activations.
As for my "information", it's from the EULA. Read it.
The guy from Twenty Sided has a post up which talks about some of the distinctions between they're DRM and the stuff from EA:
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1677
It's worth reading, although I'd be curious to know if anyone has actually tried installing it more than 3 times? If I have to call them to get them to add more activations to my account (which is what the guys from Hot Head were saying in their own forum, can't find the link right now), then I'm not interested.
And "Flaimbait"? Really? C'mon. Even the people who don't think DRM is so bad think it should be disclosed.
But isn't it fun to see how many different aliases you can get onto the watch list?
A missed item from the "Hated" column:
Yet another PC game with depressing BioShock style product activation. Sounds like a cool game, a shame I'll have to skip it.
Just a heads up; if you're thinking about buying the PC version, it has an online activation based copy protection system, with a three activation limit, same as BioShock.
Seems a bit hypocritical coming from the PA guys, but just be aware it's there before you decide to spend your cash on it. I, for one, will sadly have to miss this one.
Taken at the rally:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jwalton/2528963840/
The game still has product activation. You're still only allowed to install it only three times, ever. Not interested.
The 10-day thing is required. Here's where it comes from.
BioShock released with an earlier version of this system; SecuROM with Product Activation. After outcry from people then, publisher 2K Games promised a "deactivation" tool (which isn't enough for me to rent their game, but I guess it was enough for some). The problem with this tool goes a little something like this:
Step 1: Install BioShock
Step 2: Activate BioShock. SecuROM server now thinks you have "n-1" activations left. Your game is activated, and BioShock will never phone home again.
Step 3: Ghost/clone your hard drive image.
Step 4: Deactivate BioShock. SecuROM server goes back up to "n" activations left. Your game is deactivated.
Step 5: Restore your harddrive from the image you created in step 3. Now your game is activated again, but the server doesn't know that, and still thinks you have "n" activations left.
This is obviously a bit of an onerous process to go through, but it isn't hard to imagine someone automating this process (or even just automating the important part; finding where the activation is stored on your drive, backing it up, and then restoring it after the deactivation process is finished updating the server).
I strongly suspect the "phone home every 10 days" was an attempt to "fix" this. If 30 different machines are all phoning home every few days with the same key, then you know people are using this (or a similar technique) to pirate the game, so you can ban the key and kill all those installs. Without the phone home part, this activation scheme is essentially worthless.
The CORRECT fix, of course, is to get rid of product activation, because it's stupid, invasive, and is pushing your formerly paying customers into circumventing your copy protection.
There's two parts to SecuROM; first, there's the "phone home and verify the key hasn't been banned every 10 days", and second there's the "when you install, you need to activate your product, which gives this particular piece of hardware permission to play this game permanently".
SecuROM won't let you activate the game more than three times. So, once you've installed/activated it three times, you're out of activations, and you have to call up EA and prove to them that you really own the game, and beg for more activations.
I agree that the Windows Product Activation scheme is terrible as well, however WPA is far more lax than the scheme on this game. With WPA you get your activations back after 90 days, and your hardware fingerprint is updated every 90 days as well, which means the slow and steady upgrade/replace that most people go through will not trigger a reactivation.
And, aside from the machine I play these games on (which is running XP), I am MS free. My work laptop is running XP as well (but, of course, without any sort of activation), but every day I'm sorely tempted to turn it into an Ubuntu machine. That will probably happen sometime in the next few weeks.
This would actually probably be the hardest way to go about doing this.
You need to trick the game into connecting to the wrong server. That's the easy part.
The game, though, likely has the public key part of a public-key-crypto system. The server will send a challenge encrypted with the secret private key, which authenticates the server to the game. In order to convince the game that you are the server, you need the server's private key, which will be almost impossible to get.
This isn't like cracking the blu-ray key; with DRM schemes, you have a disc encrypted with a key, and you have a player which has to know that key in order to play the disc, so the secret key is stored somewhere inside every player. Here the secret key is stored only on BioWare's servers.
You can alter the public key used by the game, to work with your private key, but if you're going to alter the game, you might as well just remove the part of the game that connects to server altogether.
I'd much rather deal with the "hassle" of putting the disc in the drive, than the hassle of calling tech support and explaining to them that, no, I'm not a pirate, yes I do have a real copy of the game, but my hard drive nuked itself, and this is my 4th install.
Steam has no limits on how many times you can install your game (with the exception of BioShock, which uses both Steam and it's own DRM system). I can reformat my Windows drive once a month, and I can still play all my Steam games. I can try installing my Steam games under Wine to see if they work, and if they don't, no worries; I just delete them and install them again under XP.
According to Derek French:
> I believe that the SecuROM settings are for up to 3 activations.
So, install 3 times, and then no more installs for you, you dirty pirate.
According to the linked forum, there will be a max of 3 activations.
I don't know how many times I've reinstalled NWN on my machine, but it was WAY more than three. In fact, when I first installed NWN, I had horrible frame rate problems (eventually fixed by installing on C: instead of D:), and I reinstalled that game more than three times on the first freaking day.
I will never purchase software that uses an activation scheme. These software companies are saying "Pay us money, and buy our product, but our product will phone home and ask if it's OK for you to use it. Don't worry, though, because we'll make sure our server says it's OK." Talk about a shady deal...
Ever since I upgraded, every now and then I think "Why is the text input so small?" and I try to resize it, only to once again be reminded that I cannot.
Erm... He said "How ethical?", not "How fast?". Believe it or not, these are not the same things.
As the parent said, booting the system from a live CD will let you in. If this person used Firefox's password manager (and assuming he didn't set a master password), you can reset his account's password from the live CD, then log into the laptop as him, and use Firefox to connect to hotmail, gmail, etc... You could even use Firefox's "Show Passwords" to recover the passwords, if needed.
I think part of it is also that the Japanese voice actors are really good voice actors, which put a lot of emotion into their delivery. You might not understand the words, but you can often understand the overall attitude and tone without subtitles, sometimes even meaning.
I suspect a lot of dubbed anime, on the other hand, is using cheap voice tallent, because really it is a pretty small market.
For a really good example; Dominion Tank Police in the original Japanese is pretty funny stuff. Not the best anime in the world, but some good laughs in there. The dub is outright boring; my wife fell asleep. In the Japanese version, there's a religious member of the police force who is basically comedic relief, whereas in the dub for some inexplicable reason he speaks in old english, and everything that came across as irony or humor instead comes across as preachy and dull.