Posts by Frank Reding 3 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Oct 2008
“It would be tragic if the ambulance couldn’t find your street if you forgot to use the possessive apostrophe.”
That is most ignorant excuse I have ever heard. They should fire whoever programmed their systems not to search for all possible combinations, with or without apostrophe, and other permutations.
@Anonymous Coward:
"Torrent users and the like are destroying businesses. They need to protect their rights and their labour somehow. DRM is the current solution.
If you don't like it - stop illegally file-sharing and play fair."
I can't let this rest. So much misinformation and naiveté in so few sentences.
Piracy is a problem, yes. Publishers and developers have a right to pretect their IP, yes. But we're talking about people who would have bought the game had it not come with DRM, which _only_ affects legitimate users, and _not a single_ pirate. (See http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?tag=drm for further discussions on this.)
Publishers are currently driving what would otherwise have been customers to piracy. I don't condone that, but neither do I condone customers being treated as criminals until proven otherwise (and sometimes, repeatedly so).
Instead of trying to stop piracy (a futile endeavour), publishers should _encourage_ sales. How? By not including extra hurdles in installation and running of their games that will only ever affect legitmate customers. By finally displaying an understanding of the damage they're doing.
Sooner or later Amazon and other big retailer will get really annoyed with everyone complaining about DRM, and rather than try and silence the customers, they might put the pressure where it belongs: with the publishers.
And once the major retailer start complaining at the publishers, they will have to stop treating customers like criminals and drop this useless DRM cr*p. Thousands of potential customers shouting certainly doesn't seem to bother them.
We all know that DRM doesn't stop a single pirate, yet publishers insist on it. I can imagine a certain amount of ignorance about this in the upper echelons of publisher decision makers, but no one can truly be as stupid as they appear to be at the moment. (Or can they? *shudder*)
So what is the real, hidden agenda behind sticking with DRM?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
