Thursday, September 23, 2004
DRM is evil
How do you explain to your five-year-old that one of his favorite computer games has gone away and isn't coming back, all because daddy changed too much of the computer hardware? That's the task that recently faced one reader because of the copy protection scheme on an inexpensive kid's game.
"The Hyperbowl Arcade download version has been a pain for me," the reader wrote. "The demo version was provided free on the Windows XP Plus disk, and I decided to buy it for my son. I downloaded the program and paid the fifteen bucks or so, followed the registration process and installed it on just one computer."
About a year after purchasing the product, his hard drive began acting up. "Using Ghost, I transferred everything including the Hyperbowl game to a different hard drive," the reader wrote. "At the same time I also changed the processor from an XP 1800+ to an XP 2600+. When my-five-year-old tried to play the game afterwards, it said that I would have to get a new activation code because the configuration had changed too much."
The reader wrote Hyperbowl tech support, thinking that they would allow him to reactivate once they understood it was still basically the same computer. In an increasingly heated exchange of e-mail, however, Hyperbowl insisted he would have to pay for another license of the game. As with the Roxio DRM scheme we saw a while ago, Hyperbowl said that it only has product activation on the download version of it software. Therefore customers who "anticipate making significant hardware modifications in the future" should buy the CD version instead, Hyperbowl tech support explained, because it doesn't require online activation.
"The Hyperbowl Arcade download version has been a pain for me," the reader wrote. "The demo version was provided free on the Windows XP Plus disk, and I decided to buy it for my son. I downloaded the program and paid the fifteen bucks or so, followed the registration process and installed it on just one computer."
About a year after purchasing the product, his hard drive began acting up. "Using Ghost, I transferred everything including the Hyperbowl game to a different hard drive," the reader wrote. "At the same time I also changed the processor from an XP 1800+ to an XP 2600+. When my-five-year-old tried to play the game afterwards, it said that I would have to get a new activation code because the configuration had changed too much."
The reader wrote Hyperbowl tech support, thinking that they would allow him to reactivate once they understood it was still basically the same computer. In an increasingly heated exchange of e-mail, however, Hyperbowl insisted he would have to pay for another license of the game. As with the Roxio DRM scheme we saw a while ago, Hyperbowl said that it only has product activation on the download version of it software. Therefore customers who "anticipate making significant hardware modifications in the future" should buy the CD version instead, Hyperbowl tech support explained, because it doesn't require online activation.
