What is DRM? The copyright protection called DRM is an acronym for Digital Rights Management, a term used to describe the different techniques for restricting the free use and transfer of digital content. DRM is used in a number of media, but is found most often in music and video files. Many of people believe that DRM should stand for Digital Restrictions Manager being that it manages users restrictions while taking away their rights. Companies like Apple began using DRM under the auspices of fighting piracy. Has it worked? You tell me. After the news of the type of severe DRM Electronics Arts put on Spore spread to future buyers, it took only days for over 500,000 illegal copies of the Spore video game (without DRM) to be downloaded from P2P BitTorrent sites on the Internet. Does DRM work? No! It ticks people off. If you don’t believe it, ask Amazon.com, where thousands of people unhappy with Spore’s DRM restrictions gave the new video game a
So, what was so bad about Spore’s DRM to get so many people in an uproar? Here is what it is all about and I am going to tell you from first hand experience because I purchased the $79.99 Galactic version of Spore and after one more download, the game will be worthless. Because my video card was not set perfectly to run Spore, I received a warning message after the first installation that I needed to change my video card settings and reinstall Spore again or the game would not work. One installation used. I did what was required and reinstalled Spore again. No error messages this time, the game works wonderfully. Two installations used. So why am I counting i