EA's choice of SecuROM comes under fire... again

I remember the good ol' days when copyright protection involved looking for particular words in the manual or spinning a code-wheel... nowadays it seems that game publishers want to punish legitimate buyers by making games not only very hard to pirate (although let's face it, all you do is delay the inevitable) but also impossible to run with your system configuration. Copyright protection schemes (like SecuROM) does not play nice with other applications installed on your system - in fact quite recently I couldn't play Mass Effect until I'd uninstalled my Anti-Virus software and re-installed it (then everything was miraculously fine and dandy! Funny that!). Not to mention that the version of SecuROM that EA has decided to apply to its recent games (i.e. Mass Effect and now Spore) limits you to install the game a grand total of 3 times on different hardware configurations. That means if you're the sort to upgrade computers frequently, you're going to lose the right to a game you legitimately purchased very quickly.

The most recent complaints about EA and SecuROM have come in the form of a protest on Amazon.com's user comments list for the game. Apparently more than 700 1-star ratings for Spore have been made just because EA has decided to use the SecuROM copyright protection scheme. Check out the Gamespy article on it here.

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