Source:http://www.twitchguru.com/2007/08/27/bioshock_drm/
BioShock Soaked in DRM Fiasco
BioShock DRM
It's been about a week since BioShock's launch, and the digital rights management controversy surrounding thegame shows little signs of abating. BioShock had received considerable hype and overwhelming positive reviews (including my own), but the game has been mired in an uproar regarding the game's installation policy, which initially limited each customer to two installations only through SecuROM's copy protection software.
The trouble started almost immediately after BioShock release on Aug. 21. Word began circulating through various forums about technical issues with the game's installation; specifically, many users who had run into issues with playing the game, whether it was Window Vista related issues or graphics drivers, un-installed BioShock and then re-installed it on other machines. They were then greeted with an unfortunate message that read: "Too many activations on different PCs have been performed with the entered SERIAL NUMBER. No further activations are allowed." The message also included an e-mail address for SecuROM support (support@securom.com).
Here's what PC gamers got when they tried to install BioShock more than twice last week.
Unfortunately, the message didn't say exactly how many installations each user was supposed to get (which, again, was two installs initially). Furthermore, the game's software license agreement that said nothing about an installation limit for the game; in fact, the license agreement grants users the "limited right and license to use one copy of the Software for your personal use on a single console," which have led some people to contend that the SecuROM copy protection is violating BioShock's own software license (since it says nothing about installing the game and says you can run it on one system at a time). Whatever the case, it's a statement of fact that customers were given little to no warning about a DRM-controlled limit regarding the number of installations allowed for BioShock.
Soon, posts were popping up on 2K Games' forums in a thread title "How many installs do we get? Transfer of ownership?" inquiring about the SecuROM DRM and installation limit. The next morning on Wednesday, Aug. 22, Elizabeth Tobey, community manager at 2K Games, responded to the queries on the forums with the following message:
"Hey guys, first, let me say this. You DO NOT NEED TO USE THE INTERNET EVERY TIME YOU PLAY THIS GAME. It is only the first time. Second, you can uninstall and reinstall this game, and if, by chance, you have 2 computers you want to simultaneously play this game on, you also can do that. If by some chance you are reinstalling this game without uninstalling it first, a lot, there is a chance you may have to call SecuROM and get a key, or deactivate some older installations. But if you upgrade your hardware next week, you'll still be able to play the game. If you revamp your system and need to reinstall Bioshock, just uninstall it before you go through the overhaul, and then do your reinstall. Calling it "hardware fingerprinting" is a bit alarmist. We do not transmit any of your data to any companies. Really, the only people who will be concerned about any of these security measures are those who are rapidly putting Bioshock on many PCs... if you use the game as you normally do, you won't notice this at all."
Sadly, the information in Tobey's post was not entirely accurate. As many gamers found out, simply uninstalling the game on a machine did not solve the SecuROM problem. We put the theory to the test here at the THG lab and discovered that, in fact, once you installed the game on two separate machines (computer A and computer B), regardless of the reason, the activation key became useless. If you uninstalled the game on computer A and wanted to install on computer C, the activation would be terminated by SecuROM (which is owned by Sony) and the above error message would pop up. As a result, BioShock customers were misinformed, which made matters worse. And as 2K Games discovered, the problem would get significantly worse. Compounding the DRM controversy even more was the fact that the support numbers for 2K Games listed in BioShock's packaging were incorrectly printed (we called the support lines ourselves here at the Tom's Hardware Guide office several times before finally giving up).
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