Yesterday, news hit the web that Ubisoft’s latest addition to the Driver franchise, Driver: San Francisco, will require users to stay online at all times.

This draconian form of DRM is obviously not very popular with Ubisoft’s consumers. Fans were vocal in their outrage over always-on DRM with Assassin’s Creed 2 and, at least for a few titles, Ubisoft seemed to back down on their stance by removing the restrictions. But that changed.

In a statement provided to PC Gamer, a Ubisoft representative classified the overly restrictive always-on DRM as “a success” for the company. “[We have seen] a clear reduction in piracy of our titles which required a persistent online connection, and from that point of view the requirement is a success.”

As unfortunate as rampant piracy on the PC platform is, it’s ultimately the loyal, honest consumers who are punished by restrictive always-on DRM. Such DRM may play some small part in cutting down piracy, sure, but it’s hard to justify it when, through no fault of their own, an innocent consumer is locked out of their game because their connection dropped out.

Does the DRM bother you, or do you think it’s a necessary evil?

Ubisoft thinks their always-on DRM is “a success” is a post from: The Inquisitr

If there is one thing that will constantly unite gamers regardless of what their favorite game might be is the use of Digital Rights Management, otherwise known as DRM. More times than gamers can count on their ambidextrous fingers we have heard of many big name games being crippled by DRM that more often than not affected legal owners of games and did little to stop games from being pirated.

For owners of Garry’s Mod, a stand alone game that lets Steam users to change the appearance of Source engine based games, the time has come where they can hold up their legal version of Gary’s Mod like a a badge of honor thanks to an innovative use of DRM.

Garry Newman, the creator of the popular game Garry’s Mod which allows Steam users to alter the appearance of Source engine based games, has come up with such an elegant form of DRM. Yesterday he tweeted whether any people were “unable to shade polygon normals,” an issue that seemed to be quite common among a certain group of players.

The Google search Newman linked to in the tweet indeed suggested that the problem was fairly common. However, affected users who thought that the tweet meant that their problems would be fixed soon were wrong. The ‘bug’ is actually a feature that was put in the game as an anti-piracy measure, a form of DRM really.

After getting a few responses to his call for bug reports, Garry’s Mod’s creator Newman tweeted the following:

via TorrentFreak

I love it, absolutely love it. What was even better was Garry’s last tweet about his version of DRM

Now if we could just get companies like EA and BioWare to care about their paying customers in the same fashion instead of treating them like criminals with moronic uses of DRM.

Smugness is the new gamer friendly DRM is a post from: The Inquisitr

It was bound to happen but Intel’s fancy new Sandy Bridge chips that is headed to new computers has Hollywood happy like a hooker on crack.

For those who don’t know about this new chip it is Intel’s newest offering that combines both a CPU (computer processor) with a GPU (graphics processor); which does away with the need of a separate video card without giving up video quality.

Except these chips come with a little sumpin sumpin extra – lock down digital rights management (DRM).

According to The Inquirer this has got everyone in Hollywood all warm and fuzzy:

Apparently the media cartels are dead keen to get their content on PCs that are locked-down even to the level of the chip.

Mooly Eden, Intel’s VP and general manager of the PC client group said that Intel’s embedded DRM allows content to be streamed to computers with Sandy Bridge chips and that Chipzilla is making deals with all the studios and content distributors to make it available.

So while punters will get saddled with DRM on their computers, Intel thinks that it can suck them in and buy them off with improved multimedia processing.

As of right now AMD and Nvidia aren’t going down this road but you can be sure that if there isn’t some kind of consumer backlash against this idea they will be forced to just to stay competitive. When that happens we all get screwed.

Thanks Intel.

image courtesy of Fork In A Toaster

Intel to Hollywood “You’ll love our new chip” – Kiss Kiss is a post from: The Inquisitr

In light of the recent news about how the Associated Press was going to wrap all its news in some fandangle new kind of DRM which they weren’t going to talk about it anymore both Duncan and I posted our opinions. While Duncan took the more subtle sarcastic approach I went for the more “are they frikken stupid” line. As the rest of the blogosphere had their say as well Ed Felton from Freedom to Tinker decided to take a closer look at exactly what the AP was proposing.

Now if you don’t know of Ed Felton you’re missing out on the thoughts and opinions from a very smart man who has caused more than his fair share of grief when it comes to things like e-voting and other important security related matter. It turns out that Ed isn’t overly impressed

It seems that there is much less to the AP’s announcement than meets the eye. If there’s a story here, it’s in the mismatch between the modest and reasonable underlying technology, and AP’s grandiose claims for it.

The key component of AP’s plan is a new microformat that they and the Media Standards Trust introduced a couple of weeks ago. After looking at this part of the plan to DRM the news Ed had this to say

Unfortunately for AP, the hNews spec bears little resemblance to AP’s claims about it. hNews is a handy way of annotating news stories with information about the author, dateline, and so on. But it doesn’t "encapsulate" anything in a "wrapper", nor does it do much of anything to facilitate metering, monitoring, or paywalls.

AP also says that hNews " includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online". This may sound like a restrictive DRM scheme, aimed at clawing back the rights copyright grants to users. But read the fine print. hNews does include a "rights" field that can be attached to an article, but the rights field uses ccREL, the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language, whose definition states unequivocally that it does not limit users’ rights already granted by copyright and can only convey further rights to the user.

So in other words folks this new initiative from the Associated Press is nothing but a smoke and mirrors show not only meant to send us bloggers cringing back into our holes but also make newspapers who sign up believe that the AP has them covered – when in fact they don’t. Instead they will have been conned into forking over good money for something that doesn’t really exist.

AP’s DRM – just another boatload of crap is a post from: The Inquisitr

Chief spokesdude for the RIAA Jonathan Lamesauce Lamy has stated DRM is dead, but not before pissing off all the people who have legitimately downloaded music since you could legally do so.

Way way back two years ago, the RIAA was defending the practice as serving all sorts of unnamed consumer benefits. They couldn’t tell us any, but I’m sure they were there. Like the benefit of not being able to easily move your bought and paid for music from device to device or being treated like a thief when you get a new computer. That was pretty awesome, I’ll miss it.

Despite all the imaginary pros of someone placing artificial restrictions on content owned by consumers, shockingly, big players like Amazon and iTunes began to reject and/or discontinue the practice. DRM effectively worked against legal music sales and created piracy where none may have existed.

It seems that even the most vocal proponents of the practice are finally accepting what is rather than what they’d like there to be and realizing that DRM in the end impacted what they hold most dear: sales. But the fact that the music industry is so slow to accept the changing relationship of their product to technology at the pace at which technology develops doesn’t bode well for players like the RIAA. Until they realize they have to keep up with the changing market landscape and create distribution channels that offer real incentive to win consumer dollars, rather than just trying to thwart fans trying to listen to music because they don’t want to accept their revenue model has changed forever and it’s not coming back, steps like this will continue to be a drop in the bucket.

[Source: TorrentFreak]

RIAA chief declares DRM dead is a post from: The Inquisitr

“Once upon a time people use to be able to walk into something called a bookstore and actually touch the covers of books, flip through the pages of a book and then buy that book if they wanted to. There was a time when we use to have shelves in our homes where we would keep all those real books which we could pick up an read again anytime we wanted.”

That scenario could one day very soon be the type of story that we will be telling our grandchildren. As books slowly join the ranks of music that we play on our portable music players one has to wonder if, as with music if the whole idea of ownership will become a murky gray area. As eBook readers grow in popularity and books are electronically transferred questions are being raised about who really owns that book you just paid ten to twenty bucks for?

If some of the reports coming out about the Kindle and their DRM’ed books it would appear that Amazon does. With a growing number of people finding that their Amazon accounts have been closed for as little as returning too many book we are hearing that the nice $360+ Kindle is now nothing more than a brick. As well, all those books you bought and thought you owned – well think again because you don’t. 

When this user’s Amazon account was closed, he also lost access to all the books he had purchased, as well as the ability to shop for new material.

This situation brings the bigger picture of Digital Rights Management (DRM) to the forefront. When you purchase any form of media from a company, do they have the right to deny you access in the future (presuming it was not purchased on a subscription basis)? The above mentioned user ended up with a $360 device that was totally worthless to him. He couldn’t even access books he had already paid for.

Source: Channel Web

Yup all this electronic versions of music and books is sounding better and better every day.

Book ownership a story to tell our grandkids is a post from: The Inquisitr

The decision, announced at the Macworld Expo today, will be fully in effect by the end of March. Already, about 8 million of iTunes’ 10 million tracks are available for DRM-free downloads, Apple says.

The change is accompanied by a shift in pricing. Rather than offering all songs at a rate of 99 cents, iTunes will soon introduce a three-tiered system. Beginning in April, songs will be available for either 69 cents, 99 cents, or $1.29. Apple’s Phil Schiller said the decision will be made based on what record company is behind the song. He also said more tracks will be at the 69 cent rate than the $1.29 rate.

Finally, as of today, iTunes purchases will be made available over 3G networks for iPhone users. Previously, iPhone users had to connect via a Wi-Fi connection in order to make a purchase.

iTunes Goes DRM-Free, Changes Pricing System is a post from: The Inquisitr

The company had announced late last month that it would shut the servers down, meaning anyone who downloaded tracks from its Web site before February — when it switched to DRM-free files — would no longer be able to transfer the music to other computers or devices. (At least, not without taking the backdoor approach of burning it to disc, then re-ripping it.)

Now, Wally World says “based on feedback from [its] customers,” it will “maintain [its] digital rights management (DRM) servers for the present time,” the e-mail obtained by Engadget indicates. No telling how long that “present time” will end up being — but hey, it’s reassuring to see that a massive customer backlash can, sometimes, make a difference.

In the meantime, Apple is still facing a fight to completely drop its digital rights protection from iTunes-downloaded songs. A consumer rights official in Norway says the company’s restrictions violate his nation’s laws by not letting customers play their purchases on any device they want. Apple has until November 3 to respond to a Norwegian court. Its final ruling isn’t expected until early next year.

Consumers Convince Wal-Mart to Keep DRM Servers is a post from: The Inquisitr

Walmart customers have just found out.

In an email to customers, Walmart advises that as of October 9, Walmart will be switching their DRM servers off. Not all DRM services rely on an external server, but the DRM service previously used by Walmart means that songs have to be validated as being legal on the external DRM server. Without the external server, music owners are able to continue to play the music on the machine it is currently on, but are unable to transfer the music to another machine (if they buy a new box, or reinstall the OS). The ultimate in crippled music.

Walmart has this helpful advice

If you have purchased protected WMA music files from our site prior to Feb 2008, we strongly recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD. By backing up your songs, you will be able to access them from any personal computer. This change does not impact songs or albums purchased after Feb 2008, as those are DRM-free.

You read that right, Walmart are suggesting that users circumvent the DRM by burning the music, so that they can later import it back onto their computers. It may be an out of sorts, but it doesn’t overcome the fact that many people may not read the email, and even among those who do, we’re presuming they’ll understand the seriousness of the situation and will act on this act on the advice…presuming they know how to or have access to do so. For example, I can’t recall the last time I burned something to DVD or CD…many people simply don’t use physical media any more.

Cory Doctorow goes as far as saying that Walmart is a great example of why people should download music from P2P services

Hey suckers! Did you buy DRM music from Wal*Mart instead of downloading MP3s for free from the P2P networks? Well, they’re repaying your honesty by taking away your music. Unless you go through a bunch of hoops (that you may never find out about, if you’ve changed email addresses or if you’re not a very technical person), your music will no longer be playable after October 9th.

He has a point.

(image credit)

Walmart Epic DRM Fail is a post from: The Inquisitr

About 15,000 selections are available so far — some as cheap as $7, others as expensive as $35. They’re also available in WMA format.

The noteworthy part, though, is that you can get the full audiobook of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild for free if you download it before the end of Saturday. You do have to sign up for an account, but there’s no fee and doesn’t appear to be any real catch to it. As of now, however, the service is limited to PCs only.

Borders Launches Audiobook MP3 Store With Free Offering is a post from: The Inquisitr