Why online activation sucks

[Joe Forster/STA]

Please, don't show the same blindness as publishers do. (Although you're not doing it because of maliciousness.) I believe you if you say you haven't run into major problems with copy protected stuff but don't think that this also means that nobody else had any either: your environment is just too small compared to the whole world and your personal experience cannot and should not be extrapolated to the status of the whole gaming business. (If you're paranoid enough: there are things you know you don't know.)

Copy protection is getting more intrusive, abusive and tries to narrow your rights more and more, which is what DRM, DMCA, RIAA, TCP and whaddafuck else is about. Control, control, more control... oh, and a bit of control, too. (You may not even chiptune your car legally although you're free to crash your car, if you like. Uhm, you got the complete ownership for the car but not the rights for reverse-engineering, duplicating or modifying the onboard software in your own car?!)

Piracy is just a good excuse for tweaking the numbers into whatever is preferred and hiding the real reasons: greed, incompetence and major lack of quality control. (On a side note, the Budapest Transport Company is blaming "free riders" - people who ride without a valid ticket or pass - for their awful financial situation. The truth, however, is that only a third of their income is supposed to be paid by their customers - that is, the ones who do pay: the vast majority -, the other two third comes from the city of Budapest and the state of Hungary. Unfortunately, the council of Budapest refused to pay their third. Who's the real culprit then?)

No wonder people are turning over to free software. You don't own it but nobody else does either => effectively, everybody owns it (a little bit). Ahhh, communism in the working, how wonderful!

Originally Posted by DABhand

no game is guarenteed to work for ever due to hardware in the future.

Oh, but they are. That's what emulators are for.

Originally Posted by DABhand

And to further emphasise you do not own the data on the media only the right to use it.

Which slows down development just like patents do. With free software, you're not left alone, without any chance for help, if the original developer has abandoned the project: feel free to continue, fix it, hack it, improve it - or pay a competent developer to do it for you, if you're unable to do it yourself.