It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's Captain Obvious! After all the complaints and user backlash, Electronic Arts is finally facing a class action suit over the problems caused by Spore's SecuROM DRM.
The only shocker here is that it took this long for the lawyers to sink their decaying teeth into this juicy little controversy. Now they have at last, and you can bet your arse that they are looking to score big off this one ... oh, and do something about consumer rights, probably. Here's the gist of the issue:
Electronic Arts, a leading maker of computer games, defrauds consumers through its "Spore" game, which "completely wipes their hard drive" and replaces it with an undisclosed program that prevents the computer from operating under some circumstances and disrupts hardware operations, a class action claims in Federal Court.
The class claims that "Spore," a virtual reality simulation game, contains "a second, undisclosed program" called SecuROM, a "form of Digital Rights Management (DRM) for computer games."
Consumers are not warned about the program, which is installed without notice and cannot be uninstalled, even if they uninstall Spore, the complaint states. The secret SecuROM program is "secretly installed to the command and control center of the computer (Ring 0, or the Kernel), and surreptitiously operated, overseeing function and operation on the computer, preventing the computer from operating under certain circumstances and/or disrupting hardware operations," the complaint states.
First we had Electronic Arts, then we had pirates, and now lawyers are involved. At least this continuing saga isn't short of arseholes, right?
Jim Sterling serves as reviews editor for Destructoid.com, head of the Podtoid podcast, and produces a number of news stories, original features, one-of-a-kind videos. With his passionate argumentative style, controversial opinions, harsh delivery, and dedication to brutal honesty Sterling is a name that you can't help but recognize.
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Contest:
11:05 AM on 09.24.2008
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I am convinced I am right(no, it doesn't take much) EA is overjoyed by this because it keeps their crappy game in the headlines. Theres going to be a heated, bloody battle over this in the press where EA will do lots of grandstanding and just when the story runs out of legs they will change their tune and rectify the situation. Then they get a second bump in sales because of it. Its marketing genius.
Game still sucks though.
""completely wipes their hard drive"?"
What it means is that the only way to remove the program is to format your hard drive. Therefore completely wiping it out.
It should say that since they're quite different in meaning.
Also, I'm positive that EA always mentions SecuROM in the EULA.
So don't get too excited folks. EA's got a few of these under their belt already.
Citing Amazon user reviews as a factual basis for damages proximately caused by spore thereby creating other similarly situated class members? Really? A judge is gonna be angry having to read this.
Plaintiff doesn't really have damages, and kind of weakened their argument by stating that the program can be uninstalled by reformatting the hard drive. It is really their claim that the consumer was not told of the DRM, and thus, wouldn't have purchased the game knowing the DRM was included. It seem's all EA has to do in it's reply is point to the EULA (if the consumer is notified of SecuROM or DRM, and told it could affect the performance of the computer) and say pay me for writing my reply brief, this is a frivolous suit.
This is the entry level complaint, before the real lawsuit begins. In this case they just have to justify their claim to have the lawsuit go forward, so using comments on Amazon.com is perfectly justifiable.
As for the EULA, neither Securom nor a separate program installation is mentioned in the EULA (found here http://www.gametreeonline.com/SporeEULA.pdf ) EA only mentions protection measures. Thus this was not mentioned in the EULA. Thus you owe me since your reply was frivolous! ;-p
*ends post*