May 4th 2010: “Day Against DRM”
The organisation Defective By Design, an anti-DRM lobbying group who have been campaigning for the removal of all DRM in music, games and software have announced that May 4th 2010 will be the ‘œDay Against DRM.’
The day is designed to ‘œraise awareness and mobilize the public’ over DRM and its restrictions, with it stating that ‘œa handful of media and technology companies [have] waged war against the public’ with a goal to ‘œseize total control of our use of our copies of published works.’
After Ubisoft’s baffling introduction of DRM that requires players to be connected to the internet at all times in order to play, we think that this is a great time to support Defective By Design by spreading the word about May 4th and the menace of Digital Rights Management. They’ve also got a timeline of some of the major DRM events from the past ten years on their site, which includes Spore‘s slew of negative reviews on Amazon due to its tricky copy-protection.
With your help Defective By Design can move to wipe out DRM and prevent companies like Ubisoft taking advantage of its customers. Negative Gamer officially supports Defective By Design, and we hope you will too.
If you are against DRM, you should also never buy anything from XBLA, PSN or Steam.
@ParaParaKing: not sure that’s very accurate. Taking any argument to the impractical extreme breaks it.
I’m against dieing of obesity, yet still eat a cake or two. I hate wars in the Middle East, yet still travel in vehicles and use plastic. I’m against slavery yet buy products made in china. etc.
Kick their experience-reducing asses! Piracy sucks ostrich eggs, but DRM sucks bigger ostrich eggs harder!
Honestly, the other day I bought, downloaded and installed a game on Steam (which is the slightly more acceptable face of DRM, when it works) and it had some nasty DRM built into (might have been StarFucks, I can’t quite recall) which HAD to be installed before I could open the game, AND then it needed you to set up a pointless (and slow) Games For Windows Live account (which needed updating twice) before you could even change the bloody display options! And it wasn’t even a multiplayer game! Arrrrgh!
@wardrox: What is extreme about not supporting download platforms? Yes, you will not be able to download certain games, but that is far from your extreme examples.
For someone against DRM downloading only software with “good” DRM is like a vegetarian eating fish in my opinion.
May 4th? So it clashes with Star Wars Day?