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?
