6 ms·

Spore's Piracy Problem

19 points by nickb 18y ago

jacobscott 18y ago
Do publishers just have their head in the sand? DRM is a hassle to real customers and an interesting challenge to pirates. I consider the following talk on DRM by Cory Doctorow at MSR from 2004 to be a must-read, and I do not think that age has affected its accuracy: http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt
- tptacek 18y ago
  It hasn't hurt iTunes, which remains (for all intents and purposes) unbroken. It's a tightrope. Requiring reauthorization every 10 days, so that if I forget to play, the game doesn't work on the airplane --- that's a total fuckup. But if 95% of your users aren't even going to notice the DRM, and the DRM is hard enough to provide 1-5 days of lead time for the title (during the most lucrative window for the publisher), it's hard to see why publishers wouldn't do it. Spore's DRM does appear to suck. Windows game titles are notorious for crappy DRM. StarForce, for instance, apparently hooks both INT3 and the kernel idle loop. So, I'm going to concede Spore to the bOING bOING crowd. But there are DRM systems that are working: iTunes, DirecTV, Blu Ray BD+. It's an interesting CS problem and it rankles me when people are dismissive of it. Not that you were.
  - jacobscott 18y ago
    If 1-5 days lead time is the problem, why not promise to disable it afterwards? iTunes DRM has been broken and patched multiple times. The vast majority of its content is also available on CD/DVD. I don't keep up with DirecTV, but I know there was at some point an active cracking community; while BD+ is still unbroken, AACS fell. These systems have been almost entirely deployed in embedded systems, which clearly makes them harder to crack. Still, the xbox360 and the wii have been cracked (can be modded). I do not think DRM has a good track record and I think it is fundamentally wrongheaded. I don't find the current solutions to DRM that interesting -- from what I understand they just lock down as much as possible (from TCM to HDCP). However, if/when Sun's DReaM stops being a pipe-DReaM, I'll definitely pay attention.
    - tptacek 18y ago
      Disabling DRM after opening week is not at all a bad idea. iTunes DRM has been broken repeatedly. But the latest incarnation has survived multiple years, despite large incentive for a public break. It's been hard enough to break that what has been done has been kept private, for commercial reasons. Like it or not, it's a success story. DirecTV had an active cracking community 7 years ago. Then they contracted a famous cryptography team to develop what appears to be a white-box crypto scheme implemented directly in hardware gates. Nobody has been able to do anything with it since. It's a major success story. What was there in 1999 wasn't so much a "community" as a cottage industry, and now it's dead. BD+ actually has been broken. Title. By. Title. Even if that trend continues for the next several years, it's still a win for Blu-Ray, because SlySoft hasn't gotten a crack out within opening week yet, and they have to dedicate a team to refreshing their product at the whim of the publishers. I don't have a moral concern about DRM. I'd rather use unencumbered CDs. Sure, I'd also rather not pay for satellite TV. But as a CS problem, it's really interesting. The things that people say make it "impossible" actually make it Hard. Hard problems are fun, and we learn from them.
      - jacobscott 18y ago
        Thanks for further fleshing these out; I think you're right that the three are success stories. Just to play devil's advocate, can you think of anything (reasonably popular) for sale on iTunes/Blu-ray or shown on DirecTV that can't be found free (illegally) online? What do you think about the darknet paper? http://crypto.stanford.edu/DRM2002/darknet5.doc http://crypto.stanford.edu/DRM2002/darknet5.doc
        tptacek 18y ago
        I don't like this paper. It makes a facile argument ("DRM systems will leak"), and then supports it with inaccuracies. For instance, the notion that watermarking is unlikely to succeed owing to technical challenges with the "embedding layer" --- huh? This irritates me on general principles! Watermarks are covert channels, something most security disciplines try to eliminate, and generally concede to be unstoppable. What I think really happened here? This paper came out roughly a year after Ed Felten busted the SDMI watermark, and simply took his results and generalized them. Of course, SDMI is a crappy watermark; Ed Felten broke it in a matter of weeks.
  - SwellJoe 18y ago
    It hasn't hurt iTunes Really? I'm a big online music buyer. I've bought well over 1000 songs online per year for the last several years, and I've never bought a song from iTunes, because I don't buy DRM-encumbered music (for both pragmatic and ideological reasons). I've bought from eMusic, AudioLunchbox, direct from artists like Radiohead and Girl Talk, Amie Street, Amazon Unbox and probably several other places that don't come to mind. Assuming there are at least some number of people like me (and while I like to think I'm a unique flower, I'm pretty sure I'm not entirely alone), iTunes is making zero sales to some of the heaviest music buyers because of DRM. Obviously, it hasn't stopped iTunes from being the biggest online music seller...but we're still early in the online music distribution saga. There's still plenty of time for iTunes to fall out of favor...and the longer people are exposed to the inconveniences of DRM, the more likely they are to come to distrust it and choose other options. iTunes just happens to have done it extremely well and close to transparently, as long as you're doing the things Apple thought about. But, that'll change, as more people want to put songs on their non-iPhone mobile devices, and more people want to use their non-Apple/non-Microsoft OS-based netbooks to play the songs they've "bought" from iTunes. iTunes also had the advantage, at launch, of having as its only high profile competitors companies that were even worse than iTunes. All of the other big mainstream services were "subscription" services, where you basically got a radio station for your computer that allowed you to pick the songs, and if you stopped paying, you lost your songs. Everybody can see the stupidity in that...it takes longer to see why buying from iTunes is stupid. So, I think it's pretty early to say iTunes hasn't been hurt by DRM, even if you assume that I'm far enough of an outlier that people like me not buying from iTunes is an acceptable trade off.
    - tptacek 18y ago
      From a standing start, iTunes became the #1 music retailer in the US in less than 7 years. You don't matter to them.
      - jacobscott 18y ago
        I have an iPhone, and I have multiple Macs. It frustrates me that I cannot seamlessly move media between these machines and my iPhone. Last time I tried, Apple wanted to wipe all music currently on my phone before it would put music on from another computer. I may not matter to Apple, but this is an example of DRM degrading my experience after I paid them lots of money.
froo 18y ago
As of Thursday afternoon, "Spore" had been illegally downloaded on file-sharing networks using BitTorrent peer-to-peer transfer 171,402 times since Sept. 1 That number seems awfully low, I'm having a real hard time believing this figure to be true, I just did a quick count-up of downloads on the various torrent sites I know of and I came up with about 300k, no doubt there has been more downloads when you factor in other protocols and direct downloads (eg, rapidshare type links) I'm guessing the "research firm" probably just went to ThePirateBay and counted there - I don't think they took networks/trackers into account that aren't as recognisable as TPB.
- vaksel 18y ago
  I think they just counted the # of people leeching/seeding on the different sites. Because if you look, just one torrent on pirate bay has: 6385 seeders and 16797 leechers.
  - froo 18y ago
    True, I don't disagree with this statement - but I just don't think it necessarily shows the full figure. There are a lot of people who once the file is complete, stop torrents - which would make this seeder/leecher number a lowball type figure. I don't have any experience with games or software as the only thing I download is tv shows (only the ones I can't actually get in Australia.. I'd pay for them if I could get them) but from my experience, as soon as a show is uploaded it has a huge seeder/leecher ratio, but several days afterwards, that number appears is always considerably less. For some anecdotal evidence, one TV show I was watching in particular had stopped being shown in Aus but within hours of it being "released" online I was seeing up to 30k seeders at times, yet several days later that number had dropped considerably down to 3k. I just quickly typed Spore into mininova and looked at the top result by seeders and it shows the downloads as over 144k just off mininova alone, although no doubt a few of these would be incomplete, but given mininova's "market share" compared to say the rest of the torrent sharing community, the figure in the article comes across as incredibly low still.
    - silencio 18y ago
vaksel 18y ago
Personally I don't see why everyone is going apeshit over this game. Sure its nice graphics and has some good game play...but its soooo short. You'll spend 4 hours going through the stages, and then its an open ended game where you really don't have anything to do except repeating the same formula over and over again
- unalone 18y ago
  It's because the game is so incredibly revolutionary on every level at once. I haven't played the game and I'm going apeshit over it, because I don't care about the things you mentioned, I want to mess with every single editor and travel out to the universe and see every neat thing that every single player has made. And a Brian Eno-programmed soundtrack is pretty neat too. Think of it like the Sims - easy gameplay but incredibly addictive - combined with Legos.
halo 18y ago
I've been thinking about it lately and I've decided the problem isn't inherently DRM itself. The problem is that when companies use DRM without giving back and, in particular, use horrible invasive DRM that is a pain for the genuine customer. Case in point: Steam. Steam is basically one big DRM wrapper that also prevents resale. However, one key difference is that it offers multiple advantages to users in the form of unlimited redownloads, community features, not requiring a CD, no DRM driver ugliness, banning hackers in multiplayer games, works as a decent launcher and also has an extremely convenient online marketplace. The end result is that it has been given a much warmer reception than the typical DRM scheme - people are willing to give up some of their rights in exchange for the added convenience which is a much fairer trade. I'm not saying Steam is perfect but it seems like the direction companies like EA should be going.
- silencio 18y ago
  Agreed. Personally, I pirate lots of things I buy anyway because the DRM becomes a pain (Adobe and Microsoft products, for example). What's interesting is that I pirated Spore because I didn't want to put up with the DRM and the European/Australian/etc. edition was out on torrent sites before it was released in North America (for the record, I purchased Spore Galactic Edition and Spore Origins for my iPhone...). I'm not sure why companies want to give their customers a headache. I've had huge headaches dealing with genuine Windows installs that went away when I just pirate WGA cracks for XP and Vista. It's not cool when pirates have a simpler time than legitimate customers just because the companies want to discourage pirates so badly they're willing to sacrifice customer satisfaction in the process. On the other hand, I'm very unlikely to pirate something easily available on Steam..in fact, I'm not sure I ever have. For exactly the reasons you outlined.
- ivank 18y ago
  One of Steam's biggest value-adds for me is that I don't have to reinstall or manually update any games. There's no registry cruft, so you can move the Steam folder across Windows installs.
- kenver 18y ago
  You know I never even thought of Steam as a form of DRM before - even though now you point it out, it clearly is.
tdavis 18y ago
I take a very simple stance on this and all DRM-related matters: I buy something, I own it. I can install on 20 computers if I have that many. Play my music on 10. Use the object I paid for without being connected to the Internet or any other nonsense. License key? Fine, whatever, not that it's really a deterrent. If I can't do that I download it at-will, for free, sans any sort of protection and the seller gets jack. A very simple system where (a) seller/creator doesn't do ridiculous bullshit to keep me from using their item and (b) I reward them with money.
- there 18y ago
  why do you think it's acceptable to pirate/"steal"/whatever that product for free instead of simply choosing not to purchase it? i can understand a person purchasing a real copy of a game and then downloading a pirated version that has the DRM removed, or someone buying a CD and then downloading the same album on waffles in a variety of formats simply because it's easier/faster. but if you don't like the DRM, wouldn't it make more sense to speak with your dollars and not purchase it? why do you feel justified in using what they created without any compensation?
  - cturner 18y ago
    I don't know a single person who's actions reflect a genuine respect for the stupid world of software licensing. Your comment contains the sort of conflict I'm talking about. Why do you think it's acceptable not to? How is it that it is OK to do some things that displease the gods of protected content creation, yet still necessary to pay them certain forms of tribute? Why should people dance to the beat of a notion that is so obviously impractical? Should a couple of very specific business models be protected from natural progression of the digital revolution? Why should the onus be placed consumers to purchase things we clearly don't need to, and not on producers to create business models that actually make sense (e.g. steam, dongles, iphone store, support contracts, server-centric software)? What is it about your ethic that makes it something other than completely arbitrary?
  - Raphael 18y ago
    Waffles?
reitzensteinm 18y ago
I went to pre order Red Alert 3 the other day, the $120 nzd collectors edition. I was typing in my credit card when it clicked - wait... EA... DRM. I did a Google, found out it uses a relaxed version of the Spore DRM (5 installs), and killed the order. My cofounder said to buy the game and use a pirated version, but I refuse to support this crap, and that's with the sequel to my favourite game of all time. They are nuts if they don't think this happens. What has the world come to when the pirated version is the version that does not install spyware?

19 points by nickb 18y ago

Do publishers just have their head in the sand? DRM is a hassle to real customers and an interesting challenge to pirates. I consider the following talk on DRM by Cory Doctorow at MSR from 2004 to be a must-read, and I do not think that age has affected its accuracy: http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

tptacek 18y ago
It hasn't hurt iTunes, which remains (for all intents and purposes) unbroken. It's a tightrope. Requiring reauthorization every 10 days, so that if I forget to play, the game doesn't work on the airplane --- that's a total fuckup. But if 95% of your users aren't even going to notice the DRM, and the DRM is hard enough to provide 1-5 days of lead time for the title (during the most lucrative window for the publisher), it's hard to see why publishers wouldn't do it. Spore's DRM does appear to suck. Windows game titles are notorious for crappy DRM. StarForce, for instance, apparently hooks both INT3 and the kernel idle loop. So, I'm going to concede Spore to the bOING bOING crowd. But there are DRM systems that are working: iTunes, DirecTV, Blu Ray BD+. It's an interesting CS problem and it rankles me when people are dismissive of it. Not that you were.
- jacobscott 18y ago
  If 1-5 days lead time is the problem, why not promise to disable it afterwards? iTunes DRM has been broken and patched multiple times. The vast majority of its content is also available on CD/DVD. I don't keep up with DirecTV, but I know there was at some point an active cracking community; while BD+ is still unbroken, AACS fell. These systems have been almost entirely deployed in embedded systems, which clearly makes them harder to crack. Still, the xbox360 and the wii have been cracked (can be modded). I do not think DRM has a good track record and I think it is fundamentally wrongheaded. I don't find the current solutions to DRM that interesting -- from what I understand they just lock down as much as possible (from TCM to HDCP). However, if/when Sun's DReaM stops being a pipe-DReaM, I'll definitely pay attention.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    Disabling DRM after opening week is not at all a bad idea. iTunes DRM has been broken repeatedly. But the latest incarnation has survived multiple years, despite large incentive for a public break. It's been hard enough to break that what has been done has been kept private, for commercial reasons. Like it or not, it's a success story. DirecTV had an active cracking community 7 years ago. Then they contracted a famous cryptography team to develop what appears to be a white-box crypto scheme implemented directly in hardware gates. Nobody has been able to do anything with it since. It's a major success story. What was there in 1999 wasn't so much a "community" as a cottage industry, and now it's dead. BD+ actually has been broken. Title. By. Title. Even if that trend continues for the next several years, it's still a win for Blu-Ray, because SlySoft hasn't gotten a crack out within opening week yet, and they have to dedicate a team to refreshing their product at the whim of the publishers. I don't have a moral concern about DRM. I'd rather use unencumbered CDs. Sure, I'd also rather not pay for satellite TV. But as a CS problem, it's really interesting. The things that people say make it "impossible" actually make it Hard. Hard problems are fun, and we learn from them.
    - jacobscott 18y ago
      Thanks for further fleshing these out; I think you're right that the three are success stories. Just to play devil's advocate, can you think of anything (reasonably popular) for sale on iTunes/Blu-ray or shown on DirecTV that can't be found free (illegally) online? What do you think about the darknet paper? http://crypto.stanford.edu/DRM2002/darknet5.doc http://crypto.stanford.edu/DRM2002/darknet5.doc
      - tptacek 18y ago
        I don't like this paper. It makes a facile argument ("DRM systems will leak"), and then supports it with inaccuracies. For instance, the notion that watermarking is unlikely to succeed owing to technical challenges with the "embedding layer" --- huh? This irritates me on general principles! Watermarks are covert channels, something most security disciplines try to eliminate, and generally concede to be unstoppable. What I think really happened here? This paper came out roughly a year after Ed Felten busted the SDMI watermark, and simply took his results and generalized them. Of course, SDMI is a crappy watermark; Ed Felten broke it in a matter of weeks.
- SwellJoe 18y ago
  It hasn't hurt iTunes Really? I'm a big online music buyer. I've bought well over 1000 songs online per year for the last several years, and I've never bought a song from iTunes, because I don't buy DRM-encumbered music (for both pragmatic and ideological reasons). I've bought from eMusic, AudioLunchbox, direct from artists like Radiohead and Girl Talk, Amie Street, Amazon Unbox and probably several other places that don't come to mind. Assuming there are at least some number of people like me (and while I like to think I'm a unique flower, I'm pretty sure I'm not entirely alone), iTunes is making zero sales to some of the heaviest music buyers because of DRM. Obviously, it hasn't stopped iTunes from being the biggest online music seller...but we're still early in the online music distribution saga. There's still plenty of time for iTunes to fall out of favor...and the longer people are exposed to the inconveniences of DRM, the more likely they are to come to distrust it and choose other options. iTunes just happens to have done it extremely well and close to transparently, as long as you're doing the things Apple thought about. But, that'll change, as more people want to put songs on their non-iPhone mobile devices, and more people want to use their non-Apple/non-Microsoft OS-based netbooks to play the songs they've "bought" from iTunes. iTunes also had the advantage, at launch, of having as its only high profile competitors companies that were even worse than iTunes. All of the other big mainstream services were "subscription" services, where you basically got a radio station for your computer that allowed you to pick the songs, and if you stopped paying, you lost your songs. Everybody can see the stupidity in that...it takes longer to see why buying from iTunes is stupid. So, I think it's pretty early to say iTunes hasn't been hurt by DRM, even if you assume that I'm far enough of an outlier that people like me not buying from iTunes is an acceptable trade off.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    From a standing start, iTunes became the #1 music retailer in the US in less than 7 years. You don't matter to them.
    - jacobscott 18y ago
      I have an iPhone, and I have multiple Macs. It frustrates me that I cannot seamlessly move media between these machines and my iPhone. Last time I tried, Apple wanted to wipe all music currently on my phone before it would put music on from another computer. I may not matter to Apple, but this is an example of DRM degrading my experience after I paid them lots of money.

froo 18y ago

As of Thursday afternoon, "Spore" had been illegally downloaded on file-sharing networks using BitTorrent peer-to-peer transfer 171,402 times since Sept. 1 That number seems awfully low, I'm having a real hard time believing this figure to be true, I just did a quick count-up of downloads on the various torrent sites I know of and I came up with about 300k, no doubt there has been more downloads when you factor in other protocols and direct downloads (eg, rapidshare type links) I'm guessing the "research firm" probably just went to ThePirateBay and counted there - I don't think they took networks/trackers into account that aren't as recognisable as TPB.

vaksel 18y ago
I think they just counted the # of people leeching/seeding on the different sites. Because if you look, just one torrent on pirate bay has: 6385 seeders and 16797 leechers.
- froo 18y ago
  True, I don't disagree with this statement - but I just don't think it necessarily shows the full figure. There are a lot of people who once the file is complete, stop torrents - which would make this seeder/leecher number a lowball type figure. I don't have any experience with games or software as the only thing I download is tv shows (only the ones I can't actually get in Australia.. I'd pay for them if I could get them) but from my experience, as soon as a show is uploaded it has a huge seeder/leecher ratio, but several days afterwards, that number appears is always considerably less. For some anecdotal evidence, one TV show I was watching in particular had stopped being shown in Aus but within hours of it being "released" online I was seeing up to 30k seeders at times, yet several days later that number had dropped considerably down to 3k. I just quickly typed Spore into mininova and looked at the top result by seeders and it shows the downloads as over 144k just off mininova alone, although no doubt a few of these would be incomplete, but given mininova's "market share" compared to say the rest of the torrent sharing community, the figure in the article comes across as incredibly low still.
  - silencio 18y ago

vaksel 18y ago

Personally I don't see why everyone is going apeshit over this game. Sure its nice graphics and has some good game play...but its soooo short. You'll spend 4 hours going through the stages, and then its an open ended game where you really don't have anything to do except repeating the same formula over and over again

unalone 18y ago
It's because the game is so incredibly revolutionary on every level at once. I haven't played the game and I'm going apeshit over it, because I don't care about the things you mentioned, I want to mess with every single editor and travel out to the universe and see every neat thing that every single player has made. And a Brian Eno-programmed soundtrack is pretty neat too. Think of it like the Sims - easy gameplay but incredibly addictive - combined with Legos.

halo 18y ago

I've been thinking about it lately and I've decided the problem isn't inherently DRM itself. The problem is that when companies use DRM without giving back and, in particular, use horrible invasive DRM that is a pain for the genuine customer. Case in point: Steam. Steam is basically one big DRM wrapper that also prevents resale. However, one key difference is that it offers multiple advantages to users in the form of unlimited redownloads, community features, not requiring a CD, no DRM driver ugliness, banning hackers in multiplayer games, works as a decent launcher and also has an extremely convenient online marketplace. The end result is that it has been given a much warmer reception than the typical DRM scheme - people are willing to give up some of their rights in exchange for the added convenience which is a much fairer trade. I'm not saying Steam is perfect but it seems like the direction companies like EA should be going.

silencio 18y ago
Agreed. Personally, I pirate lots of things I buy anyway because the DRM becomes a pain (Adobe and Microsoft products, for example). What's interesting is that I pirated Spore because I didn't want to put up with the DRM and the European/Australian/etc. edition was out on torrent sites before it was released in North America (for the record, I purchased Spore Galactic Edition and Spore Origins for my iPhone...). I'm not sure why companies want to give their customers a headache. I've had huge headaches dealing with genuine Windows installs that went away when I just pirate WGA cracks for XP and Vista. It's not cool when pirates have a simpler time than legitimate customers just because the companies want to discourage pirates so badly they're willing to sacrifice customer satisfaction in the process. On the other hand, I'm very unlikely to pirate something easily available on Steam..in fact, I'm not sure I ever have. For exactly the reasons you outlined.
ivank 18y ago
One of Steam's biggest value-adds for me is that I don't have to reinstall or manually update any games. There's no registry cruft, so you can move the Steam folder across Windows installs.
kenver 18y ago
You know I never even thought of Steam as a form of DRM before - even though now you point it out, it clearly is.

tdavis 18y ago

I take a very simple stance on this and all DRM-related matters: I buy something, I own it. I can install on 20 computers if I have that many. Play my music on 10. Use the object I paid for without being connected to the Internet or any other nonsense. License key? Fine, whatever, not that it's really a deterrent. If I can't do that I download it at-will, for free, sans any sort of protection and the seller gets jack. A very simple system where (a) seller/creator doesn't do ridiculous bullshit to keep me from using their item and (b) I reward them with money.

there 18y ago
why do you think it's acceptable to pirate/"steal"/whatever that product for free instead of simply choosing not to purchase it? i can understand a person purchasing a real copy of a game and then downloading a pirated version that has the DRM removed, or someone buying a CD and then downloading the same album on waffles in a variety of formats simply because it's easier/faster. but if you don't like the DRM, wouldn't it make more sense to speak with your dollars and not purchase it? why do you feel justified in using what they created without any compensation?
- cturner 18y ago
  I don't know a single person who's actions reflect a genuine respect for the stupid world of software licensing. Your comment contains the sort of conflict I'm talking about. Why do you think it's acceptable not to? How is it that it is OK to do some things that displease the gods of protected content creation, yet still necessary to pay them certain forms of tribute? Why should people dance to the beat of a notion that is so obviously impractical? Should a couple of very specific business models be protected from natural progression of the digital revolution? Why should the onus be placed consumers to purchase things we clearly don't need to, and not on producers to create business models that actually make sense (e.g. steam, dongles, iphone store, support contracts, server-centric software)? What is it about your ethic that makes it something other than completely arbitrary?
- Raphael 18y ago
  Waffles?

reitzensteinm 18y ago

I went to pre order Red Alert 3 the other day, the $120 nzd collectors edition. I was typing in my credit card when it clicked - wait... EA... DRM. I did a Google, found out it uses a relaxed version of the Spore DRM (5 installs), and killed the order. My cofounder said to buy the game and use a pirated version, but I refuse to support this crap, and that's with the sequel to my favourite game of all time. They are nuts if they don't think this happens. What has the world come to when the pirated version is the version that does not install spyware?