Law of the Game on Joystiq: Rare footage of the DRM in its natural habitat

Filed under: FeaturesEach week Mark Methenitis contributes Law of the Game on Joystiq, a column on legal issues as they relate to video games:

Digital Rights Management (or "DRM" for short) is back in the news in a big way with the recent Spore fiasco. DRM, much like a Spore creature, is a quirky animal, with legs of technology, a torso of law, and arms of business, but it doesn't always have a head on its shoulders. But like so many other things that potentially put consumers and producers at odds, the viewpoints on DRM are extremely polarized with almost no middle ground. So this week I wanted to take a look at DRM, why it exists from a legal and economic viewpoint, and most importantly, try to get hold of that slippery middle ground.

Thinking back to the days of the floppy disk, piracy wasn't yet an overwhelming concern. Yes, it was easy to bypass the write protection on a floppy, but without an internet, you had to find someone who had an existing copy in real life. For the majority of the population, this wasn't an option. Then we entered the initial CD-ROM phase, and at the time, the CD-ROM was a pretty secure media. The idea of a low cost home CD burner and blank CDs were years off, and the Internet was still in its infancy, so CDs were pretty safe from piracy well into the 1990s. It was the proliferation of CD burners, high speed internet connections, and peer to peer file sharing (Hi Napster!) that made software license security a big issue for all software companies in the late 1990s, and things haven't slowed down since.

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