Spore

In the fourth part of my look at the Spore lawsuit filed in September, I’ll be looking at the so-called truth about the product. Apparently this truth (mentioned in paragraph 20), if we had known it, would have either deterred us from purchasing Spore or would have made us want to pay less for it. Once again, paragraph 20 is provided for reference.

Plaintiff brings this class action on behalf of a global class of consumers who have purchased Electronic Arts’ Spore computer game which contained an undisclosed, secret, separately installed, stand alone, uninstallable DRM program which would install itself to the command and control center of the computer and oversee function and operation of the computer, preventing certain user actions, preventing certain user programs from operating, or disrupting hardware operations. Plaintiff and the proposed class members would not have purchased the Spore computer game and/or paid as much for it have they known the truth about the product.

Ignoring the false claim that SecuROM cannot be uninstalled and the unsupported allegations that SecuROM installs to the Kernel, there are still the claims that SecuROM was “undisclosed,” “secret,” “separately installed,” and “stand alone” to cover before looking at what SecuROM is alleged to do to a PC. The first two words “undisclosed” and “secret” are for all intents and purposes that same thing as they both imply that the Purchaser was neither told about, nor knew of SecuROM being installed on their PC as a part of the Spore game. Granted, unless the purchaser had done their homework beforehand, it was not made known to them in an overly obvious way; there was no bright neon pink sticky label on the box proclaiming “SecuROM inside!” in giant lettering. But then, Electronic Art’s did not go out of their way to purposefully hide SecuROM in a fashion in which no one would ever have known about it either. Remember that when you install Spore, you are informed (if you read the EULA) that copy protection measures (otherwise known as DRM) will also be included in the install. While it does not mention SecuROM by name, it can hardly be claimed that the inclusion of DRM was either undisclosed or secret. Further to that, it does not take much effort to find mention of SecuROM as the DRM used in Spore if you use a search engine. Remember, this very same DRM was already employed in Mass Effect and the intentions for it to be used in Spore too were also made known before Mass Effect was released.

The question here now, is why purchasers of Spore, such as the named plaintiff, did not bother to research the product they intended to purchase? If they had, it would not have taken very long to find out all about the DRM used. This was not a secret! The information has been known and made readily available on many sites on the Internet months before Spore was released. If the DRM used is of such an issue to a purchaser, why did they not investigate it before hand? If it were completely impossible to find any mention of SecuROM being used in Spore via any source of information, then the lawyers would have grounds to substantiate their claims that the inclusion of SecuROM was both undisclosed and secret. As it is, this claim simply does not hold very much weight to it.

The lawyers are correct in their statement that SecuROM is separately installed, although not in the manner they are trying to propose. The first important point is that SecuROM is not installed during the installation of Spore. I have checked this personally with a PC on which I ensured there were no SecuROM components currently on the hard drive or in the registry. Having installed Spore (without an Internet connection on that PC), I once again checked for the existence of SecuROM in both the locations on the hard drive it installs to and in the registry. It was not present. Thus, I can conclude without a doubt that SecuROM is not installed as a part of the Spore installation process. The Spore executable when run for the first time, checks for the existence of SecuROM. It is only then installed, in what some could claim as a separate process during the initialization of Spore, if SecuROM is not already installed on the PC from a previous program that also uses it.

In regards to the claim that SecuROM is a stand alone program, it is obvious that the lawyers are trying to give the impression that SecuROM is a program not connected to Spore in any manner. I.e., they are trying to claim that SecuROM is a stand alone entity which does not rely on any other program to start or operate. Their implication is almost certainly that SecuROM can – and does – operate without the need for Spore, much as a program such as Notepad++ (a damn fine text editor, by the way) can run from anywhere without relying on any elements outside of the directory in which you run it. However, SecuROM does rely on being called by another program. It does not start up all by itself. In fact, SecuROM is not even a program in the sense that it can be started in a stand alone fashion via its own executable – it does not even have an executable from which to run it. SecuROM is a process that must be called via another process from a separate program for it to be used. In the simplest terms, it can be likened more to a DLL file shared by several common applications, than to a stand alone executable file. And like those shared DLL files, if you remove SecuROM before removing the programs that rely on it, those programs cease to function properly (ignoring illegally altered files for a second). To that end, classing SecuROM as a program – to give the impression that it runs by itself – and not as a component accessed by other programs in order to function, is not an entirely correct classification.

To further build on these assumptions made by the lawyers, they also go as far as to mention that SecuROM “prevents certain user actions, certain user programs from operating, and disrupts hardware operations.” However, not once do they bother to expand on these claims to provide any form of credible proof that such incidents have even occurred to a detrimental effect. In fact without any proof to the contrary, the only actions that SecuROM, as provided with Spore, prevents are the running of a non-cracked version of Spore when an invalid authentication key is provided and the running of Spore if the Process Explorer tool is running. In the case of the Process Explorer tool, if you shut it down prior to starting Spore and then restart it afterwards, it will still operate perfectly. The claims that SecuROM prevents the use of the Process Explorer until a reboot is no longer correct. That problem was patched out in newer versions of the Process Explorer, so if you have that problem. All you need do is update.

There are also plenty of allegations that SecuROM prevents the operation of multiple DVD drives, virtual drives, Alcohol 120% and Nero Burning ROM among others. Well, SecuROM has never interfered with any of the above while they have been present and running on my PCs. Although I am always ready to go over any verifiable, concrete proof that can indicate such problems. And if you have such proof, I also urge you to try and pass it on to these lawyers – they sure are going to need it as the Amazon reviews are just not going to stand up in court.

Finally, if the plaintiff is so worried about all the bad that SecuROM does, why on Earth would they actually be willing to pay less for it? Is it then suddenly acceptable for SecuROM to cause all this supposed damage as long as it’s provided in a cheaper product? The mind boggles as to that reasoning.

Coming up in Part 5, my conclusions and recommendations relating to this lawsuit.

Thanks for reading!

Read the first part of this series
Read the second part of this series
Read the third part of this series
Read the final part of this series

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