Digital Rights Management: Difference between revisions

'''Digital rights management''' (sometimes referred to as "digital ''restrictions'' management" or "digital rights ''mangling''", especially among detractors, and usually abbreviated "[[DRM]]") is a general term for access control mechanisms implemented on digital media to limit what a user can and cannot do with it.

If you hear the word in general conversation, it's most likely specifically referring to the [[Copy Protection]] placed by copyright holders on digital audio and video files -- restrictionsfiles—restrictions on converting from one format to another, how many and what kinds of different devices the media can be played on, and so forth. One widespread example of this type of DRM is DVD [[Region Coding]], which restricts playback of a DVD to a player marked with the same region code as the disc.

* [[Content ScramblingScramble System]] (or CSS) - a measure on the software level to provide the same sort of [[Copy Protection]].

* [[Downloadable Content]] - in this case, in the sense that if you purchase a game pre-owned, you miss out on various portions of the game which were available to the original owner, unless you pay an 'access fee'.

** ''[[Rock Band]] 2'' is doing something similar -- thesimilar—the manual includes a code that can be used to download 20 additional free songs (beyond the game's 84 on-disc), but the difference is that using this code is the ''only'' way to get the songs (as far as this troper knows). (Unfortunately, this also means there's no way to get them in the Playstation 2 version of the game, which doesn't support DLC.) The same exact code (NOT the DLC code recieved after submitting it to Harmonix, the 20-character code on the back of the manual) is also used to get most of the licensed [[RB 2]]RB2 songs in Rock Band 3 (the ones from Harmonix-fronted bands were later released for free on the X360 and [[Play Station 3]])

*** Got ''[[Guitar Hero]] World Tour'' or ''Guitar Hero Smash Hits'' used? There's a good chance you won't be able to get any songs from them in ''Guitar Hero 5'' (WITH''with'' all the new stuff added like Expert+ for GHWT drum charts) as a result of that, and you're guaranteed not to get them if you lack a manual. oh, and you still have to pay for the re-licensing, but that's the least of the worries here.

** ''[[Forza Motorsport]] 3'' has an extra set of classic cars and test/benchmark circuits that you can download with the supplied code in the box.

** EA has been doing this too, most recently{{when}} with the ''[[BioWare]]'' games, ''Dragon Age'' and ''Mass Effect 2'', which each come with a code for an extra party member if you buy them new (you must pay $15 for them if you buy it used). ''Mass Effect 2'' however has a little extra value with its Cerebus Network, which has various free bits of content, with more on the way, but you must either buy the game new or pay $15 for access to the network.

*** ''Pokemon'' does the same thing.

*** Ditto ''[[Mass Effect 3]]'' with its release-date DLC that you had to pay to unlock. A vocal segment of the fanbase views this as a blatant cash-grab on the part of EA and ''[[BioWare]]''.

* Installation Limits, which prevent the game from being installed from the disk after it has been installed a few times.

* SecuROM, which requires the CD to be in at all times when playing the game, although this can be defeated by either using a crack or making an ISO image of the game and mounting it.

** Not really. Crack works, but an ISO image doesn't since [[Secu ROM]]SecuROM depends on purposely flawed sectors to be present on a physical disc. [[IS Os]]ISOs tend to lack these sectors. However, there are proprietary image file types that would emulate flawed sectors to allow [[Secu ROM]]SecuROM protected games to run.

* By far the most infamous one before SecuROM is StarForce. To sum it up, it installs a device driver with the highest security privileges (a Ring 0 driver), disables any SCSI device on your computer (most image mounting tools create a virtual SCSI drive), had a tendency to be unstable (which could crash the OS), Windows Vista was terribly allergic to it in normal mode (or even Safe Mode), and left a huge security hole in your computer. This is all when it wasn't simply ''destroying your CD drive'' as a result of careless device commands .<ref>Protip to device driver programmers - Most computer CD-ROM drives do not take step-down commands very well while they're actively writing data.</ref>. It also didn't uninstall even if you uninstalled the game that came with it. [[Ubisoft]] was actually sued for using this.

** Need more proof the StarForce developers are pond scum? When Stardock Software, creators of ''[[Galactic Civilizations]]'' and ''[[Sins of a Solar Empire]]'', posted an article on their website stating how they felt that using DRM was bad customer relations and how they intended to abstain from [[DR Ming]]DRMing any of their titles, [[Star Force]]StarForce responded by publishing torrent links to Stardock's games. That's right, they ''actively aided people in pirating the games of a company who refused to use their product.'' Whatever your feelings about piracy, to do something like that against a company who refuses to use your product ''out of a desire to please their customers'' just to teach some kind of [[Broken Aesop|warped lesson]] smacks of pettiness.

*** As if that wasn't enough, they threatened the first two parties that raised awareness of the damage StarforceStarForce can cause with a lawsuit, claiming that the FBI hashad already been notified. Because it's the FBI you usually call when somebody's defaming you.

*** All of which has been undermined by the Internet, of course. And the fact that the ''Leisure Suit Larry'' questions were[[Time Marches On|stopped being topical about twenty years ago.]]

[[Category:DRMPages with working Wikipedia tabs]]