I need not explain my views on Digital Rights Management, or as Richard Stallman calls it Digital Restrictions Management. I do, however, take some measure of pleasure in reading stories such as this one:

This can be triggered via using up your 3 activations and each time you change a piece of hardware, reformat your computer or install/upgrade a new operating system, it takes up one of the activations.

This is proven to be true by a guy over at the Mass Effect forums. He registered and started to play the game (Activation #1). Well, when he tried to play the game he had strange artifacts on his screen. Thinking it was an OS-related issue, he reinstalled XP and reinstalled the game (Activation #2). Finding out that it didn’t help the problem, he soon figured out it was his graphics card struggling. Well, he bought a brand new card and that solved the problem (this triggers Activation #3). Game ran fine for a short period of time (2 days) and he played thru it and completed the game. Well, a week after that, he decided he wanted to run thru the game again. This is where he stumbles upon this error:

“The game can not start. For security reasons, only a limited number of machines can ever be licensed by a single purchase. This limit has been reached. Please purchase another registration code, reinstall, and then try again."

I have had similar problems with DRM enabled software. I purchased Bioshock & Half Life 2 when they were first released. Due to the software wanting to register before I was allowed to play and due to the extreme popularity of both titles, the servers were swamped and I was unable to play either game for a day or two until the rush was over and I could finally get the software to connect. Some might see it as a minor issue, but it is things like that that show DRM is broken.

Also from the article:

If you are a Pirate:

• BAD: You do have the same bugs that those with legal copies have, plus new ones depending on how the cracked copy was programmed.
• GOOD: Unlimited Activations!
• GOOD: No SecuROM to deal with
• GOOD & BAD: It’s free, but illegal

If you are a Legal Customer:

• BAD: Limited to 3 Activations
• BAD: Your computer is plaqued with SecuROM
• BAD: Game contains errors and bugs
• GOOD & BAD: You support Maxis by purchasing the game, but you are also supporting EA, and if you support them, you support SecuROM

Honestly…what looks better to you?

Link.

Forbes: LONDON (Thomson Financial) - Microsoft Corp and Apple Inc could face a possible lawsuit for failing to include measures to control access to copyrighted material in products such as Vista OS, iTunes and the iPod, two companies have warned.

Media Rights Technologies (MRT) and BlueBeat.com have issued cease and desist letters to both companies and to Adobe Systems Inc (nasdaq: ADBE - news - people ) and Real Networks -- which produce the Adobe Flash Player and Real Player respectively -- for actively avoiding their X1 SeCure Recording Control, which they said is an effective copyright protection system.