What Digital Signatures do is simply mark a executable as trustworthy, checked and signed by a independent to let a person know that it did indeed come from the company in question, and to help protect the exe from tampering after publication – for the purpose of preventing people from injecting malware, NOT to prevent copying or manage “rights” in any way.

Saying that this braking and stopping people from playing the game suddenly makes it DRM, is like saying that if a patch broke the Direct X API and caused the game to crash every time, that Direct X is suddenly DRM (or the patch was DRM?).

Hell I just downloaded some new drivers for my Vidcard, and ZOMGS they have a digital signature! Quick phone the press, Nvidia uses DRM on their publicly available, freely distributable drivers…
Again, Digital signature is there so if someone downloads it from say filefront, it’s got a much less chance of being fake, or having been tampered with if the signature is in tact.

Hell, Digital Signature shares more in common with a MD5 checksum than it does Securom or other such DRM systems.

Do you guys remember the WAIT we had after it came out for xbox/ps2 and when it finally did it was ported, ran like shit and had no multiplayer.

grrr

-jim

Maybe you should invest 2 years of your life and money on something that can go up to 90% piracy (World of goo), and then you start thinking again.

Problem to me is that people cant understand exactly what DRM means.

Some minds just think straight and simple equation: DRM = BAD.(PERIOD)

Well its NOT BAD, but the way they are implementing, THIS IS BAD AND MESSY.

If this GEARS certificate had never expired, and if you could authorize or deauthorize PCs on Spore since the beginning, none of these breaking news would ever be written, and then you would NEVER know what a DRM is.

I mean IS, because what it really MEANS, people haven´t learn or read about even today, after 6 months of DRM started the trouble.

Ok maybe companies are EVIL. So its your chance to invest HEAVILY on a game, and just release it without any DRM, or any copy protection (securom is also a lucifer´s tool, right?).

Just trust people, everyone will buy it. Maybe this 90% piracy on “world of goo” was a lie planted by its own creators to ensure everyones will to use DRMs and SECUROMS…

BECAUSE… you know, they are EVIL too…

Also, broken link.

Also, look at your definition for DRM: "control what someone can do with what they've purchased." – so, restricting … but why? We all know that it does nothing to stop piracy, so why use it? Restriction for restriction's sake, at least IMO – in spore, for example, where 3 installs only was enforced until they were pressured to change it. If you really want to call it a form of DRM, then OK, it is, but if you're going to that extent, then Anti-Virus programs are a form of DRM when they deny you access to an infected file, any Operating System when it refuses to run a program not designed for it, or programs that terminate themselves if there's an error to stop any "potential damage" to the system.

Many other games use this system of checking a certificate method as an anti-cheat device, and the vast majority of the time it works as intended. It wouldn't have kicked off this time either had someone not stuck a date on the certificate, which they never, ever should have done. This is the main reason why I don't consider this DRM – in a functional state, it won't have expired and the game will still work. It was done wrong and now operates in a matter *similar* to DRM, but there was no intent to restrict so I can't call it DRM. You aren't restricted from playing offline with a cracked .exe, and even some of those cracked ones were taken out by this.

As for the time to patch – probably something to do with how patches get authorised. I'm not entirely sure how it works, but I'm pretty sure that patches need to be tested and authorised by the Games for Windows LIVE… board? team? whatever they are, it needs to be checked by them first (awesome testing in the first place btw) before they sign it off and it's made available to download. If it were down to me, I would have just resigned the version that was last signed and stuck that up for download. I'm guessing that they're either not cutting the red tape and have to do the testing again, or they've submitted a new version of the .exe – in which case, it will need more testing.

And as for you having the rights to modify the software, you don't. You don't own the software, you license it from the company. Any modification of the code usually violates the EULA that you agree to to play the game, and as Blizzard Entertainment has show, the EULA holds up in court as a legal document.

Nice try attempting to justify Digital Rights Management.