Spore, SecuROM, and the satisfaction of class action lawsuit

[mellowtigger]

I heartily disapprove of SecuROM. Maybe it was just wishful thinking, but I thought that Electronic Arts had removed it from their distribution copy of the game before they released Spore upon their paying customers.  I thought the initial outcry had persuaded them against their plans.

I went to the SecuROM website and found where they explained (# 37) how to remove the program from my pc.  Oh, good!  I downloaded their uninstaller, I unzipped it, and I ran it. Then I was prompted with a messagebox that contained this garbage:

SecuROM Uninstallation
SecuROM is about to remove files and registry entries created by SecuROM from your hard disk. For complete uninstallation, it might be necessary to log in under an account having administrator privileges. Please note that these files and registry entries will be recreated when another SecuROM-protected executable is executed.
Do you want to proceed?

What is the point, really, in proceeding with the uninstall if the DRM just reinstalls the next time that I play Spore?!

Well, good news. Somebody is finally creating a class action lawsuit (pdf court document) over this nonsense.  I emailed one of the lawyers tonight to say that I wanted to participate as a paid customer of Spore.  We'll see what happens out of this.  I suppose it's too much to hope for that EA would have to release a fix for the program, removing the stupid DRM that succeeds only in annoying their paying customers.

For grins, I also emailed Avast to ask why their antivirus program didn't warn me when this program attempted to install itself.  Sure, SecuROM doesn't replicate.  It piggybacks onto a program that I do want to run, it installs itself without my permission, and it consumes system resources against my will.  That's exactly what I want an a/v program to warn me about.

Comments

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a job for a virtual machine, if it's possible to play SPORE on one. Install it in the VM, make a backup copy of that - and you can play it anywhere on any machine that can host a VM. ;)

I don't know what SPORE's hardware requirements are - it's entirely possible it might look at the synthetic machine's "hardware specifications" and say "I can't run on this." But it's a thought. ;)