May 12, 2008

The Culture of Ownership

We live in a "culture of ownership". Well, there's been an interesting development in one of the "owned" pieces of property out there. Apparently, "Happy Birthday," is very likely not under copyright, despite the protestations of the supposed copyright holders (thanks, Molly, for letting everyone on Twitter know). Let's hope someone has the guts to challenge them on it.

In similar news, until recently "Mass Effect" for the PC was going to have some rather draconian DRM attached - requiring you to have an internet connection on installation, with a re-activation mandatory every 5-10 days. BioWare/EA has apparently changed their mind about that, but it still remains that they were planning on severely inconveniencing their paying customers. Seriously: anyone who pirated this game would have no issue with this, as they'd never see it. The only thing this kind of scheme would achieve is stopping so-called "zero-day" piracy.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

It just irks me how companies continue to punish their legitimate customers while not solving the problem of piracy at all.