Spore’s DRM Leads to Class Action Lawsuit Against EA

Spore… can’t the poor game catch a break? Nope, not as long as DRM exists in the software. We’ve covered the DRM in Spore many times in our news already, but the latest happening is a class action lawsuit against EA, stating that the company violated two different laws in the state of California – though the laws could be similar in other states as well.

The reasoning behind the suit leads to SecuROM, the notorious “disk checker” DRM that has been loathed by many people for quite a while. The problem isn’t so much the software itself as much as it is the fact that EA doesn’t tell its customers that it will be installed. The company fails to mention the software specifically, but does mention that copy protection is used.

The biggest problem with SecuROM is that it takes a lot of effort to remove off the system if you don’t want it there anymore. You can uninstall every game that utilizes it, but it will still be there, lingering. Whether or not this should be considered a real issue or not could be debated, but as I always say, if you buy your software legally, you shouldn’t have to put up anything of the type. It’s going to be interesting to see how far this lawsuit will go, but one sure thing is… it’s not going to affect EA’s pocketbook that much even if they lose, sadly.

The suit accuses EA of “intentionally” hiding the fact that Spore uses SecuROM, which it alleges is “secretly installed to the command and control center of the computer (Ring 0, or the Kernel) and [is] surreptitiously operated, overseeing function and operation of the computer, and preventing the computer from operating under certain circumstances and/or disrupting hardware operations.”