Spore Tops Piracy Charts, but Don't Blame DRM

From PC World: Like a splash of cold water, the latest word electrifying entertainment feeds is that EA's evolutionary toy-game Spore is the most pirated PC game of 2008. According to Torrent Freak, a weblog that professes to cover the BitTorrent biz, Spore is the most downloaded game on BitTorrent, something Torrent Freak dubiously attributes "in part...to the DRM [digital rights management] that came with the game." I say dubiously because attributing heavy downloading of one of the most anticipated games of 2008 to some sort of anti-DRM protest in any capacity is as wild a guess as assuming Barack Obama is "kind of in bed" with Rod Blagojevich just because some in the media think it's cute to display photographs of the two Illinois politicians smiling at one another.

But let's play devil's advocate, because the fact that Forbes lazily picked up and uncritically echoed the TorrentFreak story seems to have legitimized the mythical claim that Spore's high piracy numbers are "in part" due to DRM protesters. I'm not saying such claims are flatly wrong, I'm just reminding everyone that no one's released evidence to support such claims. Either way, such claims are mere speculation.

Even assuming DRM is a feckless workaround and borderline customer abusive, it's all too easy to hop on the I'm-indignant-bandwagon and trundle off in a tizzy past a crucial point. Being foolish in terms of how you treat your customers isn't necessarily illegal, but piracy is. When TorrentFreak says Spore was downloaded 1.7 million times since early September and attributes part of that "record breaking figure for a game" to DRM protesters, they may, whether by educated guess or sheer luck, be correct. They may also be dead wrong. Either way, they justifying nothing. Even if every pirated download of Spore could be indisputably represented as an anti-DRM vote, it wouldn't legally exonerate or ethically justify a single one.

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