Digital rights management (DRM)

It's been a while since my last post seeing as I've been rather busy lately.. But here's another stage of the security posts - DRM.

Basicly DRM technologies is used in some cases to limit the amount of times a user can install his game on seperate computers (usually limited to 5). Now this causes a whole lot of problems in and of itself, seeing as if you format your harddrive, get some new hardware or uninstall the game to find out you want to play it again later, you'd have problems! This limits the end user quite a bit and has been seeing a lot of critic from a lot of people. Spore was especially in the spotlight of this rage amongst the users, and it not really being used as much now adays anymore. Instead we're seeing Ubisoft's DRM system enter the light - also explained in the last post (as it is in fact a merge of the 2 parts). As previously mentioned, Ubisoft simple had parts of their game stored on a server meaning cracking it took a long time.

DRM technology is not only used for games, but also E-books, music, films and a lot of other digital things. There is also a DRM system called "DRM-X" which requires you to use special software to access the file. This system has however not been implemented in any of the modern games I've seen so far and I think it's mostly used for E-books.