Erich Remarque of Magnolia, Arkansas is pissed. After waiting three years to play Spore, he's being treated more like a suspect than paying customer.

"[Spore] incorporates a draconian [digital rights management (DRM)] system that requires you to activate over the internet, and limits you to a grand total of 3 activations," he writes in his glaringly critical review of the game on Amazon.com. "If you reach that limit, then you'll have to call EA in order to add one extra activation. That's not as simple as it sounds, since when you reach that point EA will assume that you, the paying customer, are a filthy pirating thief."

Emotion may have got the best of Remarque, but he has reason to be upset over Spore's limited use policy, which is extreme. And he's not the only one who thinks so. At the time of writing, 85 percent of 3,000 user reviews on Amazon.com have given Spore a one-star (out of five) rating, almost all of them slamming the strict digital rights management employed by Electronic Arts.

Spore is pretty strict when it comes to procreation.

The livid response was enough to force a quick change of heart from EA, however. DRM is still present in Spore, but EA has increased the number of possible activations from three to five, added activation transfers that allow users to "de-authorize" an existing activation and transfer it to another computer, and promised more leniency in extending additional activations by phone should the need arise.

Will the Spore uproar make publishers think twice about using DRM in the future to deter piracy, or will DRM become business as usual for PC games?

Since the dawn of copy machines

DRM is nothing new. Forms of copy protection have been used to thwart software piracy for decades, through more obtrusive methods than DRM.

In 1984, customers who purchased the seminal space trading game Elite were presented with an on-screen code that was indecipherable without Lenslock, a small plastic lens included with retail copies of the game. Players held Lenslock against their monitors to read and enter the code, which verified their purchase and allowed them to continue playing. (Luckily for Elite publisher Acornsoft, Amazon user reviews weren't yet invented.)

SecuROM affords maximum control over buyers.

Modern DRM techniques are subtler. The most prevalant technology used in PC games today is Sony's SecuROM, which discourages duplication by limiting the number of possible installations. Major licensees for SecuROM include EA (Spore, select The Sims expansions, Mass Effect, Crysis Warhead and others) and Take-Two Interactive (BioShock on the PC).

But a growing number of consumers assert that SecuROM behaves similarly to malware (a catchall phrase for software designed to affect a user's machine without their consent, such as spyware and viruses), an accusation playing a major role in a recent class-action lawsuit against EA. According to the 36-page document filed by law firm KamberEdelson, Spore installs SecuROM onto users' machines without their knowledge, has adverse effects on their machines, and cannot be easily removed.

And the gaming community's response to SecuROM is almost universally one of outrage. On the official Mass Effect forums, a thread started by BioWare's Chris Priestly outlined BioWare's and EA's official response to the debate over Mass Effect's DRM. It reached 75 pages before being locked and continued in a separate thread.

"I am not willing to accept any form of activation for a single player game," wrote a gamer from Germany in a comment indicative of the collective attitude. "If I am not able to install a game whenever and whenever I wish without being dependent on the good will of the call center agents of the creators and the availability of their authentication infrastructure I will not buy it."

Such criticism has been directed toward virtually all SecuROM-protected games, often resulting in one-star user reviews as in the case of Spore.

Does it work?

Despite what publishers say about DRM's relevance to marketing and consumer research, DRM in games is clearly all about preventing piracy. But does it work?

Amazingly, not a single success story of DRM in games readily exists, though gauging DRM's practicality is admittedly about as accurate as forecasting a five-day weather pattern.

Is DRM defective by design?

But if Spore is any indication, DRM fails as a piracy deterrent. Unsurprisingly, the game's SecuROM was cracked four days after release, resulting in more than a half-million illegal downloads on BitTorrent as of September 14, 2008, according to the Washington Post. Coupled with the negative publicity, Spore seems poised to become the most pirated videogame in history.

Perhaps DRM is just wishful thinking: The most prominent example of successfully implemented DRM -- the lingering DRM in low-fidelity MP3s sold on Apple's iTunes -- is countered by other digital stores like eMusic and Amazon.com, which trust their audiences enough not to implement DRM technology.

But DRM in gaming presents an interesting contrast to DRM in music or movies. Because the latter media are non-interactive, they are more easily replicated due to the analog hole: If you can see it or hear it, you can almost always copy it. Because games are interactive, however, they are not as vulnerable to piracy as are music and movies.

And there are other ways to combat piracy in games -- offering updates, content perks or online play to authenticated users, much like Microsoft does with Windows updates.

Sadly, an "us versus them" mentality still prevails in the minds of some publishers, similar to an ungrateful Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Consider a Sept. 19 prepared statement from EA Games President Frank Gibeau, addressing the controversy surrounding DRM and Spore. In it, Gibeau admitted that Spore's DRM was too severe and needed to change, but only after discrediting certain outspoken consumers as "noise."

"?we've received complaints from a lot of customers who we recognize and respect," he said. "And while it's easy to discount the noise from those who only want to post or transfer thousands of copies of the game on the Internet, I believe we need to adapt our policy to accommodate our legitimate consumers."

Closing thoughts

Just as it plagues other forms of digital media, piracy has had a substantial effect on videogames. The Entertainment Software Association estimates that the videogame industry loses $3.5 billion each year to software piracy, making the philosophy driving the war against game piracy seem justified.

But coming from an industry currently making more money than Hollywood, it can seem like uncouth greed. And some gamers are having difficulty sympathizing with giant companies like EA. "How many [ways] can EA ? make money off of Spore?" asks one user on the Giant Bomb forums. "How long is a piece of string?" answers another.

Of course, not all consumers are philosophically opposed to DRM. Some support the concept and can even be found on Amazon.com, of all places.

"Pay no attention to the cheapskate thieves posting one-star reviews over the DRM simply because they cannot steal this game," said one gamer from Washington with regard to Spore. "This game has DRM, but it causes problems for a very small percentage of people who legally purchase it. I had no problems whatsoever."

Unfortunately, for those hoping Spore would launch an anti-DRM revolution in games, early sales suggest otherwise. The simulation title has already surpassed 1 million copies in just two weeks, according to EA.

And for DRM, the future likely bears a path similar to that of Spore's copy-protected primordial creatures:

Evolution is far more likely than extinction.