Bitcoin Forum

We like investments in Bitcoin, in fact we embrace it as it’s our sole income here at AdaptiveGlass. However some VC money is going to areas of Bitcoin investments that we are not that happy about.

We heard it on Good Authority (from the CEO of the DRM bitcoin startup) that at least 5 game makers, including LucasArts and EA are or at least were prior to the SimCity launch intending to fund his Video Game DRM company based on Bitcoin Technology.

http://www.adaptiveglass.com/?p=626

Let them dig their own graves. The problem, if any, lies with the consumers who fund this.

Wait, people play games from EA still?

But seriously, nothing you can do about it.  Even if they, for some reason, use BTC itself it doesn't matter really.  Bitcoin is bitcoin and can be used by anyone anywhere for whatever reason.  

The best thing you can do is not play crappy games.  There's tons of games out there that are much much better.  Even if you find a way to "pirate" these games, you're only part of the problem as it encourages the bastards to make more crappy games.

The idea itself is kinda flawed (just patch out the part that sends the DRMcoins - and if they use BTC good luck in getting your money stolen!) and I really don't appreciate the tone of your heading.

Free market. Deal with it.

Doesn't matter, crackers will always be able to modify the executable and remove the checks.

It's a technology, and it's awesome in and of itself.
Gotta take the good (yay, drugs!) with the bad (damn, DRM!).

Meh. As much as I deplore DRM in all its forms, Bitcoin needs to be a neutral currency (usable for any purpose). If people want to spend their hard-earned money on that garbage, let them.

Nothing in your car manual states that you shouldn't plow pedestrians over driving down the street.   Since it's not in the manual it shouldn't be a worry right?

I'm sure there's SOMETHING that alludes to avoiding hitting people...

Maybe DRM will work if it involves bitcoin?  lol ha haha ha!  :D

What specifically do you propose you can and are going to do about it?  (Besides posting in a forum)

Fine when the wright brothers Made the airplane There was no ban on putting smart bombs on them

BTCTalk: "Protecting one's intellectual property is the exact same thing as running over people in the streets or bombing little children."

Man I'm a journalist,  the only thing I do is tell the people what I hear.

I think where you went wrong then is not so much telling people what you hear, but telling them and then trying to force an incorrect and hyperbolic conclusion onto them.

The article is pure sensationalist tripe, there's no evidence or any information to back up these ridiculous claims.

Please go away.

Maybe...   I personally view it as an abuse of what bitcoin was built for.   So for that i'm guilty....  

However I was also successful as you now know that there is a company out there,  most likely funded by Video Game makers that will be using Bitcoins for DRM.  So does everyone else reading it.

That's call FUD and we get plenty of it around here lol.

I don't see anything wrong with that.   I think DRM are the only legitimate way to protect whatever you consider as your right to prevent people to copy digital files they bought from you.

I very much prefer this kind of technical method to law enforcement, anyway.


And if you don't like DRM, don't use non-free software.  It's as simple as that.

LOL!  I won't disagree...  all I did was report what I was told... 

I, along with probably most people here, would say it's impossible to "abuse" bitcoins in any way, shape, or form.  

If your goal is to grab eye-balls through sensational journalism then yea, you met your goal. Just be prepared for the forum rage :)

It won't work. They are talking about using a fork, not Bitcoin itself. Nobody will support their forked blockchain and it will be attacked.

they could use bitcoin itself,  dividable down to several decimal points.   

What would be funny in that case is that if the price increases to the point where it's profitable to buy the video game just to take out the micro bitcoins.

It can work if for example blocks cannot be generated by random miners but only by the company itself. Or you can only merge-mine this exclusively together with Bitcoin blocks...

Anyways, there are other, better systems already in place if you want to ensure that games can only be activated for a certain amount of times - and as every DRM scheme they are either broken or heavily centralized.

If they use Bitcoin, the tokens for the DRM will cost much more than the game and the business model won't scale.

edit: OTOH, this may be brilliant and the game buyers could end up getting their money back by having bitcoins worth more than the game. They will play games for free.

people will hoard when they want to hoard, nothing can stop that.

A very good point. Car makers assume the users have some common sense. :)

This. I fully support the idea of using bitcoin protocol for drm. Then people might actually get the full potential of bitcoin (protocol).

Well, it's not really an anarchist posture, DRM in some forms can restrict property rights, If i want to copy a game to keep a back-up incase my original disk gets scratched why shouldn't I be able to do that I paid for it. Or if i want to install it on more than one computer in my house, if I buy baked beans from the shop they can't tell me how many bowls to put it in or how many serving of it I can have.

+1

Also, bitcoin is simply a superior medium of exchange to fiat and precious metals, it's not a copyright policy trip.
We should expect and even rejoice at bitcoin supplanting fiat in ANY form of commerce, even the shitty (copyright) or illegal (SR) ones.

bitcoin can and should be used for whatever people want. what authority are you to say what one person or company can or can't use bitcoins for? it functions as a currency without a central authority, and you sir are no authority over what anyone chooses to do with it.

Bitcoin is a free system, people will use it for what they want.

First of all opposing DRM is not anarchy, quite the opposite, since DRM is an attack on the property rights of end users since in order for the DRM to kind of work the publisher has to take over control of the end user's computing devices. This is why so many technologically aware people are so opposed to DRM.

Now the use of Bitcoin for DRM will fail just like every other DRM scheme since like any other type of DRM, DRM is ultimately about hiding information among somebody else's private property and hoping that the owner of said private property will not find the information. In this case the private keys to the Bitcoins will have to be hidden somewhere in the end users computer. Find the private keys and the DRM is busted. This DRM does add a very interesting twist, since of in order for this to work the value of the BTC has to be comparable to the retail cost of the game. Set the value of the BTC too low and one can then pirate that game by simply paying the BTC amount. But what happens if the value of Bitcoin rises? Then we will have people buying the game in order to crack the DRM and extract the far more valuable Bitcoins. After the valuable Bitcoins have been extracted then the game can be pirated and played for what ever that is worth.

This does add a new dimension to the concept of "mining" for Bitcoins.

As a gamer I will see companies like Electronic Arts, Lucas Arts and yes even Valve, any that use these kind of systems will be kicked out of the industry, this kind of thing is precisely why I oppose any kind of DRM. These people don't care about intellectual property rights or making good games, they just want to make sure that the customers pay even if that means screwing over people who willingly play by their rules.

I have a particular vandetta against Sony Online Entertainment as well for what they did to Pre-Cu Star Wars Galaxies

Well, I'd like to think that some of them care more than others.

This is what happens whenever you execute a non-free software.   So stop complaining.

DRM are absolutely fine.

DRM is silly, and fundamentally a short-term kludge that tries to patch over fundamental changes in the market.

The proposed DRM mechanism in the article is especially silly, because there's already an attack that breaks it (assuming you control the internet connection of the software being tricked).

If they are going to all this trouble they might as well just make the game pay-to-play and let people copy it as much as they want. Set the price low enough and most people won't bother cracking it and they'll make up the lower markup with increased volume.

No DRM is an entirely different issue from Free vs Proprietary software. DRM is way worse than any of the loss of freedom due to proprietary software. In the 1990's I was a loyal customer of Microsoft because Microsoft was one of the few companies that did not infect their products with DRM. In those days DRM consisted among other things of deliberately creating bad sectors on 5.25in floppy diskettes. When Microsoft turned to the dark side with DRM at the turn of the millennium I went with GNU/Linux and Free Software.

Furthermore is possible to infect Free Software with DRM, if the Free Software does not use GPLv3 or AGPLv3. Ever heard of the TIVO or the Kindle?

The problem with this model is that the pirate just pays 1 satoshi to pirate the game.

What's the difference with existing implementation: By install a copy of game you create an online account, you have to charge the account to play

The freedom to exchange our efforts for what we want was compromised with the present fiat system. Bitcoin can restore that, and rightly so, because people have the right to:



Hopefully, we will always have choices when small groups try to take them away.

This is nothing to be worried about. Game crack or launcher will void any DRM. I don't understand why the bitcoin technology is even needed because with unmodified install the plain old client-server model will be as good as it can be.

If the client is cracked, it can install and launch without any network communication and other artificial restrictions. End of all problems.