The current software climate being what it is, DRM (Digital Rights Management) is a contentious issue. The idea behind DRM is to put the software customer’s purchase under lock and key, even after they own it. The customer bought it so they own the software, right? Well, yes and no. That’s where it gets complicated.

When you buy a software program, you buy a copy of the code to use for it’s intended purpose. So, technically, you don’t own the program. You own the right to use it. Actual ownership of any software would literally include owning the original source code and every copy of it. Accordingly, “buying” MS Office would give you ownership to the company itself; that’s obviously NOT how this works.

Buying software is actually buying a license to the software, and companies control the terms of that license. Their attitude: “If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.” They are counting on the fact that you will hate the company less than you love the software it produces, and it works. DRM works on this principal.

A former game manufacturer:

DRM “works” in the sense that it gives a better ROI[return on investment] on most games. Sure ther are games like Witcher 2 that are outliers; but generally most games will make more money with DRM then with out. There is a tims of internal data at most large game companies for this.

“But but… it gets cracked.” Yes, majority, if not 100% of the cases it does get cracked.

But DRM is not there to stop you. It’s not there to stop the pirates. The DRM is there to stop 14 year old Bobby from sharing his game with Tommy down the street. Tommy plays the game, tries to copy it, it doesn’t work and begs his mom for it. Another sell.

Ther have been studies that have tried to control between DRM and non-DRM games (very difficult to do correctly). The general trend is that it helps, it helps a lot with profits (maybe not so much with customer relations though).

You really think these huge companies like Ubisoft, EA and others would pay good money and put DRM in and lose customers if they couldn’t/didn’t make money off it?

You can say all you want about how they treat customers [like shit]; but at the end of the day they are very profitable corporations. They know what they are doing.

” So essentially, Ubisoft paid several million dollars to develop a DRM that is much easier to crack?”

You can make arguments that it’s bad and evil and gives customers bad experiences [and I agree]. But you can not say it doesn’t make business sense. It makes dam[sic] well good sense. Sorry but you are really dumb if you think these companies are losing money of their DRM investments.

DRM is bad for customers, good for companies. And…it isn’t going away any time soon, so get used to it.

Quote taken from http://i.imgur.com/BVxPk.png