This Is Why You Should Hate Product Activation

**Lemur** · 07-25-2008, 03:00

Every computer user should despise product activation with a deep, dark, soul-consuming anger. Somebody who sells you a game, film or song with activation is saying, "Hey, you can enjoy it for exactly as long as I let you, and for as long as I feel like keeping the activation server running. After that, it's not yours anymore."

Example:

Yahoo e-mailed its Yahoo! Music Store customers yesterday, telling them it will be closing for good—and the company will take its DRM license key servers offline on September 30, 2008. [...]Once the Yahoo store goes down and the key servers go offline, existing tracks cannot be authorized to play on new computers. Instead, Yahoo recommends the old, lame, and lossy workaround of burning the files to CD, then reripping them onto the computer. Sure, you'll lose a bunch of blank CDs, sound quality, and all the metadata, but that's a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to listen to that music you lawfully acquired. Good thing you didn't download it illegally or just buy it on CD!

**Whacker** · 07-25-2008, 04:14

So pretty much what I've been preaching since day 0. Yet people are still willing to give up control of their own property willingly. It has and always does smack of the Soup Nazi story to me, in a slightly different context.

**Xiahou** · 07-25-2008, 04:16

And that's exactly what the industry claims will never happen. I've heard game devs claim alternately that if they go out of business they'll unlock the games so no activation is required (not sure how they'll magically make the installer no longer look for an activation server- but hey) or that by the time they cease activations you probably won't want to play the game anymore.

To that, I would reply "You're right, I'm never going to want to play it in the first place with activation."

**Husar** · 07-25-2008, 06:49

I agree, activation is stupid and unnecessary, I have a copy of Earth 2160 lying around that does not want to activate anymore since I played around with RAM configurations and then upgraded the PC.
Now I could get more activations by calling the customer support apparently but they want something like 1.60 EUR per minute and when I thought I could gave it a try just once, I, who would've guessed, landed in a waiting line and hung up. By the time someone woud've anwered I guess I would have payed for the game twice.

**Andres** · 07-25-2008, 14:19

I am someone who frequently re-installs an old game and I wouldn't want to find myself in a situation where I can no longer play my legally purchased game because some server or company doesn't exist anymore.

I simply refuse to buy anything that requires online activation. A shame since I really want to play Mass Effect, but apparently, it requires online activation, so no Mass Effect for me

**drone** · 07-25-2008, 16:00

Originally Posted by Andres

I simply refuse to buy anything that requires online activation. A shame since I really want to play Mass Effect, but apparently, it requires online activation, so no Mass Effect for me

No Mass Effect (or Bioshock) for me, either. It's the ultimate slap in the face to a customer. "You can pay full price for a product, but we control whether you can use it or not."

As the article says, this same thing happened to the Microsoft's MSN Music store this year, although public outcry forced them to keep the servers going. And that was big, solvent, swimming in money Microsoft. With music DRM, it's more of a format war than piracy prevention (and the losers end up like Betamax).

**TevashSzat** · 07-25-2008, 21:36

The sad thing is that piraters don't need to worry about all of this product activation at all since the crackers have already removed them

**CrossLOPER** · 07-25-2008, 23:13

Originally Posted by drone

No Mass Effect (or Bioshock) for me, either.

Didn't Bioshock's validation thingy take a trip out the window?

**drone** · 07-25-2008, 23:32

Originally Posted by CrossLOPER

Didn't Bioshock's validation thingy take a trip out the window?

Not that I know of, although I haven't been following it closely. They did increase the number of validations possible after the release, but I haven't heard anything about a patch to remove it altogether.