On a side note, you can only copyright the data of a font, not the design. So, you can copy the design of a font, perfectly and exactly, and not infringe copyright. Of course, you can’t take a copyrighted font and trace it inside a font editor, but you can copy by eye, or take a rasterised version, such as would be printed on paper, and trace that instead.

The long and short of it is the only people who have been, or will ever be, sued are software vendors who are distributing font files without licenses to do so.

Sorry to be boring! ;-)

Poor Arial, Verdana and Times font creators… no one think of the fontauthors?

It could have just been my drive, but it never had problems with any other Securom games. Maybe there was an issue with the disc. I never did finish the game, so I’m not sure if I would face the same issues with the drive I have now.

Having a lifetime activation limit, though, that’s garbage. We also don’t know what these companies will do when they go out of business – we might be left with games that can no longer be played without being cracked, because they can’t connect to a server that doesn’t exist anymore.

The limited activation side though is the worst thing to happen to PC gaming in a long time. I’ve passed on several high-profile releases due to limited activation DRM – Far Cry 2, Dead Space, Riddick, etc. That’s around £80 (at retail price) the games industry won’t be seeing from me until the activation DRM is removed.

The only time there was genuine difficulty with secruom was when it first came on the scene and certain model optical drives had difficulty reading the sectors on the CD/DVD disc to authorize running the game, eventually most were updated to read securom properly.

The bogus complaint often leveled against Securom was that my CD/DVD drive died, of course in those cases you only have to look at the person gamer or pirate making heavy use of optical drive which is one of the lowest quality and cheapest parts in a computer and it gives out after strenuous use, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out the real cause of death. I’ve had the optical drive in my laptop die on me 3 times and its never had a securom game in it once.

Of course the internet activation secruom is a completely different fellow & people just don’t like the idea of limited activations at all, that feeling is compounded in PC gamers who may have chaotic usage patterns switching from one PC to another or re-building their own etc so it is not a very good system (but that hasn’t stopped some trying to level bogus rootkit claims against it even the old disc drive breaking has been dug up again).

Solutions like steam or onlive are more effective than than the securom online activation and PC retail is on deaths door so it will fade away eventually.

Oh wait, this thread isn’t about DRM, right?