Wikipedia says, "In biology, a spore is a reproductive structure that is adapted for dispersal and surviving for extended periods of time in unfavorable conditions."
Electronic Arts’s game Spore is certainly meeting unfavorable conditions, due to the crippling DRM with which it has been infected. Paul Biba has already covered the Amazon one-star-review backlash, which at the time of this writing is up to 2,016 out of 2,216 total reviews. But that was only one prong of the attack.
The other is that Spore is being "dispersed" via the peer-to-peer darknets at what the chief executive of Big Champagne (a company that tracks peer-to-peer downloads) calls an "extraordinary" rate.
According to coverage by Forbes, CNet, and Torrentfreak, Spore has already been downloaded over 500,000 times since September 2nd. Torrentfreak claims that "This download rate exceeds that of any other pirated game in history, and in a week or two from now it will be the most pirated game ever on BitTorrent." (Whether this claim is actually true is not certain.)
As I noted in my letter to Random House, DRM often has the opposite effect of that which is intended: it can annoy people so much that they choose to crack the DRM and share the encrypted object over peer-to-peer out of spite.
And as Big Champagne CEO Mark Garland points out in the Forbes article, the people DRM harms are the ones who would not "pirate" the game anyway:
DRM only limits the ability of consumers who wouldn’t typically pirate media to make copies or share it with friends and family, agrees Big Champagne’s Garland. But because encryption is so easily broken by savvier—and more morally flexible—users, it does little to stop the flood of intellectual property pirated over the Internet, he contends.
"DRM can encourage the best customers to behave slightly better," he says. "It will never address the masses of non-customers downloading your product."
