How do you explain to your five-year-old that one of his favorite computer games has gone away and isn't coming back, all because daddy changed too much of the computer hardware? That's the task that recently faced one reader because of the copy protection scheme on an inexpensive kid's game.
"The Hyperbowl Arcade download version has been a pain for me," the reader wrote. "The demo version was provided free on the Windows XP Plus disk, and I decided to buy it for my son. I downloaded the program and paid the fifteen bucks or so, followed the registration process and installed it on just one computer."
About a year after purchasing the product, his hard drive began acting up. "Using Ghost, I transferred everything including the Hyperbowl game to a different hard drive," the reader wrote. "At the same time I also changed the processor from an XP 1800+ to an XP 2600+. When my-five-year-old tried to play the game afterwards, it said that I would have to get a new activation code because the configuration had changed too much."
The reader wrote Hyperbowl tech support, thinking that they would allow him to reactivate once they understood it was still basically the same computer. In an increasingly heated exchange of e-mail, however, Hyperbowl insisted he would have to pay for another license of the game. As with the Roxio DRM scheme we saw a while ago, Hyperbowl said that it only has product activation on the download version of it software. Therefore customers who "anticipate making significant hardware modifications in the future" should buy the CD version instead, Hyperbowl tech support explained, because it doesn't require online activation.
"When I first bought the game, I'm sure there was no warning on their website about not changing your hardware configuration," the reader says. "It was over a year later when I ran this that there is now some mention on the page that changing configuration could cause some problems. It still gives no indication as to what level of change is regarded as a new computer for purposes of being denied use of the product."
Hyperbowl offered to let the reader re-license the game for a discounted price of $10, but at this point it wasn't about the money for the reader. "Why should I have to pay Hyperbowl again for deficiency in their activation software?" the reader wrote. "Even Microsoft and other vendors allow you to reactivate if you have system problems or 'move' the product between machines. Hyperbowl just repeatedly stated that you must pay again. It isn't even that good a game to start with, but my five-year-old doesn't understand why one of his favorite e games no longer works."
It was about the money for Hyperbowl, though, and I found it very interesting that they made the bottom line explanation for why they can't reactivate customers in these circumstances very clear. "Since we are charged fees by the activation service provider for each computer Hyperbowl is activated on, we simply cannot freely allow a single license of Hyperbowl to be activated on multiple computers," Hyperbowl tech support wrote the reader.
In other words, forget about the customer-vendor relationship -- what's important now is the relationship between vendor and its DRM provider. If the customer is left without the product he or she paid for, well, that's just too bad. Life in our copy-protected world isn't always fair, and that is unfortunately a lesson even little kids are now having to learn.
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