With Ubisoft's fantastically awful new DRM you must be online and logged in to their servers to play the games you buy. Not only was this DRM broken the very first day it was released, but now their authentication servers have failed so absolutely that no-one who legally bought their games can play them. 'At around 8am GMT, people began to complain in the Assassin's Creed 2 forum that they couldn't access the Ubisoft servers and were unable to play their games.' One can only hope that this utter failure will help to stem the tide of bad DRM.

It's almost as if Ubisoft has done this on purpose in order to promote piracy of their new game. Almost.

I would love to be in the meeting where the people who build these kind of DRM abominations manage to sell them through to publishers. I'm not sure if it's an internal team, or all their DRM security controls are built by a third-party, but whoever is selling publishers on this crap has to be seriously good at selling rubbish to senior executives. What kind of bullshit charts and graphs do they show to convince publishers that forcing their consumers, who've already paid for a product, to jump through hoops is a good idea?

How dumb do you have to be to fall for this kind of nonsense? You would think that someone in a senior position over at Ubisoft would, you know, go on the Internet once in a while. Ever single time someone comes out with a new DRM measure it's cracked within hours of release. If it's a popular game, it's often cracked and released before the game even hits shelves. Investing in DRM is like flushing hundreds of thousands of dollars down the toilet. There a grand total of ZERO use cases where DRM has effectively controlled media piracy.

Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher's Weekly that 'publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy' comes a sudden realization of a much larger threat to the viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were 'loaned' last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American city and town.

That organization is the library, in case you didn't click through to the Slashdot article. I only wish it was a joke, but there's a group of people out there right now trying to think up ways to destroy libraries. I've often what legal ground an "online library" might be able to stand on. I wish that the Google Books ordeal had gotten more press and they wouldn't have settled. Wikipedia is the most impressive knowledge resource ever created, but digitizing and indexing a library be a tremendous step forward in free information and open education. The world would be a better place if there was an affordable way to access journal information. One of the things I hate about marketing and advertising is that we usually draw insights off of junk data. There's a world of good information out there and it's just slightly out of reach... and out of budget.

Question Of The Day: What Is Your Excuse For Not Paying For Music?

It's interesting how people justify their own actions. Take a look at what's going on in the comments. You've got all sorts of justifications for how people deal with the fact that virtually every song that's ever existed is floating around on the Internet. I find it particularly interesting, because if people acted wholly rationally they'd pirate everything. The odds of getting caught for pirating music are effectively zero. The only ones who ever feel the wrath of the RIAA's hammer are those seeding content to others.

iTunes came along and made buying music online so streamlined that people started buying music again because it was just easier. I've never purchased a song through iTunes. It's just not something I'd do. I still buy CDs. My usual process for purchasing music consists of pirating music until I find something I like, at which point I order the CD on Amazon. I like the physical disk. I like the art.

I wonder what I'll do when they no longer sell CDs. I wonder what the RIAA will do when they eventually realize they lost the battle years ago, all music is freely available, and artists make money purely by touring.