You're right, it's SecuROM. "A de-authorization tool was released for the main game, but EA's customer support must still be contacted to deactivate the downloadable expansions" (source). Good thing i never buy DLC unless they are given for free or included in the GOTY edition of any game.

Thanks for the tip but no thanks! Origin is the reason i never played Mass Effect 3 although i really enjoyed immensely ME & ME2. Maybe someday i'll see a Longplay series of ME3 just to see what happened and what's the fuss with that awful ending that many gamers were talking about. Or i'll just read the plot on Wikipedia... :)

Hmmm, i haven't thought about this possibility... I'll keep that in mind, should the SecuROM in my retail edition stops working someday! ;-)

I'll just leave this here: http://xkcd.com/488/

I hate it when high profile sites give people excuses to act immorally.

Haha, in that case 99% of the world are immoral, cause everyone has at least something they copied, be it an mp3 song, a cracked Windows installation a dvdrip of a movie or a pirated version of a video game.

Blame anti-circumvention laws. That is what that comic is making fun of.

Except that the message of the comic is "use DRM-free services, where you can move the files between devices and use them where you wish without having to break encryptions and breaking agreements/laws" rather than "meh, go pirate the thing, it doesn't matter anyway". Of course, many interpret it as the latter, as you said.

You do actually have the license and a permanent right to "use" it. Since neither Chahi nor Olegdr are Americans, Olegdr can probably download the game off a torrent and legally play it (but not the GOG version, because the GOG installer contains GOG IP).

I'm reminded of this little example, although i thought it was a bird song's requiem...

Not really. Say you haven't downloaded X game, and GOG goes out of business, you lose your license to that X game, and you cannot get it from another service. But, ye, technicalities and crap.

That's wrong. You don't lose a license because the intermediary went out of business. When you buy a game from GOG, you get access to the game content, which is the rightsholder's IP, and GOG's wrapper component, which may be GOG's IP (their signage certainly is). Once you have the license, no matter GOG's current status, you have the right to make copies of the game for your personal use.

Provided there are no laws preventing you from going to shady websites, you can download a copy from TPB -- the seeders would be (most likely, depending on jurisdiction) infringing the rightsholder's copyright because they don't have the right to distribute copies (even if you show an uploader your proof of purchase -- they just don't have the right to distribute copies fullstop) -- but you wouldn't be breaking any laws as long as you don't seed it back.

However, the license by itself doesn't actually oblige anyone to provide you with a playable copy. When you buy a game from GOG, you also get access to GOG's download services. If GOG goes under or revokes the services for aggravated tosbreaking, neither Steam nor the rightsholder have to provide download services, even if you don't have a backup copy.

Similarly, if you have a CEG game and Steam bans you, or goes under and fails to make good on the CEG removal promise, you still have the right to play the game if you can find a legal way to do it. For a typical steam crack, Americans would be boned by the anti-circumvention part of the DMCA and everyone else would be still technically breaking the warez group's copyright if they didn't release the crack into the public domain (crazy but true). GOG's installer is a no-no because it has GOG's IP in it. But if someone innounpacks GOG's IP out of a GOG installer, the end result will be perfectly okay to download, keep, and play for a Steam customer.

Starmaker: For all intents and purposes it doesn't matters much to the average user if he breaks paragraph 247B of some TOS he skipped reading. The point is, all my GOG bought games and their respective extras are backed up on the same external hard drive the Another World executable and registration information were stored on. However unlike with the crappy DRM system of AW, my GOG games will have no problem getting installed anytime in the future (as long as the system of that time is backwards compatible but that's totally besides the point). I also own a couple of games which are no longer on sale here and I can still download and use them with no problem.

By the way, this is why I'm always asking GOG to separate their installer package from the original game image files.
If they'll stop updating it for some reason (ex: game removed), at least we'll be able to manage the game ourselves on new systems and\or emulators.

Of course few people live a perfect life and don't do anything wrong. I think that it's better to judge the actions though, not the people. I mean, the action itself it wrong, and if you do it regularly it's wrong, but if you did it in the past, well you did it and that's that.

Anyway, my position is that if you bought a game it's fine to get a pirated copy if that's more convenient. (Otherwise, go get it legitimately.)