Spore has seen its share of disgruntled customers over the game's use of some very intrusive DRM, but now more gamers have started to seek a legal remedy to their problems with SecuROM. At the end of September a class-action lawsuit was filed claiming that SecuROM did everything but set the users' houses on fire, and now two more class-action lawsuits have been filed against EA.

The first lawsuit was filed by Richard Eldridge, and concerned the use of SecuROM in the free version of the game's Creature Creator. "Consumers are given no notices whatsoever that the FREE trial version of the game includes Digital Rights Management technology... Consumers are given no control, rights, or options over SecuROM," the suit alleges. "The program cannot be completely uninstalled."

The suit then lists some of the software that SecuROM looks for, including the Fantom CD Emulator, Alcohol 120%, Nero Image Drive, and Daemon Tools, among others. "EA, by virtue of its secret instalaltion of SecuROM, has determined that it should have control over which programs a user may utilize or run on ttheir computer..." the suit claims. The suit asks for relief in the form of payment to have SecuROM removed from the computers of class members, and the restitution of "all unlawful or illegal profits recieved by defendant as a result of the unfair, unlawful, and/or deceptive conduct alleged in herein."

The second class-action suit deals with claims of damage due to SecuROM "after suffering months of computer problems and ultimately having to reformat her hard drive to rid her computer of SecuROM and its accompanying problems." The suit seeks to keep EA from selling games witih SecuROM, unless proper disclosure and removal tools are included.

While we pointed out that it's hard to prove that the myriad problems described by the plaintiff were all due to SecuROM when looking at the previous lawsuit, these new complaints appear to be a bit more grounded in reality. They bring up the lack of disclosure about SecuROM in the game's EULA, the fact the program isn't shown in the "Add/Remove Programs" utility in Windows, and the lack of an easily found uninstall utility for SecuROM. The problems listed in the suit included "prevention of proper launching of games... disruption of antivirus programs and firewalls, computer slowdowns... and complete operating system failure." The suit then says the only way to remove the program is a complete reformat and install. In legal terms, the allegation is that you need to nuke the installation from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Ars had some misgivings about the past class-action lawsuit on this issue, simply because the claims of damages were so broad and hard to prove. The language and allegations of these two suits, which deal with the Creature Creator as well as a copy of The Sims 2: Bon Voyage, are much clearer and to the point: SecuROM is installed with inadequate disclosure, and it is hard to remove without downloading an uninstaller, which EA does offer from its web site. While DRM will always be around in one form or another, hopefully lawsuits such as these will make companies like EA be more forthcoming about what programs will be installed along with their games, and how you can get rid of them.

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