Completely Broken DRM on the XBOX 360

[giza]

I just saw this piece on The Consumerist, and it is a bit frightening if you've actually purchased content from XBOX Live.

Here's a summary of one customer's story:

• Customer's XBOX 360 gets the "red ring of death", so he sends it in for repair. Receives a new XBOX with a different serial number, resulting in his content--content that he paid for--becoming unavailable when he is not logged into XBOX live with the purchasing account. Even another account on the same XBOX cannot use purchased content now.


• Customer calls Microsoft, stays on for an hour trrying different ways to get access to his content with no luck. M$ promises to call him back in two weeks.


• Two weeks pass. The sound of crickets is heard.


• Customer decides to call Microsoft to follow up. They make him repeat the same steps from before, with no luck. M$ promises to call him back in two weeks. Again.


• Two more weeks pass. The sound of crickets is heard.


• Customer decides to call Microsoft for the third time. They make him repeat the same steps from before, with no luck. M$ promises to call him back in two weeks.


• Two more weeks pass. The sound of crickets is heard.


• Customer decides to call Microsoft for the fourth time. They make him repeat the same steps from before, with no luck. M$ promises to call him back in two weeks.


• Two more weeks pass. The sound of crickets is heard.


• Finally, customer gets a call from "Frank" at Microsoft. Frank is unable to help.


• Over the course of a few more phonecalls, Frank is still unable to help the customer get access to his content.


• Finally, Frank tells the customer that there is nothing more he can do, and that resolution is expected "sometime in 2008".

Now, just to be clear, the only way that the customer can access his XBOX Live content is to do so with the account that he used to purchase it.

If someone (like his wife) wants to use another account on the same machine, tough luck.

If his Internet connectivity is flaky, tough luck.

If the XBOX Live service is down and he can't log in, touch luck.

If Microsoft were to go out of business, tough luck.

Now, I know the last one isn't too likely to happen anytime soon, but I think this is yet another case of some serious drawbacks of DRM that consumers simply are not aware of. There are a whole host of problems that can keep you from using products that you paid for. And if the vendor is unable or unwilling to help, you are completely and totally screwed out of using what you paid for.

I hope that Microsoft and other companies that make use of DRM will take not of failure modes like this and try to keep them in mind in the future. Things like this can easily result in a Public Relations nightmare for any company.

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

[Edit: Several folks have pointed to me that this story just doesn't make much sense. Getting the content back is as simple as deleting and re-downloading it. It increasingly seems that the problem is a case of--as coyoteden put it, PEBCAS (Problem exists between controller and sofa). I still dislike DRM, though. :-P ]

Comments

[ilthuain.livejournal.com]

Delete the content and redownload it.

Worked for me!

[giza.livejournal.com]

That doesn't cost money? And works on an XBOX 360 with a different serial number?

[meow-tuna.livejournal.com]

AFAIK it doesn't cost any extra. Once you've bought it it's noted in your 360 Live account and you can just re download it. I might try it tonight with something cheap.

[ilthuain.livejournal.com]

Doesn't cost a cent.

I mostly play XBLA games (Small Arms used to be my addiction, now it's the TOTALLY RAD Undertow) and I redringed last July. They scrapped the old system so I had to connect to play initially, but then I just deleted the content and redownloaded it free of charge.

Easy as cake.

[frostyw.livejournal.com]

Except that the cake is a lie.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Betweens yours and others' comments, it really is sounding like a case of--as someone else put it: PEBCAS (Problem exists between controller and sofa)

Time to go edit my original post.

[rassah.livejournal.com]

That snapshot of the 360 with a red glowy circle on the front looks eerily too much like the turrets from Portal.

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

are you still there???

[rassah.livejournal.com]

I don't blame you...

[simbab.livejournal.com]

Sometimes when I hear about gamers being mistreated by customer service, I have to wonder how much of an asshole factor their is. If they talk to the people on the phone anything like the things they write in web forums about these companies (yet oddly still continue to patronize), then I could see an aggravated customer service rep say, "yeah, uh, we'll get back to you on that." And just kind of end it there. Or maybe it wasn't malicious at all...maybe the person forgot to enter the data into the system because they were annoyed with the way they were treated.

I tend to look at these hard-luck stories surrounding games and other products that tend to have a user base with a bit of a sense of entitlement, and wonder if there isn't more to the story.

Basically, how you approach these kinds of things can be the difference between getting what you want and being out of luck. I think that fact is lost on a lot of people, and it makes me less than sympathetic for people when this stuff happens. Then again, you are paying money for a closed, restricted, and locked-down-six-ways-from-Sunday system, so you at least should know what you're getting into.

I don't see why anyone's surprised at this, however in the wrong Microsoft may be.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Even if that's the case, as you say, the noisy twerp is STILL out hundreds of dollars in legally purchased software. I agree that people should be courteous, but I don't agree that any company may keep me from my property just because I spouted off. Besides, it misses the whole point - people shouldn't have to call MS to get their accounts fixed or review their files or whatever whenever they have a hardware failure or what not. Lots and lots of money can go poof like this and MS isn't gonna pay one nickle back, even if the problem is their fault do to shoddy architecture.

[simbab.livejournal.com]

But that's just the thing. You don't legally own it, and people should know this. Legally, Microsoft doesn't owe him a thing. Technically, you can't buy software. You don't own it. It's a license. And most EULAs have clauses in them that allow revocation of the license for any reason that the vendor sees fit. Believe me, they've covered their bases in the EULA for the XBOX system. I'm sure of it. They don't pay those lawyers to sit on their thumbs all day.

I know it isn't fair but thems the breaks. Personally I'd like to see this legal technique thrown out by the courts, because many of the draconian licensing terms that are used in software products are not legal in the EU and most other parts of the world. From what I recall there have been no court tests of this stuff, but the cynic in me says with the federal bench having, ahem, "benefited" from a large number of Republican presidents and their appointments, the time for any decisions that will be truly disruptive to anti-consumer corporate behavior are long past.

Consumerist FAIL.

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

If this is a typical Consumerist "expose":

The "consumer" is a moron (or an asshole) who can't (or refuses to) do a single thing customer support suggests. Therefore, he/she/it rants to the consmerist about how he/she/it/shit "can't undurrrrstand dem towelheads in that there India" and the consumerist whores it up. I could tell them right now the manager of my local Best Buy molested my dog and they'd be happy to print it.

DRM does suck. Here are there specifics of how it sucks on the X360: Most purchased content is keyed by your XBL account and your console. Either key can unlock the content. So, as long as the content is on the console it was downloaded from, anyone can use it. If you take your content to another console, you have to sign in to your account can unlock it.

What's happened here is that the dead console's hard drive is on the replacement console. As far as the DRM is concerned the content is on another console, hence the need to sign in to the purchasing account.

And yes, the easy fix is to delete and re-download the content. This will sign the content with the new console's key so anyone can use it.

That is exactly what MS told that guy. It worked fine for me when my 360 was replaced. It also seems to have worked for just about everyone else, because there have been a LOT of replacements. If they all had DRM problems, there would have been an ever bigger shitstorm over the high failure rate.

P.E.B.C.A.S. Problem exists between controller and sofa.

I'm going to just qote from the article...

[nightwind292.livejournal.com]

They had me try a few things in the system blade and redownload one of my items. This did nothing to resolve then issue.

Re: I'm going to just qote from the article...

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

which is why i think the user is clueless. Probably redownloaded the wrong thing or something.

[rassah.livejournal.com]

DRM for "bought" content does indeed suck. However, I do love the DRM idea for rented content, or rather the ability to "rent" content thanks to DRMs existence. More specifically, I like that it is possible to pay a monthly flat fee to listen to the entire unlimited collection of music form something like Yahoo Music. To me that is a better deal than paying $0.99 a song from something like iTuned *coughripoffcough* with the hopes that I'll actally like it. And DRM is the only thing that makes such a service possible.

[streakthetiger.livejournal.com]

My friend's 360 crapped out.
He got a new one and was able to access his account and get all his purchases back.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Did he redownload his content as others have suggested in the comments here?

[streakthetiger.livejournal.com]

To my knowledge, yes. Didn't cost him anything either.

[bushrat.livejournal.com]

http://www.smashmyxbox.com/

DRM shouldn't be allowed to exist...

[furahi.livejournal.com]

"They're all dead Dave, everybody's dead Dave"

What do you expect from the evil empire? ;)

[jlick.livejournal.com]

While the original account appears to be dodgy, a more complicated scenario happened to my friend miltownkid (emkid.net). He bought his 360 in Taiwan and set up his Live account in Taiwan. Then he moved back to the US and he found he couldn't renew his Live account using a US address and credit card because it was a Taiwan account. He wasn't able to get Microsoft to sort out the problem and had to create a new account, but he only lost one downloaded game because of it. The 360 is also region coded so sometimes he finds a game he can't play on his out of region player, but fortunately he reports than most US games are released without region coding. Region free mods exist, but modded consoles will not work with Live.

Things get even more sticky with HD players as the HD groups reserve the right to completely change the DRM schemes and require users to apply firmware upgrades to their players when changes occur. The recent Live Free or Die Hard Blu-Ray release required consumers who bought it to upgrade their player in order to watch it, and many consumers who are not tech savvy had trouble accomplishing this feat. And there's almost certainly going to come a day when an upgrade is required but the manufacturer just shrugs and says "oh we don't support that model any more."

[wildw0lf.livejournal.com]

Speaking of another DRM incident, some new Western Digital external drives if you install the bundled software actually won't let you share DIVX, MP3 files, etc, as the bundled software prevents them from being shared

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/12/western-digital.html

The fix for the WD NAS drive(s)? Just don't install the bundled software.

[wildw0lf.livejournal.com]

I wonder how long it will be before companies start bundling in DRM at the hardware level, where you likely won't have an easy way to circumvent this in the future.