EA threatens to ban users who talk about DRM ... or not

It seems that EA have threatened to ban the Spore accounts of members who discuss (complain) about the DRM on the official game forum.

SecuROM as been discussed and discussed so much and it causes arguments in threads. If you want to talk about DRM SecuROM then please use another fansite forum. If there is any change you will be able to read it on the official Spore site.

Please do not continue to post theses thread or you account may be at risk of banning which in some cases would mean you would need to buy a new copy to play Spore.

Note: The original post seems to have vanished and only this copy remains.

However, a producer for Maxis tries to calm things down:

We are happy to support healthy exchanges on the forums. And people will only get banned for breaking the rules.

Discussing DRM is not breaking the rules - and as long as it is a civil conversation, it's cool with us.

There's a thread about online accounts at: http://forum.spore.com/jforum/posts/list/2897.page

Please feel free to discuss DRM there - we'd like to keep this to a few posts so that people who are here to talk about the game don't have to sort through all the DRM posts. This thread will be locked - so feel free to post on the other thread.

Now, in my opinion, this highlights a serious problem with the DRM mechanism. Being banned from the forum should have no impact whatsoever on your ability to play Spore (or any other game). The fact that a moderator is even using the threat of taking away a gamers ability to play a game that they've bought and paid for suggests that the power of DRM has gone to some people's heads.

It's time for EA to sort out this mess. It's quite clear that the DRM handcuffs are too tight, and it's also becoming obvious that these mechanisms that are designed to prevent piracy are being abused. There needs to be clearly defined policies as to what the DRM can and can't do, and users of the game need to receive better protection so that their right to play a game can't be removed by some overzealous forum moderator.

The only group of users not getting a hard time from the DRM are those who have paid nothing for the game and pirated it. That's plainly a ridiculous situation.