Poor, wretched EA. First they have to make 600 staff walk the plank, and now they’re being sued all over the place. There are a lot of hackles raised by SecuROM’s secondary effects, like disabling certain drives or legitimate software. A commenter pointed out this page, which lists the current lawsuits (there are four) against EA on this subject.

The most compelling one has to be the newest, regarding Spore’s Creature Creator, a free piece of software if you’ll recall in trial form, and an embarassing money grab in retail form. However, even if you got the free version, you got yourself some nice SecuROM DRM included, and I understand that it isn’t even mentioned in the EULA. Copy protection for a free demo? What the hell were they thinking? The other new lawsuit is a little more woolly and probably will come to nothing.