PC gamers are upset with Ubisoft over its treatment of From Dust, a strategy game that launched last month for the Xbox 360 and this week for PC. On its forums, Ubisoft first said that the game wouldn’t require an online connection for each play session, as long as players signed in once after installing the game. But then, Ubisoft removed that forum post, and instead said players would have to connect to Ubisoft servers every time they fired up the game.

From Dust players are also reporting crashes, a lack of graphical customization settings and a limited frame rate of 30 frames per second, Rock Paper Shotgun reports. A Ubisoft forum moderator is telling players that they can pursue refunds.

For another one of its games, Driver: San Francisco, Ubisoft swung the other way, telling players that they won’t need a constant Internet connection to play, as originally announced. Instead, they’ll only have to sign in once per play session. That’s good news, but only adds to the confusion.

What Ubisoft really needs is some sort of clear, across the board policy for all of its PC titles. The problem is that Ubisoft probably wants to adjust its DRM strategy for each game based on the likelihood of piracy vs. the risk of alienating legitimate customers.

But that problem can be solved. Why not publish a firm timetable for DRM that becomes more relaxed as a game gets older? Why not, at the very least, announce a DRM policy months before launch and stick with it? Blizzard, by comparison, angered some PC gamers when it announced that it’ll require a constant Internet connection for Diablo 3, but at least the publisher is giving players plenty of advance notice. (The game doesn’t even have a release date yet.)

I’d say that Ubisoft should ditch draconian anti-piracy measures altogether, but the company is convinced that they work. (Ubisoft’s DRM curbs piracy, at least. Whether it improves sales is a lot tougher to measure.) Better communication and a bit of compromise would do a lot to pacify PC gamers.

Now, Ubisoft is backing away from this restrictive form of digital rights management for one of its blockbuster titles. Ubisoft confirmed to VG247 that the single-player portion of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood will only require an initial login, and then will be playable offline.

Ubisoft hasn’t said that it’s finished with online-only DRM forever. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood has a significant multiplayer component, so the publisher may feel that it doesn’t need such heavy DRM to deter pirates. But Ubisoft has also been patching the online-only requirement out of its older PC games. R.U.S.E., a strategy game released last August, didn’t require a persistent connection either.

Ubisoft wasn’t the only publisher to dabble in online-only DRM last year. Electronic Arts tried it with Command & Conquer 4, released in March 2010, but also appears to have backed off. Rumors that the recently-released Bulletstorm would require a persistent Internet connection were quickly squashed, and the upcoming Dragon Age 2 will only require a single authentication.

I’m no pirate, and I’m not categorically opposed to publishers trying to protect their creations, but PC gaming suffers when players have to jump through too many hoops to enjoy their games. Let’s hope that the games industry has written off last year’s experiments in online-only DRM as a bad idea.

Starting with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11, players will need an “Online Pass” to enjoy the game over Xbox Live or the Playstation Network. These passes are included with new copies of the game, but used buyers will have to purchase another pass for $10. All EA Sports games for Xbox 360 and PS3 will require an online pass from now on.

Sony did something similar with SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo 3, including a voucher for online play in the retail packaging and charging $20 for replacement vouchers. Sony said it was only trying to stop piracy, but EA doesn’t hide its disdain for used game sales. “We want to reserve EA SPORTS online services for people who pay EA to access them,” the company said in an Online Pass FAQ page.

EA previously experimented with innocuous ways to encourage new games sales. New buyers of Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2, for example, received free bonus content that used buyers had to purchase separately. Online Pass promises bonus features for new game buyers as well, but it takes the idea one giant leap further by withholding a core part of the game.

The writing’s on the wall: Gradually, publishers will begin locking up more of what’s on the game disc until there’s no advantage to buying used. It started with bonus content, now it’s multiplayer, and pretty soon it’ll be the whole game. EA’s justification for Online Pass — that it deserves to be paid — really applies to all game development, so you’re kidding yourself if you think the trend stops at online sports games. Want to play the final chapter of your second-hand first-person shooter? There’s an access code for that.

Gamespy reports that the publisher will allow unlimited installs of its future PC games, but Ubisoft’s servers will handle saved games and authentication. That means you can’t play without an Internet connection.

In way, it’s a forward-thinking plan. Ubisoft’s looking ahead to a time when Internet connections will be everywhere, so you’ll never have a problem proving you paid for a copy of the game. Storing saved games online also means you can start playing on your laptop from where you left off on your desktop.

The big problem is we’re not yet in the age of ubiquitous Internet connections. Sure, you’ll have no problem playing at home — unless your Internet connection goes out for whatever reason — but this scheme rules out airplanes, remote areas or hotels that don’t have Wi-Fi. Ubisoft is betting most people don’t play in those situations, but it’s not fair for the publisher to make that decision. At the very least, Ubisoft game boxes should have big warning labels so players know what they’re getting.

One other concern: Ubisoft’s authentication servers aren’t guaranteed for life, and 10 years from now, players could be shut out of the game they bought. In fact, last time Ubisoft tried online authentication with Assassin’s Creed, some players had trouble immediately after purchasing.

In any case, is this really a fool-proof method for stopping piracy? If it was, I’d think other publishers would be using the same methods. Even Steam, a major platform for PC gaming that uses online authentication, has an offline mode.

The funny thing is that, in 2008, Ubisoft released Prince of Persia for PC with no digital rights management, apparently fed up with its past failures to stop piracy. I don’t know the results of that little experiment, but I guess Ubisoft figured it’s more profitable to penalize their paying customers than to let pirates roam free.

In an interview with Nikkei Electronics Asia, Stringer spoke of how his company didn’t take open technology very seriously in the past, pointing to the failed Sony Connect music store as an example. The site’s tunes came in the proprietary ATRAC format, which only worked with Sony’s music hardware and obviously displeased freedom-seeking customers. Connect was phased out beginning in 2007.

Stringer blames the store’s failure on a type of proprietary digital rights management. “At the time, we thought we would make more money that way than with open technology, because we could manage the customers and their downloads,” he said. “This approach, however, created a problem: customers couldn’t download music from any Websites except those that contracted with Sony. If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple Inc of the US.”

The interview, published this month, seems slightly dated, as Stringer talks about Apple’s use of FairPlay DRM and how Sony can maybe exploit that weakness. Of course, Apple removed DRM from iTunes last month.

Beyond Stringer’s “open vs. closed” epiphanies, the interview’s other main takeaways deal with the Playstation Network. He drops some hints about an expansion of the network “to hardware other than the PS3″ and speaks of “evolving the PS3 into a platform for Web services,” but doesn’t elaborate in specifics.

With the exception of Bravia TVs and maybe the revamped Walkman X-Series, I don’t see much room for expansion. Owners of a Playstation 3 and PSP can already transfer movies and TV shows between the two, and the PS3 is the only home console that can access Hulu, albeit through the machine’s Web browser. That’s not to say those two pieces of hardware wouldn’t benefit from an online media store.

And besides, Hulu and video downloads are relatively recent developments anyway, taking hold in the second half of last year. Perhaps Stringer’s shift in thinking began a while ago.

The Sims 3 will use a simple, disc-based authentication system, similar to the one used in The Sims 2. Players won’t have to go online to validate their copy of the game, so presumably there won’t be any control over the number of installs.

A letter from Rod Humble, Executive VP of EA’s Sims Label, says the company has heard the requests from customers. “We feel like this is a good, time-proven solution that makes it easy for you to play the game without DRM methods that feel overly invasive or leave you concerned about authorization server access in the distant future,” he said.

Humble doesn’t make specific mention of Spore’s DRM, but anyone who followed that fiasco could perceive a reference. The game originally came with three installs and no easy way to deauthorize computers, but EA eventually caved to the outcry and added two more installs and a deauthorization process. Meanwhile, angry players launched an Amazon bomb, and software pirates helped make Spore the most illegally downloaded game in history.

Obviously, this demonstrated that even the most DRM-shackled games can and will be pirated, and as publishers go to greater lengths to stop it, customers will only get more irate. That’s a sad reality, but at least EA is no longer taking it out on legitimate copy owners.

One more thing: The move by EA is part of what seems like a wave of anti-DRM sentiment among publishers. Earlier this week, Microsoft and Steam introduced less burdensome authentication processes, and yesterday Ubisoft released a batch of old games to the Web site Good Old Games without any DRM at all. Perhaps the days of punishing the consumer for pirates’ transgressions are slowly coming to an end.

But here’s the hook: GOG’s offerings don’t include any Digital Rights Management, so players are free to install as many copies as they want, wherever they want.

Ubisoft has stumbled with DRM in the past. Last summer, legally downloaded copies of Rainbow Six Vegas 2 for the PC wouldn’t work because they lacked an authentication disc (duh), and the company resorted to an illegal crack from a warez group to fix it (d’oh). A few months prior, DRM rendered Assassin’s Creed unplayable for some rightful owners as it unsuccessfully tried to authenticate over the Internet.

So when Prince of Persia was released for the PC in December, Ubisoft threw its hands in the air and abandoned DRM for the game. Ars Technica suspected that this was just a way for the company to build evidence of how much money they lose without copy protection.

I don’t know whether that’s true, or whether the results from Prince of Persia had any bearing on the deal with GOG, but it’d be great to find out. Unfortunately, the handful of questions I sent Ubisoft’s way have so far gone unanswered.

In any case, I’m not keeping my hopes up for a drastic change in Ubisoft’s philosophy, but I’ll post an update if I hear differently. I suspect the company is willing to play by GOG’s rules in order to get the content out there. The site launched a public beta in September, and its as good a source of revenue for dated PC titles as Ubisoft is going to get. Besides, if there was any danger of widespread piracy for those old titles, it reared its head a long time ago.

In French:

“Comme toujours avec Apple, nous avançons avec prudence. Toutefois, les signaux sont clairs aujourd’hui. iTunes devrait proposer les catalogues des trois majors Universal Music, SonyBMG et Waner Music débarrassés des mesures techniques de protection mardi prochain, le 9 décembre. La mutation vers le DRM Free devrait se faire à un niveau mondial (voir Les DRM objets de toutes les négocations).”

Translated (merci, my french-speaking friends):

“Apple always proceeds with prudence. However, the signals are clear today. iTunes should offer the catalogs of the three major labels — Universal Music, Sony BMG, and Warner Music — without DRM next Tuesday December 9. The switch to DRM-free should be worldwide.”

What it essentially is telling us is what we’ve thought for awhile: that iTunes will be going DRM-free. The writing has been on the wall: nearly every recently opened music store, and most notably Amazon, have been without DRM.

But should we believe it? I’d say no. Why? Simply put, the record labels have been holding Apple hostage in an attempt to break its dominance. Allowing iTunes to go DRM-free would allow Apple to essentially solidify its dominance in digital music all but permanently save for some crazy unforeseen circumstance.

News reports indicate that Apple is in discussions with the majors about a switch away from DRM, however nothing is expected to be put on paper anytime soon. I’m not hearing anything either, and frankly don’t expect to.

This is the only thing that the record industry has over Apple, and I just can’t see them giving it up that easily. Yes, it sucks, but that’s just the way it is.

With that out the way, I also believe this: Copy protection (also known in recent years as Digital Rights Management) just stinks. At its best, it creates minor but real inconveniences for the people who pay for stuff; at its worst, it badly screws up their experiences with the products they buy. Let’s just say it–the world would be better off without it.

Most of the best arguments against copy protection aren’t so much arguments as case studies. Over and over, it’s caused both anticipated and unanticipated problems. Including ones for the companies who use it.

So let’s review the case against copy protection by looking at what it’s done for us over the past 25 years or so. Warning: Persons whose blood boils easily should read no further…

25. Lenslok. And all its spiritual descendants. Which are many and varied.

I managed somehow to avoid Lenslok back in its heyday in the mid-1980s, but just reading about it makes me gnash my teeth, It was an oddball prism-based gadget invented in the mid 1980s to copy-protect games on the Atari 400/800, Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and other pioneering home computers. You held the Lenslok up to your PC’s display to read a secret code that let you unlock a game. But “[in] order for the Lenslok to work correctly the displayed image has to be the correct size,” says Wikipedia. “This meant that before each use the software needed to be calibrated to take account of the size of the display. Users found this setup particularly annoying, at least in part due to the poor instructions that were initially shipped. Additionally, the device could not be calibrated at all for very large and very small televisions, and some games shipped with mismatched Lensloks that prevented the code from being correctly descrambled.” Sound a little bit like what Microsoft might have come up with if it had attempted to invent Windows Activation and Windows Genuine Advantage twenty years before it did. [Image from SUMO.]

24. Lotus 1-2-3 and dBASE. Remember them?

Two of the most dominant software packages of the 1980s, they came from software publishers who apologetically championed the use of copy protection for years, even after the increasing use of hard drives made their schemes a major headache for customers who had paid hundreds of dollars for the software. Eventually, they were forced to ditch it, and in the long both were crushed by competitive applications that had never been locked up in the first place. Question for debate: Does copy protection tend to hurt the applications it “protects” in the long run–not only by annoying customers but also by leading companies to rest on their laurels rather than beat their brains out to earn every sale they make?

23. It’s patronizing.

Microsoft’s brief Windows Genuine Advantage FAQ, for instance, begins its answer to the question “What is the Windows Genuine Advantage program?” by declaring “Microsoft Genuine Advantage programs, including Windows Genuine Advantage, help you determine whether or not your copy of Windows is genuine.” True–but far from the whole truth. If that was WGA’s principal purpose, Microsoft would give you one heads up that your software appeared to be illegitimate–at your request–and would leave it at that. Instead, it requires you to validate your copy of Windows (sometimes repeatedly) and, if it thinks it’s pirated, takes steps to dissuade you from using it. (At least Windows Vista SP1 removes the “kill switch” that rendered copies of Windows that failed the WGA test unusable.) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’d respect WGA more if Microsoft simply said something along the lines of “We spent vast amounts of money to build Windows, and WGA exists to prevent people from stealing it.”

22. It locks you in.

If you splurge on iTunes songs that are protected with Apple’s FairPlay DRM–which works almost exclusively with Apple products–it’s a major disincentive to buy digital music gear from other companies. If you plunk down money for tunes protected with Microsoft DRM, you can’t put them on an iPod unless you’re willing to burn them all to CD, then rerip them. Yes, Apple could license FairPlay to other companies and/or build an iPod that supported Microsoft’s flavor of copy protection. But when music isn’t locked up in the first place and uses standard formats like MP3 and AAC, you don’t have to worry about anyone supporting anyone else’s DRM–the music just plays.

21. Three words and one hollow claim: Plays For Sure.

That was the tagline for the music certification program Microsoft introduced in 2004, incorporating its Windows Media copy protection. The one that consumers had trouble with from the get-go. and the one that Microsoft began to abandon just two years later, when it shipped the first Zune players, which didn’t support Plays For Sure DRM. Today, many of Microsoft’s original Plays For Sure partners have dumped it, leaving consumers who invested in compatible devices twisting in the wind. And Microsoft says that Plays For Sure is now called Certified for Windows Vista. Except that its Zunes carry that certification and aren’t compatible with what used to be Plays For Sure DRM. Confused yet? I sure am.

20. TurboTax 2002.

In 2003, TurboTax added stress to tax time rather than reducing it, in the form of copy protection that Intuit said would be used on all future versions of the application. Its customers reported problems. Intuit initially responded by saying those folks were just misinformed and befuddled. Then it backpedaled, admitting that the copy protection was “the wrong thing to do” and ending it permanently. Oh, and the sales gains that the company thought would come once it was harder to pirate TurboTax? Intuit said that they were disappointing.

19. Forty-two.

That’s not just the ultimate answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything–it’s also the number of digits that you’ll need to enter into Microsoft’s Activation Wizard if you’re unfortunate enough to have to activate one of the company’s products via telephone. Consider each digit a tiny hoop that you must jump through to prove you’re not a software thief.

18. It’s a creator of unplanned obsolescence.

Millions of perfectly good computer monitors can’t play high-resolution Blu-Ray movies–not because of a shortage of pixels, but because they were manufactured before the advent of HDCP, the copy-protection standard, licensed by Intel, that’s designed to protect high-def content. HDCP defends high-def video in part by making it look worse on non-HDCP devices: On older displays, it knocks down the resolution and turns high def into standard def. In other words, Hollywood doesn’t just want you to buy copy-protected entertainment: It expects you to spend hundreds of dollars on new equipment that supports its copy-protection scheme.

17. It can be used as a cudgel.

Major labels use DRM to punish Apple–and therefore Apple customers–for iTunes’ success. They do it by letting Apple competitors such as Amazon sell DRM-free music, but requiring Apple to use DRM on the same tracks, apparently in hopes of putting a dent in the iTunes Store’s music-download dominance. Besides Apple, who gets hurt here? The millions of music fans who prefer to buy their music from Apple, of course.