Out of all the issues you could pick on DRM about, one of the most obvious and controversial has been activations. It's common amongst software these days, and for the most part people have learned to deal with it, except when they “use up” their activations. EA dealt with this in spades when they released Spore, which shipped with SecuROM, but after the considerable community backlash they quickly eased their policy on limited activations.

Things are changing even more as far as EA and DRM are concerned. Back in December, the company released a de-authorization tool for Spore which allowed users to switch five authorizations around between machines and now they have unveiled the same tool for over a dozen more games with similar restrictions. While not as good as getting rid of SecuROM completely, this will at least help alleviate complaints that the limited activations scheme is too much for users to bear.

The software doesn't uninstall the games it de-authorizes, allowing someone to just re-launch and re-activate if they so choose. Of course, that doesn't help you at all if you are maxed out on authorizations for a game and your machine was wiped. Piracy may still be the easiest option, but at the very least this is another step in the right direction.