If your Xbox is defective, MSFT screws you again with DRM

Travis's sent his defective Xbox 360 in for repairs and got the DVD drive replaced. Now his Xbox Live account no longer recognizes his machine, and refuses to let him play the vintage arcade games he paid for. The rigamarole that Microsoft is putting him through is flabbergasting.

First, you have to create a new gamer profile and make it an Xbox Live "Silver" membership. It's free to create that new profile since the "Silver" membership is free, but there is a heck of a lot of data entry for contact information, not to mention the fact you need to give it an email address and password so it can sign on - just like a real profile. The representatives on the phone will tell you it doesn't matter what email address you give it, but from experience I know they send account notices and such to that email address, so it should probably be legitimate. Of course, that means if you don't have your own domain and/or can't figure out how to set up email address forwarding then you'll need to create a new, dummy Hotmail account or something. Super convenient.

Once you have the dummy gamer profile set up, Microsoft will credit that account with enough credits to go in and re-purchase all of the games you previously had unlocked. Getting that credit to come through takes eight-to-ten business days.

Practically every vintage arcade game can be downloaded for free from the Internet. We keep hearing about how DRM will make "doing the right thing easy," but here you have a situation where Travis is being punished for being foolish enough to buy these games instead of finding a download site. What's more, this punishment was precipitated by a manufacturer's defect in his equipment -- a double-screw-job. Link (Thanks, Travis!)

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