http://www.boingboing.net/2009/03/31/electronic-arts-rele.html

Posted by Cory Doctorow, March 31, 2009 4:30 PM | permalink
Electronic Arts has released a de-activation tool for removing the SecuRom digital rights management that the company earlier deployed on several of its games. SecuROM is known as the most Draconian DRM tool for games, apt to screw u your computer and harm your ability to play the games you bought. It's also entirely ineffective against piracy: Spore, the SecuROM-crippled game released to much fanfare in 2008, was also the most pirated game of 2008. It seems like the decision was driven by the massive, global negative publicity that SecuROM attracted, and by the rumblings from the FTC about regulating DRM.

Electronic Arts has posted a SecuROM de-authorization management tool. Once downloaded, the tool will search your drives for EA games infested with the draconian online DRM system, and help you download their respective individual de-activation tools. This isn't a perfect solution, since it's still possible to run out of activations in the event of hardware failure or other source of data loss, but since the announcement that this particular DRM system will be dropped for The Sims 3 , it would seem that EA has had a minor epiphany about DRM.

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Official Statement:
Certain EA PC games with SecuROM digital rights management technology allow users to concurrently "authorize" up to five computers at the same time to play the games. Users can then play the game on any authorized computer they choose. If your EA PC game was released after May 2008 and has a machine authorization limit, you can now manage your computer authorizations using EA De-Authorization Tools!

For a list of EA games with machine authorization limits released after May 2008, click
For a list of EA games with machine authorization limits released after May 2008, click here.">here.

To learn how to deactivate your EA Games,< ahref="http://activate.ea.com/deauthorize/"> go here.