I'm not sure if this qualifies as a Streisand Effect, but in the case of Spore, the stimulus and the response are palpable. The anti-DRM backlash against Spore is at least partly responsible for the more than 35,000 illegal downloads of the game reported between Wednesday and Thursday, a figure revealed by Forbes in a look at the game's "piracy problem." The quotes from hackers, crackers and others in download forums seems to suggest they were provoked by what they see as a needless insertion of DRM restrictions on the game.
"By downloading this torrent, you are doing the right thing," wrote one user going by the name of "deathkitten" on the popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay. "You are letting [Electronic Arts] know that people won't stand for their ridiculously draconian 'DRM' viruses." "You have the power to make this the most pirated game ever, to give corporate bastards a virtual punch in the face," deathkitten added in another comment.
Overall, Spore was downloaded via filesharing networks more than 171,000 times as of writing, an expected number given the visibility and the anticipation behind the title. But getting to that number this quickly is unexpected, and the rate of downloading from Wednesday to Thursday is attention grabbing, Forbes writes. For its part, EA in a statement says that the percentage of users installing on more than one computer is less than 25 percent, and less than 1 percent install on more than two machines. If that's the case; if hackers are going to break your DRM anyway (Spore was cracked and torrented at the beginning of the month); and if putting in these controls generates such mistrust and bad PR, when their real effect is on a microscopic minority of your users, then, really - why bother? Spore's Piracy Problem [Forbes.com]