Amazon Caught Deleting Negative EA DRM-Related Reviews... Again

from the uh-oh dept

You probably remember the uproar that surrounded the release of Spore, where plenty of people were pissed off at EA's decision to use draconian DRM and made their feelings known via thousands of 1-star reviews on Amazon.com. At one point, all of those reviews disappeared from the site, leading some to accuse Amazon of censoring the reviews. Amazon quickly said that it was a glitch and the reviews came back.

However, it appears that "glitch" has come back -- and once again it's for thousands of DRM complaints on an EA game. EA released Crysis Warhead with the same awful SecuROM DRM, and the reviews made that clear. But, just as with Spore, the Crysis Warhead reviews magically disappeared. Amazon is once again claiming that it was a glitch, just like last time. As the article notes, there is one possibility, which is that Amazon has an automated system that tries to flag spam reviews, and the actions of the DRM complainers triggers that mechanism. That would make some amount of sense, though Amazon shouldn't keep calling it a glitch if that's the case.

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Surprises

by Mike Masnick

Fri, Sep 12th 2008 1:31pm

Did Amazon Delete Spore Reviews? [Updated]

from the they're-all-gone dept

Want to know how not to respond to criticism? By deleting it. Yet, it appears that's what Amazon has done. Earlier this week we wrote about the controversy of EA's decision to put cumbersome DRM on the highly anticipated video game, Spore. The response was that thousands of people started posting one star reviews of Spore, noting the problems with the DRM. Things then got worse when people realized that EA had misled customers about the fact that they could only have one user account on Spore.

Now, a bunch of people have noticed that Amazon appears to have deleted all of the reviews on the Spore page. This is only going to end badly. When you try to shut down a large group of people who feel wronged, you're not just whacking the bees' nest with a stick, you're setting it on fire with a flame thrower. The folks who were complaining are only going to complain louder, and louder. Remember what happened when Digg tried to takedown the AACS crack? Whoever was responsible for removing the comments -- whether it was Amazon or EA -- they may find that the reaction to trying to shut down the angry mob is only going to make folks that much angrier, and alert that many more people to the problems they have with EA's use of DRM.

Update: It appears that some, or potentially all, of the reviews are now back on the site, and Amazon is claiming that it was a "glitch" that they disappeared. Some people claim that their own reviews are not back yet, though, so the whole situation is a bit fluid. Either way, if it really was a glitch, it was a pretty bad time and place for such a glitch to occur.

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