It often seems like big companies tend to win domain dispute rulings over companies that just squat on various domains -- and perhaps that makes sense. So it's a bit of a surprise to find out that Take-Two Interactive has lost its bid to get the domain name bioshock.com, which is currently held by a company that owns hundreds of thousands of domains, Name Administration. The problem? The domain was registered a year before Take-Two filed to register a trademark over Bioshock, for the video game series. Name Administration noted, in its defense, that "bioshock" is not a term that's exclusive to Take-Two, and the arbitration board found no evidence of "bad faith" in using the name.

When will the video gaming companies learn that DRM really only pisses off your legitimate customers? Despite having seen this happen over and over and over and over, it's happening again. With the release of Bioshock 2, the decision was made to include annoying SecuROM DRM. Did it do any good? Nope, on the day of release there's a cracked version available immediately (thanks AJ, for sending this story in). Oddly, that writeup uses this to suggest that the use of DRM made sense, but I can't see how you get from there to here. The DRM didn't stop it from getting cracked and being made available to anyone who wanted it. It didn't stop any unauthorized access whatsoever. If they hadn't put the DRM on it (which cost money both in licensing the technology and in additional Q&A and customer support issues) they would be in exactly the same position today with the app being available for unauthorized download (except they'd have a bit more money). Oh yeah, they also wouldn't have pissed off a bunch of customers. So what good did the DRM do exactly?