Why Shivering Isles Sucks
Securom
It's bad enough that Bethesda had to ruin what previously was, in my opinion, one of the best roleplaying franchises for the PC. But with the Shivering Isles expansion, Bethesda has resorted to bundling trojan horses and malware with their applications.
Shivering Isles comes with SecuROM, a "copy protection system" that is created by Sony, the same people that brought you the music CD rootkits. SecuROM is a shoddily written piece of software that takes over your computer, tells you what you can and can't do on your computer and generally causes games it protects to suffer in performance and stability (though Oblivion has never been a stable application).
If you have any virtual CD drive applications on your computer, such as Alcohol 120% or Daemon Tools, SecuROM games flat out refuse to run. There are legitimate uses for such applications, I personally use them to store copies of all games I buy so that I can put them on my giant external harddrive and access them from my laptop when I'm on a roadtrip. Virtual CDs are also faster, more convenient and they don't scratch or get ruined. The only solution is to uninstall these applications.
I am a legitimate user who purchased a legal copy of Alcohol 120%. The notion that I should have to uninstall it to use a game that I PAID FOR is absurd. This is not a good faith incompatibility, this is the deliberate crippling of a product in a futile attempt to prevent piracy. The law has a word for that. It's called fraud. Selling a product that is defective by design is fraud. As far as I'm concerned, I PAID FOR my computer and Bethesda or any other company have no right to tell me what I can and can't do with it.
And before the Bethesda sycophants come and start citing the EULA, we'll get it out of the way. I am not a laywer but I've found that it's not legally binding in most states. There is the little law called the Uniform Commercial Code which, in many cases, classifies software as a good. You can't attach restrictions to a good after it is sold and the EULA is not visible at the time of purchase.
If the software restrictions don't prevent you from using your legally purchased software, there is the fact that SecuROM protected CDs and DVDs aren't standards compliant. SecuROM uses hacks and cheap tricks to store data on an optical disc where most standard CD copying utilities won't pick it up. SecuROM stores data where data isn't supposed to be stored. CD drives are designed to read CDs. DVD drives are designed to read DVDs. Neither are designed to read discs in the mutilated format that SecuROM protected games come in. It's no wonder so many drives have incompatibilities with SecuROM games.
The notion that SecuFraud actually does anything to prevent piracy is also a joke. Shivering Isles is up on every file sharing network, on every far corner of the internet. All you have to do is download the image and mount it and run the installer. It comes precracked so the user doesn't have to do anything. And best of all, no malware. It's so easy to find and install a pirated copy of Shivering Isles that a child could do it. I don't condone piracy but it's getting to the point where downloading pirated games is safer and less likely to infect your computer with malware than actually buying a retail game.