Forbes: Spore Downloaded 35K Times Weds-Thurs

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.

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.