The ironic thing about the whole tug-of-war, with pirates on one side and publishers on the other, is that it’s the consumer who’s in the middle taking all the abuse. The ones who pay, really do pay. Cracked copies available for download online don’t come with all the heartache of the nasty copy protection. If you buy it in the store, you’re operating on an open door policy where crap is concerned.

For Bioshock, 2K decided that yes, screwing up consumers’ computers is a little heavy handed – or at least, not a good PR move. So, in order to ensure that one copy of the game doesn’t exist on thousands of machines, they instituted their limited-install policy. Now people with multiple computers and friends who enjoy swapping games around with no malicious intent are screwed over, as opposed to just plain old anybody with a certain model of DVD burner.

As long as there are video games being produced, there will be software pirates; and as long as there are pirates, there will be copy protection. All the paying consumer in the middle of this fight can do is try and claw back some of their own digital rights; the 5 by 5 and right to install a game without it screwing up their ability to open a disc drive. It’s a fact of life.

You can’t suggest a body to rate copy protection and decide what’s kosher and what’s not, as it will inevitably end up siding with whichever party holds more sway (hey, Gamer for President 2008). You can’t pretend that video game publishers shouldn’t be able to protect their investments, or that human nature can be put aside to stop the pirates – most of whom are Joe Soaps with BitTorrent or a MegaUpload account. What you have to do is battle and rile every time a game comes out with something silly like Bioshock’s limited install system. It’s not ideal and it’s not nice, but that’s the world we’ve come to inhabit.

Aaron McKenna contributed to this report.