Update: Consensus is still forming, but a lot of people are now dismissing the initial rootkit diagnosis. It now appears to just be a particularly onerous copy-protection scheme, which is kind of what we’ve come to expect from Sony and SecuROM these days. The protection-stripping patch promised by Levine and company can’t come soon enough.

Having just finished playing Bioshock the first time through and loving it to bits, I’m now tempted to uninstall the whole game and shelve it for a couple of months. Why? Because the SecuROM copy protection Bioshock uses exhibits rootkit-like behavior. Sound familiar? It’s exactly the same sort of thing we saw about two years ago, when Sony and Universal were caught red-handed trying to put rootkits onto their music CD releases.

There’s still a question of whether SecuROM puts a rootkit on your system. At the very least, it exhibits some odd behavior, like protesting when you run Process Explorer—a powerful utility that, oh, by the way, was created by Sysinternals, now owned by Microsoft. In other words, you can’t run Bioshock and a legitimate Microsoft utility at the same time. And of course there’s the general copy-protection issue, namely that copy protection hurts legitimate consumers more than it hurts people who steal the game. In this case, it’s the problem of only ever being able to install the game twice. 2K Games says you should be able to install/uninstall as many times as you like, but if you should ever forget to uninstall twice, no more Bioshock for you. (2K recently said they would up the activation limit, which helps but does not eliminate the issue.)

To be honest, my Steam install of Bioshock was relatively trouble-free, at least once I got past the 400MB zero-day download and the intermittent failures of the activation servers. But now 2K Games may have accomplished what thousands of virus writers, malware spammers and worms have failed to do: infiltrate my computer with malware. Even if SecuROM turns out not to be a rootkit, there’s still the general problem of copy protection DRM becoming more aggressive with every passing year—as well as the incentive to steal a game instead of buying it.

Do I feel like a sucker for buying Bioshock? Not yet. It was a great game and the developer team have a lot to be proud of. But I don’t want to have to come back in two weeks and say I was wrong to support such a good game because the publisher went and fucked it all up with rootkits.