The internet is very much a novel way to communicate. The ability to connect with people on the other side of the globe and send someone a document they might have left at home with a click of a button is a supreme advantage over merely having to do without, especially where business or government is concerned. More and more we see the programs we purchase coming from file share servers rather than on a CD or DVD. Convenient? Sure it is. You can pay for a program and receive it without ever having to get up from your chair; however the drawbacks are what concern me, and they are notable. As a longtime avid PC user, I have noticed a shift in the winds over the years in terms of the way programs find their way into the hands of the general public. It used to be that you go to the store, find the program you want, buy it, take it home and install it from the disk. If the program screwed up all you would have to do is reinstall it. You actually had a physical disc you could count on and call your own. If you took care of it, it would take care of you. No longer. Even if you buy a disc from the store these days, there is always some sort of download involved in its installation. Many times, this requires the installation of additional programs known as “software managers” so the program can function correctly. As a result, you don’t actually “own” anything you buy that installs using this system and your right to use it can be revoked on someone else’s whim. Today, this means that even your disc that you bought at Best Buy has become no more useful than a shiny, fun-sized Frisbee as you actually use the cd-key or authorization code to enable download and use.

Many of the PC games these days employ a middleman of sorts named “Steam,” a platform that is given sole distribution rights of most major titles. So many major titles employ its use, in fact, that this