Gundato: The caveat to this being Ubi-DRM, which, for a time, did a wonderful job of stopping 0-Day piracy. Then the warez groups figured out how to just get the files from Ubi anyway, and it kind of fell apart :p
Gimgak: If I remember correctly I read on torrent freak it took an hour after release to be cracked...
Sort of.
Within a few hours (I am not sure what the actual timeline was, but you'll see why it isn't relevant) the DRM itself was cracked.
But Ubi had another trick up their sleeve. You had to download stuff from their servers. So you might be able to play without a connection, but you only had the first few levels/missions on your disc.
But, since all the warez groups are arrogant bastards, they felt the need to scream how they succeeded. And the pirates suffered.
One method that was discovered shortly thereafter was to actually distribute all the files with the scene releases. The problem with this was that the Releases were dependent upon how fast the groups could beat the game (and since certain groups felt like DoS'ing Ubi, it didn't speed things up).
The newer cracks actually still require the pirate to be connected to the internet, and actually just fakes an authentication with Ubi to get the files. Which is hilarious in that it means most of the whiners are still doing what they said they wouldn't, and Ubi is forced to waste bandwidth on pirates.
That being said, this approach did prevent "proper" 0-Day piracy of most of the titles with Ubi-DRM (I think SC: Conviction was the first game where this worked on 0-Day). Because even though the game was cracked, it was still unplayable, which means that 0-Day piracy just didn't work for them.