As I've discussed already when analyzing the future of licensing, corporate interest has been running the show, to disastrous results. It might be time to make licensing and other rights' restriction schemes outright illegal. One such system is Digital Rights Restriction Management, which is a "technology" created by digital publishers in the 90s to make sure that, if governments didn't play by their rules (which they mostly did, either by extending copyright again and again or by allowing them to play their shenanigans with End User License Agreements) they would simply take matters into their own hands and make sure their own definition of the rules was followed, by force.
DRM comes in many different forms - CSS, which was one of the first such schemes and was used to encrypt DVDs, uses a cipher that makes reading a movie stream impossible without the key. Obtaining the key is a jump-through-hoops process where the player needs to have a key (which was paid for in form of a license) to decrypt a key (which is physically present in the disc) which is then used to decrypt yet another key which they allows the system to read the actual bits and bytes of the movie stream.
If it sounds overly complicated and stupid, then you've understood DRM and my job is done.
One of the many things that CSS ignores is one tiny little thing called Inalienable Human Rights like the right to Free Speech and the right to make Fair Use of copyrighted works, which is fine for evil corporations because fuck Human Rights, right? But as governments let corporations play their dirty game they get more and more daring and DRM gets more brazen. Nowadays it's common practice to keep part of the DRM process physically separate from the rest, so you need internet access (either prior or constant) to have access to content you paid for and rightfully own (at least as far as the law goes).
Nowadays such shenanigans have been having lots of backlash, especially from consumers buying music from online stores (most if not all migrated away from DRM because of negative customer feedback) and from players being locked away from games because of draconian DRM (as #GamerGate has taught us, Hell hath no fury like a gamer scorned), so hopefully sometime soon there will be a shift in legislation that either seriously restricts DRM and EULAs or outright eliminates them.
One can dream, right?
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