Ok, so everyone's talking about it, I might as well mention it too. Microsoft's Xbox One has officially announced that it will not be enforcing the insane level of DRM that was proposed. Game sharing will be as simple as handing someone a disk. I read an article about that this morning, and I was just shocked by the comments. I mean Microsoft caught a veritable shit storm of bad media and public image assassination over this DRM thing, and now some people are saying it's not that bad.
It only affects you in limited situations, they say. They're right. If you're interested in purchasing, never trading to friends, lending to friends, or selling anywhere except to a licensed dealer (and you can only sell if you bought it new). If you're sure your console will never break or you'll never break it, then yes, the DRM won't affect you.
Year after year, attempt after attempt, lockdowns like this only help the person trying to be honest. They should have learned from spore. Spore was available DRM free the day before the game was officially released, so anyone cheating got it then. If you bought it, then you can only install it twice, even if your machine reformats, or crashes, or if you buy a new laptop because the old one died. It's the old sand in the fingers analogy. Just let us have our games, and sell them like you always have. The status quo can't be all that horrific, you're all still in business. Maybe for once just trust in the potential kindness and honesty of your customers. Maybe the bad apples make the bunch seem bad, but it's really only a few, just ignore them and enjoy the rest!
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Companies think that DRM protects them from a million-man (and woman) army of pirates, hackers, and ne'er-do-wells. But in most cases it hurts the company by keeping the game/movie/book/song/whatever out of the hands of people who actually want it and are willing to pay for it.
If you want something, you're usually willing to buy it, so long as it's not too expensive and there aren't any real hurdles to getting your hands on it. But start adding hurdles, and it becomes a pain in the ass, and the value of having the thing is diminished.
And those people who pirate it? Either they like it, want to support the creators, and buy a legal copy after trying it out or they weren't going to buy it in the first place. So it's not really a lost sale. It's a pipedream of coulda's that never were.
I think this comic really illustrates some of the problems with hurdles: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones.