DRM is essentially (in modern terms) a piece of software whose actual purpose (as opposed to its stated purpose) is to corrupt your computer and cause it to crash unnecessarily, requiring a reinstall of your OS and all your software, preferably with the loss of as much personal, irreplaceable data as humanly possible.
DRM companies try to tell you that it's to "protect their work", when in actuality, it does nothing of the sort. ALL DRM has been broken or bypassed. Professional pirates crack it before it's even released. The actual intent of DRM isn't to protect rights, but revenue streams, and indeed to create new streams. There is no crime in buying a movie disk and watching it on your computer OR your personal DVD player OR your home DVD player, but with sufficiently restrictive DRM, it becomes impossible to do so, and you have to buy a separate copy for each place you might conceivably want to watch that movie.
When it comes to computers, DRM tends to be as buggy as any other software, and it's also intentionally invasive, doing things to your computer that professional virus writers only get to have wet dreams about. Want to play such and such game? It comes with a huge risk in the form of a rootkit or custom drivers that CANNOT be removed without a complete OS reinstall.
DRM succeeds only in pissing off paying customers whose computers become unstable or just plain can't use the software they PAID FOR, and drives them eventually into the arms of the pirates, who simply bypass it.
$50 for something that trashes my computer and might stop working whenever the publisher wants it to
vs
$0 for something that just works but may be out of date for a couple weeks when a patch gets released
I wonder why the PC industry is flagging.
Read up on the controversy surrounding Spore.
