The Worst DRM Systems in Modern Times 

Obligatory reminder that Pirated Adobe software is 100% ethical

DRM: When legally purchased games have a better chance to have malware than the pirated version.

Reminds me of Gabe Newell's interview from a long time ago. “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.” When your DRM is so aggressive people will crack your content just to not deal with your bullshit. I think what the Factorio developers have done is interesting. They let you download the full game from the website provided you have purchased the game, and it comes with no DRM IIRC, meaning it's easily shared around. However, buying the game gives you access to the massive library of mods that people make for it, which is another reason why people who pirate factorio still buy the full game afterwards.

Reminds me of when a company implemented DRM so harshly, that the devs had to put a cracked version of the game on Steam because the version they had still had a disc check and they couldn't figure out how to remove it. Edit: Looking into it, they actually were lazy and forgot to remove the cracking teams credits in the code. So, instead of just removing the credits or keeping on the cracked version...they just dug up what was left of the source code. It's more buggy than even the original release, ala Silent Hill 2 HD.

Modern Triple A pirates are heroes of the technology age

DRM are just another reason that makes piracy the superior choice for consumers.

"Piracy is the result of bad service on the part of game companies" -Gabe newell. This is the direct quote of "Piracy is a service problem"

The guy that brought the 5 million dollar lawsuit against Star Force (causing Ubisoft to immediately dump them) was a total hero.

I love the settlers franchize. When i was 8, settlers 3 came out. I got the game going, but when you were smelting iron ore into ingots, said ingot would turn into a pig, completely blocking you from producing metal goods. I thought it was a bad disk or something, but after buying 3 copies, i got the idea that they were all the same, i was heartbroken. Only after 15 years after remembering that story and reading about it online, i found out it was DRM installed by the developer. I bought these copies from our probably semi-illigal stores, there were no others anyway. It was in late 90's in russia. The whole thing is sad and hilarious at the same time.

Adobe software works better when pirated because you can use it when you're offline.

Not really DRM, but I remember having to sit through the anti-piracy advertisement in the movie theater and without thinking saying out loud "Didn't I just buy a ticket, why do I have to sit through a piracy lecture? Maybe next time I'll just sneak in!" That did get a lot of laughs and agreement, luckily there was no usher nearby to throw me out.

One of my worst experiences with DRM. One that comes to my mind quickly is the bullshit with the NFL. Was a paying customer for the Red Zone app. For several years I was paying like $10 to view the Red Zone channel on my phone, which was being mirrored to a HDTV. In 2017-18 or so the NFL stopped that practice of allowing screen mirroring. End result? I now pay them nothing, pirate their shit, and use my computer to mirror the Red Zone channel as well as 4-5 other games to a 72" HDTV. I know I am not the only one. The Sony rootkit fiasco was funny, but I managed to avoid it. Give me time, I'm sure I can come up with some others.

Another type of, I think, DRM was region locking on DVDs. I remember buying movies from other countries (Japanese movies for example) because they weren't available here. A 100% legal and original copy of that movie, but I couldn't watch it because of region locking. Thank god multi region DVD players came out because having to import a Japanese DVD player just to watch one movie would've sucked.

I heard that Lords of the Fallen used a DRM system that would constantly copy itself over and over again everytime you played the game, eventually completely filling up a person's drives after awhile lmao.

This is why I buy my games from GOG when I can. They have a zero DRM policy. If you want to sell your game on GOG, then you have to remove any and all DRM from the game files. It’s the closest thing to actually “owning” a game anymore.

I remember a DRM called something like Blueshell that was added to Kerbal Space Program (then soon removed due to sever backlash.) It also had ring 0 kernel access, but even worse, the privacy policy basically said that the DRM had access rights to ALL DATA ON YOUR COMPUTER and reserved the right TO SELL SAID DATA TO THIRD PARTIES OF ANY TYPE.

Shoutouts to Keurig for being diabolical enough to put DRM on goddamned coffee. No, I'm not joking.

i grew up pirating stuff, i was always more scared of getting starforce than any actual virus

I live in Russia, so back in a day I had all sorts of trouble with starforce, however the worst case of drm that I encountered was battle net application from blizzard somewhere in 2015 or 2016. It had ability to somehow scan your memory, and if you had something undesirable (from the perspective of the blizzard app) running on your computer (like programming IDE), it prevented games from launch. Creepy. They were forced to abandon this practice, when government issued some kind of law that prevented them to scan memory of their client's computers.

Sony DRM on their music cd’s. At one point whenever you inserted a Sony music disc it would use a windows exploit to install a malicious root kit which would prevent users from copying data off the disc. They also got in a lot of trouble for it when caught.

I watched the video on Cannon being forced to make their cartridges without the DRM chip. The irony here is that DRM sucks in general even on printer ink

When I download a pirated blu-ray film, it just plays fine. When I buy a blu-ray in the shop, I first need to hack the AACS keys otherwise I can't play it. DRM harms paying customers and does not harm pirates.

One of the worst modern examples has to be the Adobe CC suite, but not because it's a subscription service tied to the cloud. Adobe changes the file format *every single version update* so you can't open projects unless they're either created with the version you currently have or convert to the latest version. Once you convert, you can no longer open it on the last version of the software before that. A similar practice is done by Autodesk with its FBX file format.

The worst thing about these DRM schemes is that once they're obsolete, or the company who bundled the DRM with the game don't even know how much damage they're causing. IIRC, one of the Trackmania games couldn't be installed on modern PCs because the StarForce DRM would brick your system, forcing you to reinstall due to driver incapability.

This video couldn't have come out at a better time, I literally just uninstalled(like 5mins ago) Far Cry 3 (legit version) because it asks me to enter my PW on EVERY launch and takes like 6 secs every so often to "connect to server" so I'm downloading the cracked version right this moment lol

I remember getting the complete season box for Digimon data squad. My PS2(main DVD player) refused to play them because they were region locked to Austria. Now I'm looking into how to install a modchip into my PS2 so it can play the DVDs. And if I'm going through the effort of installing a modchip why stop there? I never had an interest in trying out PS2 homebrew and out of print games before, but hey look hardware perfectly suited to play them. Congratulations Sony. Through your anti-piracy measures you just encouraged more piracy.

I USED to work for John Deere, and built several test stands for remanufacturing the electronics used in their million dollar tractors. Farmers aren't even allowed to look up error codes for their equipment. They'll cancel the farmers' warranty and service contract immediately if detected. Unfortunately for JD, it recently came out in court that they built a lot of their equipment with embedded linux, and totally violated their license by not allowing anyone to see what changes they made to the code. More and more people are learning what kind of bastards and running the company. The only people they hate more than their customers, is their employees.

Kind of in the same vein but kernel-level anticheat is some nasty stuff. Easy-anticheat, denuvo, vanguard, all make your computer potentially vulnerable to kernel-level attacks if it is ever compromised all in the name of making the game "fair" even though people bypass it all the time, another downside being that it makes the games completely unplayable on linux systems.

The worst DRM i can remember from the top of my head might have been the original one for Spore when it was first released. If i am not misremembering you only had 3 installations you could do with your CD key before you had to go buy a new one, all in the name of anti-piracy i think the backlash they got both from the community and legally made them remove this feature

Anyone remember the DRM fiasco where anyone who purchased Doom Eternal couldn't play for like a week? and anyone who played it without buying (cough) could still play perfectly fine.

I just realised that printing yellow dots may be a significant part of why modern printers won't even print in black ink if the colour ink is empty.

I love that the more companies try to make it difficult to pirate things, the more rewarding it becomes because of how obnoxious their DRM is

DRM essentially means that you literally do not own something if you do not pirate it.

The funniest thing is, I literally cannot think of a game, or movie, or a piece of software that isn't already cracked and available in torrent sites. So the only thing DRM does is bother the actual paying customers. Just compare it - a kiddie just opens the torrent site, downloads, applies the crack and starts playing. While me, a paying customer - I need to register to the site, make sure when I launch the app I have internet connection... oh no, I bought a new mouse so now my license is complaining. Oh no, the license server is down so I can't play my game today. And we've not even mentioned the "dongle" idiocy...

From the moment DRM became a thing I have pirated everything that doesn't have an open-source equivalent. I have never looked back. But to answer your question, the DRM that shocked me the most was the SCMS which appeared with DAT (yeah, I super old). Basically, as soon as it became possible to copy digital music losslessly, the "power that be" made sure to put a serious brake on that possibility. On that day, they made me a "criminal". Their choice, not mine, I have all the money I need to buy music. I just can't, out of principle. Let's also mention DVD's unskippable FBI warning about copying movies : if you pay for the DVD, you get that threatening message any time you play your legal copy that you paid for. If you pirate the same movie, that warning isn't included in the video file. I don't know about you, but I prefer when *guilty* people get threatened, not innocent ones.

This part about pirated content being more convenient reminded me of Sims 3. Sims 3 was one of these games that didn't have the bane of existance that is always online DRM yet, but you did need the disk, either of the base game, or the most recent DLC you got installed. The only problem with that was that my sister and i shared our disk, and she would usually hoard them in her room and play A LOT of Sims, such that i never got to play. She would even borrow the disk to friends for them to install the game on their PC, so that i once even had to call support when i got a new computer for them to restore my allowed 6 copies. One day, this pissed me off so much, i just downloaded a crack and never had that problem again.

So gaming DRM is actually good because it promotes piracy and raises awareness of the problem?

Trying to get video games to run without the cd was basically my first DRM encounter back in the 90's.

Metal Gear Rising on Mac used to ping a server among other stuff for its DRM. Server went offline when the company that made the DRM went bankrupt. And now no one that had bought the game on Mac could play it. Period You should do a follow-up video on anticheats. Most of the popular current anticheats are rootkits,with just the tiniest layer of trust preventing a disaster from happening (See Artifact or EasyAntiCheat)

About a decade ago, a friend of mine purchased Dead Space 2 on steam and enjoyed playing it. Fast forward to a few months ago when he decides to revisit the game, yet the EA DRM tells him his copy is illegitimate and he has to purchase a new key. Apparently this is an extremely common occurrence with the steam version of dead space 2. Contacting EA support gets you the finger because "it's steam and not origin so we cannot help" and contacting steam obviously doesn't help because the issue is EAs activation service.

Digital Rights Management? More like Digital Restrictions Management huh

Annoying DRM? Paperboy back in '86 made you install rather than run from floppy, and the DRM would only allow one install and had to be uninstalled back to the original floppy. It was a PITA when i only had a 2 floppy system with no HDD. Had to boot to dos, remove dos disk, install the game to a blank disk using both drives, and uninstall before i shut down. That, and having to solder 28 pin chips by hand into NES carts to do homebrew or mod games. Bar Games had you identify a certain type of bar glass printed in the manual, i memorized it all (and as a result knew what pints quarts, highballs, snifters, and other glassware was at like 12 lol). California Games did a similar thing, and it was a PITA. What i learned from all of this is to just pirate the damned thing, or crack it if i was stupid enough to buy it, hey i fell for game scams when i was like 10 too but i learned quick how to compare hex files and spot the DRM, and find what i wanted on underground BBS. We had 'internet' back then where some BBSs could use T1 lines and link users on multiple BBSs together for text based RTS gaming and chat, and that's how a lot of pirated games spread. Outlaw pirate BBSs were badass lol! And with how bad things are, i don't buy shit from any publisher that's not indie or grassroots, they don't deserve it and they legitimately owe me (and you if you're in 'murica and paid taxes) back the money they stole offshoring IP in Denmark and Ireland and shit. I paid taxes so the government will fix the potholes, but every year my money goes to kickbacks (negative tax credit) to EA, Activision, and several other huge publishers running this scam. There's a LOT of companies that do this outside of gaming to the point that it's like trillions that huge multinationals GET PAID instead of paying taxes like us suckers getting robbed at theoretical gunpoint considering they can kick your doors down, abduct you and possibly 'accidentally' off you in the process. Meanwhile over 20 years nothing gets fixed, the road to my place looks like a clusterbombed Iraqi airfield and keeps breaking my vehicles. Think about that the next time your head hits the roof of your car because you bounced though a foot deep pothole or when a bridge collapses, they could have fixed that shit with the billions they kick back to these criminals annually. I wish there were any games even worth pirating from them these days, i'd pirate them on principle that they owe you, me and society a lot more than just a broken copy of a stale COD franchise or whatever IP they use to rob taxpayers.

I haven’t gotten into piracy until recently, so the only times in my life where DRM was an inconvenience was with printer ink. I tried to get a third-party ink cartridge to work with an old printer. It worked very inconsistently before I just decided to throw out the printer. I got it for $10 from a yard sale

Remember those Sony CDs that used to install rootkits as well? I swear, companies try so hard with their DRM and it always ends up being more of a headache for the end user than it is for the people trying to crack the thing

Discord killing Spotify playback while you're talking is some of the most petty DRM. I'm thankful for betterdiscord

DRM for some audio production software is pretty bad too. Worst thing about some of them (iLok, I believe) is that if you lose access to the OS without deactivating the license first, you have to purchase the software again. That's just evil. =(

Moral of the story: DRM screws law-abiding citizens more than pirates. The worst DRM I experienced would be with Denuvo on Sonic Origins. I cannot run the game with DXVK at all (which is pretty much necessary on my PC since I get lagspikes and freezes for some reason on DirectX). However, Team Sonic Racing, another Sonic game I bought with Denuvo, allowed me to play with DXVK.

That explains why some of my games worked perfectly fine in my laptop, but when trying to use them in the desktop computer, which was way better in specs, i got nonsense errors about cd dirty. That computer had 2 cd slots....

Not even home kitchen appliances are safe from that kind of practice either. That "juicer" called the juicero, made from the bowels of silicon valley, is one of many examples

I'm sure if corpos had their way, the D in DRM would mean "dildonics-based", just to remove any subtlety.

I've used cracked copies of everything for so long, so thoroughly, that I don't even know what it's like out there for normies obeying the rules. All the way back in 2008 when Spore tried to tell me that I could only install MY GAME 3 times and then it was garbage I was done being a good boi. Oh yeah, doing something as simple as changing a DVD drive for a new one could trigger Spore's DRM to consider your PC a "new computer" towards that limit.

One mistake here. The publishers more often are the ones that decide to add nasty DRM, not the studios. It often can piss of the devs to boot. Reminds me of the non-Denuvo Doom Eternal.exe that magically somehow managed to be released on launch from a very competent dev team.

HDMI has DRM that prevented me from mirroring my phone to my TV to watch Hulu. Solution? Switch to my home media server app and mirror that instead. Who ever coded HDCP and other DRM, please seppuku. Developers need to take a stand and have morals. Developers are the only ones who would automate their own job with AI without realizing they are making a mistake.

RU-vid loaded the video slowly, hoping I wouldnt watch. Might be a drm, idk. Good video though.

This insane DRM is why I will never buy movies, tv shows, or music ever again. This is going back to when Apple made decent products. I remember I couldn't even burn a MP3 CD with music I had purchased on iTunes. It took me years of fiddling with stuff to fully get rid of the DRM on everything I had payed for; where the stuff from Limewire never had an issue.

Every time when I hear about Star Force I always feel like it's either a joke or a special project that was intended to show that piracy is a much safer and ethical way to get software than purchasing software that have DRM

This video makes me feel better about all those games and softwares i pirated in my life.

I always pirate first purchase later. Morally it is the superior method. I only support developers and filmmakers that have a quality product, except I sample the full product first. Consider this method the Costco Way. Buy it, use it, return it if it sucks. Since software or media across the board doesn't offer outright refunds, f'em until they fix it.

4:50 My mom actually got around this by buying 3rd party refillable ink carts. Take em out, refill em, hit the reset button and you're set. Since me and my sister were home-schooled, this came in major handy since it meant that she could print multiple copies of material with only one book. She could also resell the book during summer since it wasn't filled with test answers.

UPDATE 8/4/2023: I have found out that the information below is a rumor and may not be accurate. It is still included below for posterity. Do what you want (lol) with the info. Fun fact: The band OK Go, in their album "Oh No," included a 36-minute long track of the lead singer's girlfriend sleeping just to fill up the CD space so DRM software couldn't be included by the record label.

The worst kind of DRM I have seen is getting a game on a CD, installing it, and it telling me it needs to download the game off of Steam and giving me a Steam key.

That's how piracy exists. No one wanted to deal with the wasted resource like processing power and local storage.

Bought the StarWars collection on DVD. It needed a special player to actually watch... and then crapped out and refused to play ever again after I updated my video driver and codecs. DarkSpore killed the game on release date. The server had a bug that automatically blocked the registration of new accounts after the beta period was over, making it impossible to play even single player after the premier. The whole dev team by that time got already moved to other projects, so there was no-one to fix that. Battlefield 1942 got released without a valid CD key in the box. Meaning the only way to play it was to download a crack. EA. just EA.

The earliest version of DRM I encountered was trivia at game launch which required you to find a specific word on a given page of the user manual, this was way back when computer games came in a box with a book included.

I had this happen with my lenovo x230 battery. Their batteries are unavailable and cost $230 for a 4 hour battery. They made my laptop unable to use the non genuine battery and it has to be plugged in all the time.

Just a little update MO~ I've recently started studying for the LPIC-1 just because I've had a ton of fun with linux. After that my plan is to head backwards and start picking up some of the comptia certs like network+ and security+ as well. I hope your job has been well! This channel has inspired the hell out of me, thanks for all the content!!

Lost Planet 2 (2010) on PC uses Games for Windows Live as part of its DRM. One of its DRM checks, weirdly, is to check how many threads your PC has. The game will not function if you have more than 12 threads. Maybe this made sense in 2010, but it definitely did not age well. Every time I wanted to play the game, I would have to restart my PC to disable a couple cores, then I would be done playing, and have to restart my pc to re-enable them. There isn't any community fix for this, because this DRM is embedded within the games executable. Brilliant. Recently, Capcom has actually de-listed the game on Steam due to GFWL issues. Who knows, maybe they will bring it back one day with the problem fixed. One can only hope.

The worst DRM that I experienced last year's that's was WindowsApps directory that had harder restrictions than system32. I had Xbox Game pass and I wanted to install community language pack for a game named Hollow Knight. DRM was locking me from modifying game files and dual-booting Linux didn't fix even, WindowsApps directory had only broken syslinks to memory in Linux.

I bought a laptop that came with windows 11 (unfortunately) and I was surprised to see that I couldn't even change the system's language because apparently my windows activation key didn't let me do it

Do you know Linux has DRM!? Yeah, it is called Direct Rendering Manager! Got you!

It shits me that the only way I can buy a movie these days is to "purchase" a poor quality hosted version of my movie from a streaming provider.... or buy a BluRay or DVD version. I can't buy a digital high quality copy that I can put on a USB drive or my NAS? I would happily pay for the content... but I get so much more functionality from pirating it that I am forced to do it!

Back in the day, I remember these code wheel or color card thing that games had. I always thought that these were some sort of child lock for game time management or something. My first annoying encounter was around 1998 I think. Before that, I had no idea that there is a difference between original and pirated copies. After all, I live in Indonesia, a country which a lot of software manufacturer never care about back then, yeah they know our neighbors Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and others but somehow they completely miss that massive country next to them. That's is why back then it was much easier to find pirated copies here than original ones, be it games or other software. Or even worse, music piracy. I can't really tell which cassette is original and which is pirated because the pirates packaged it so well and even made their own printouts for the case and cassette stickers. My first experience was I think it was Jagged Alliance 2 or C&C Tiberian Sun. I didn't know that I was supposed to copy the crack and I thought something was broken. Only a while later I found one game and I read at the bottom of the readme file that I was supposed to do just that. I was studying in Singapore during that time but pirated CDs were everywhere there too. Of course one thing that annoy me, when my CD rom drive gets broken, I hate that some games forced users to have the CD in the drive.

DRM is the worst. Legitimate customers get screwed over while pirates get the better experience. It doesn’t even have to just be the DRM I remember buying a Sony movie on Blu-ray when that technology was becoming more affordable and it wouldn’t let you skip straight to the menu. You had to at best fast forward through the trailers. DVDs were the peak of digital movies. Really sad. Why are you going to force people to watch trailers for films that are no longer for sale? No longer in theatres? At least on VHS it made sense because you physically had to store those at the start of the tape if you were a scumbag company. Should have put the trailers at the end so people could actually just watch the damn movie… I can’t stand DRM but it’s just baked into everything. And with EULAs also being garbage… I don’t believe they are legally binding. I don’t even know why they bother to ask you on company work computers as well. You have to use that software or you can’t do your damn job. I should probably figure out which flavor of Linux I like best before Microsoft decides to install some software that prevents you from installing another OS. 🙄 wouldn’t put it past them. Doesn’t really even matter. VHS tapes and DVDs also had anti copying measures but at least you could usually skip to the menus on DVDs without having to be forced to sit through the trailers. All this stuff just exists to waste your time. Pirate the movie? Click and watch immediately. Closest thing to that we have now and even then it isn’t great is on demand streaming. Which is also filled with DRM.

Wow I didn't know about those printer paper dots, it just keeps getting worse...

This is why I torrent and download patches haha, I remember buying a game for my old PC which had a "always online" DRM. I forgot the game's name but it was a J-RPG. There was one time where I was mid game our internet connectiom suddenly went out and I can't play the game for a whole week or two. Companies are definitely stepping up their DRM systems.

Don't forget about the Sony BMG copy protection rootkit. Trying to playback an audio CD in your computer would install a F4I XCP rootkit on your machine, creating a backdoor into your system, leaving it vulnerable to hackers.

So, you're telling me to join (or create) a group dedicated to break all kinds of DRMs just for the sake of it? Because that's what I want to do.

Digital *restrictions* management.

watching you blow up has been awesome to see. im happy for you broski. hope your good and taking care of yourself. thanks for the content

👏🙂 Very interesting video as always Mental Outlaw. Keep up the great work

Given that Microsoft has never updated Windows Media Player since the release of version 12 in 2009, Windows Media DRM is likely not on Microsoft's high-priority list anymore in the era of HTML5.

Windows 8 had a pop up that blocked your whole screen reminding you to activate.

One of the worst forms of DRM is when a game or a piece of software is tied to a company server, meaning you have to be always online to even begin using the thing you paid for and if those servers go down then you're absolutely SOL. It's amazing when some really great people make emulated servers to keep things alive but that's such a massive undertaking especially when so much of a game's/program's data it needs to function is stored on that now shut down server. DRM is quite literally digital poison.

I always love your videos! So well informed

let's take a moment to bless the Brain Lords behind crack teams. absolute saints

Thanks for another great video ! 🐧

While I have several disagreement what you say (within this or other videos), I appreciate the perspective you have on the these topics. I especially appreciate it when it comes to advocating for users.

I remember sharing a DVD drive over LAN to play a game at the same time as my little brother was playing it, because it used disc-in-tray DRM and it had no issues with a network share as a disk directory It did crash eventually, but that could just be from the disk not delivering data at the right time, and the game wasn't expecting very long answer times

If a title has DRM, just pirate it. Don't pay for an inferior product!

5:11 I have overridden this limitation for the price of 500 rubles(roughly 7 bucks) Nothing to really flex about, it is just funny how the manufacturer expected me to buy overpriced components when in reality it’s that simple to handle.

it's like buying a kitchen knife and then also getting a police officer who watches you 24/7 to make sure you don't stab somebody. and you have to feed him and house him....

There were two other protection systems around at the same time as Starforce. SecuROM by Sony DADC and Safedisc by Macrovision. Yes Macrovision, the people responsible for the copy protection found on VHS tapes. Both Safedisc and SecuROM were riddled with security holes that would allow an attacker to gain control over a machine. In fact SecuROM was so bad in their implementation of the Secdrv.sys file that Microsoft banned it from being installed. Also SecuROM used the kernel API to write Registry keys into your system that were both unreadable and undeletable. So you couldn't even remove them with the Registry Editor even if you knew where to look. DRM is something I know a lot about considering the groups I've been a member of.

Stopped buying DVDs cuz of the incessant ads and anti piracy unskippable screens. That was the worst. Like how many people buying their content actually pirate? They dug their own graves.

What is this thing called Windows? Is it some sort of application? I've never seen it in the Linux repositories. Haven't run into that DRM thing either, but maybe it doesn't affect the torrents I download.

A few examples after many years as a relatively early adopter in the home computer scene: In the early 2000's, an easy way to work around the slow startup of DVD-based games was to use a disk virtualization utility that would load an image from your hard drive and view it as an additional drive. So some games DRM would check if you had that utility installed and refuse to run. Although in all fairness, they did explicitly say why and uninstalling it worked, but it was still annoying. About 10-15 years ago I visited the USA and spotted a multi-pack of ink for my printer. All legit, original by the printer's manufacturer. A little cheaper than at home and convenient since I knew the printer at home was running low. Well, despite the packaging listing my printer model exactly, it wouldn't work. "Not compatible". Region coding in the cartridges. Really annoying. And a final example of failed DRM: On the Sinclair QL (yes, I'm showing my age and level of geekiness here) one piece of software that I bought came with a plastic prism of Fresnel squares that you were supposed to bend and hold in front of a scrambled 2-character code to unscramble the code and type it in every time you wanted to run. But what their programmers had failed to understand was that the QL had one of the first affordable true multitasking OS's, so a very small utility to install a "virtual prism" appeared almost immediately. It would just sit there quietly until that scrambled code appeared and then it would show the unscrambled characters in a separate window off to the side. Since holding the "real" prism exactly the right way, especially if your screen wasn't the regular size, was a hassle, using the software bypass was easier even though I still owned the "legit" plastic key. And one disclaimer: I'm now retired but the final 20+ years of my working life, I earned my salary selling and supporting professional software development tools for companies wanting to develop their own software, mostly for embedded systems. Professional programmers need to eat too! Not all have the luxury to be able to develop free software for others to use. It's similar to the "amateurs vs pros" debate of the Olympic Games. Kudos to Torvalds, Stallman and the rest, but if you have a new idea that hasn't yet captured the minds of the public, how do you finance man-years of development time to even get it to the point where enthusiasts start making imitations of it? If launching a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter isn't realistic? As a former software development professional, I hate bad software as much as anyone (and probably more than most) and as this discussion has shown, many attempts at DRM have been really, really bad. But the softwares mentioned have all been coded by people who wrote them as a way to make a living. I don't see anyone here advocating a return to voluntary "honor models" which is what feeds the Linux and Gnu movements.

on an unrelated note: congrats on growing your channel dude holy shit keep up the good fight

Printer ink is deffinitly a pain with drm

There is actually a pretty easy way to disable windows 11 TPM requirement. (Rufus)

This is one of the reasons I'm so looking forward to the proton compatibility layer, windows is just becoming more and more of a handycap as time goes on.

Congrats on 400.000!