DRM—officially for "Digital Rights Management", but more accurately described as "Digital Restrictions Management" by the Free Software Foundation—is software induced artificial restrictions on everything from software to equipment and machinery.
This section will collect information and links to better understand what DRM is, how it works, and what damage it does on society.
A good resource for an introduction is the Free Software Foundations page on the subject.
Inkjet printers are a notorious scam to begin with, but how they legally get away with region locking ink cartridges is completely incomprehensible. Luckily, this person managers to waste quite some time for HP support as well, but at the cost of wasting even more time for himself.
If there's anything confirming that we're living in a dystopian world it is that we need to "win a right" from the manufacturer to repair our own equipment. Also note that this is not a regulation or anything that the manufacturer has to comply with, it's essentially a private contract(?) between a farmers association and the manufacturer.
I'm having a hard time seeing this as anything positive. If anything it helps take some of the pressure off from the manufacturer, so regulation mandating this "right" to everybody is less likely.
This is probably the most blatant admittance that DRM is about redefining ownership. Microsoft made the books bought through their store unavailable, and refunded the buyers for the purchase. While that may seem ok, it means that the people who bought these books didn't own them to begin with.
What if they wanted to keep the books? After all, they had bought them, right?
Note also this:
Microsoft allowed you to add mark-ups and annotations to the books you bought, but these will also disappear along with access in July.
Which means that not only does Microsoft tell their customers that the don't own the books they "bought", but not even their own added content, notes and remarks are their own to keep.
In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”
On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole by Amazon.com.
Perhaps the goto example of how DRM redefines the concept of ownership.