Google's software mistreats or harms the user

Don't consume that content then! You don't own the content!

Does DRM work against businesses who implement it? I'd say hell yes it does. It drives people to piracy.

But I don't think inventing childish, misleading names is going to fix anything. Much better to point out how it causes people pain (unstoppable commercials, inability to play content on all the devices you own, etc).

> Say you want to send data to an untrusted destination and want the data to be read-only and non-copyable. DRM is the solution. That's not malware, it's part of the threat/loss prevention model for certain kinds of data.

That's a nice way of phrasing it from the business point of view. From the customer point of view, it's degrading the product and artificially limiting the ways one can interact with it. It goes against the fundamental principle of general-purpose computing: as a computer owner, I get to tell what the computer can and cannot do with the data it has.

DRM in its most general form exists as a way to (try to) make some data follow a different set of rules than the rules of the medium. It's an attempt of making bits have colour[0]. Since bits don't, and can't, have colour, you have to simulate this by changing the rules of the universe in which those bits are processed. It's practically impossible to do correctly, hence the product degradation that always accompanies DRM schemes.

Adding insult to injury, DRM is usually employed to force a recurring revenue stream in a context where it fundamentally doesn't make sense.

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[0] - https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

This is my #1 issue with the FSF, and a lot of these types of arguments originate with RMS himself. RMS has always put a lot of energy into trying to get people to use other words to describe common things, and the other words always spin those things in some really obvious and extreme way. Insisting that everyone say GNU/Linux is the one most people are familiar with, but other things like always referring to DRM as "Digital Restrictions Management", etc. Or heck, trying to redefine the very generic but positive word "free" to mean a whole host of very very specific and often unintuitive things.

The FSF/RMS insistence on calling things by different words seems so irrational and dishonest. Likewise with taking common words with many meanings (like "free") and claiming that word as their own, then claiming that what "free" really means in the context of software can only be expressed once you tack on several KB of legalese that tells you what you can't do with it and how you're a bad person if you do. It's like the naming of the PATRIOT Act- it had nothing to do with patriotism, but it surely changed people's perceptions of it in subtle ways. What congressman would vote against patriotism? How could anyone be opposed to freedom? It's the same BS rhetorical trick, and it makes whoever uses that trick seem less honest and more irrational (to me at least). It's still an effective propaganda technique, which is exactly why they should avoid these sorts of rhetorical tricks. I don't want to hear their propaganda, I want to hear their philosophy. Because if their philosophy is truly built on a foundation of propaganda and rhetorical tricks, then their philosophy is meaningless. I agree with much of what the FSF advocates but they've always done such a terrible job advocating for it.

Extends what you can do, by letting you control (limit) my usage.

So instead of "It is extra software with the only purpose to limit what I can do." we have "It is extra software with the only purpose to limit what I can do, on the bidding of someone else."

That's basically the same definition. The "someone else" part was already implied by the first half, obviously some party wants it or there would be no conflict. So we've reached a clearer and more explicit definition, but we've also shown that the original definition is not insincere at all!

> How do you reconcile the two conflicting requirements? One way is to invent crazy DRM schemes.

Another way is to not do it. The law does not require you to implement crazy DRM schemes, it requires me to not distribute copyrighted work to which I don't own the copyright.

The law doesn't force companies to implement DRM. It's a choice, and as a choice, it can be considered malicious action by customers.

Grocery stores doesn't hire large amount of security people so that every customer would have a security person assigned to them that follows them around and ensures they don't steal anything. They could do it, I don't think any law anywhere prevents them from doing that. But the first one to try it would quickly lose all its customers. If such a practice happened to get ultimately established (e.g. normalized by stores in non-commodity position), I suspect the meatspace equivalent of FSF would be ranting about it too.