Description

Digital Rights Management (DRM) refer to a class of technologies integrated into certain hardware/software in order to place arbitrary restrictions on the usage/access of such products or some of their specific functionalities, mainly for the purpose of preventing copyright violations.

Potential

DRM is intrinsically at odds with the principles of Project Autopia, mainly user-ownership.
This kind of technologies basically enables a third party to dictate who can or cannot use their products, and what the end users can or cannot do with them, drastically limitating their level of ownership. In some cases, this can go as far as to grant the producer the power to remotely alter, lock or shut down specific products, programs or functionalities at his complete discretion without the user's consent, basically nullifying any real ownership by the end user.

Status

Many different kind of hardware and software already include some form of DRM.