Check out this site and read that Federal Trade Commission is going to be looking at the DRM issue in games and people can contact them and to voice their views.
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Wonderful!
That being said, I doubt much good will come of it. The death of DRM will be informed customers voting with their wallets, not legislation, unless an actual ban on DRM is made, and I somehow don't see that happening.

At the very least, the type of DRM and it's restrictions should be clearly written on the box. And not in the small tiny print your average shopper does not look at anyway.
I'd much rather see it vanish completely though. I've been buying more games without DRM since various companies started doing that than I ever did when it had it, such that I'm one of those people who look up what protection the games uses before I consider purchase.

While I hope that some good comes from all this I have a sense of dread that it will end with something along the lines of a panel stacked with EA and Securom shills recommending that there need to be harsher legal penalties for people breaking DRM. I hope it's just my overbearing cynicism at work.

I have the same fear, Phoenix.

I've definitely made my last impulse by on PC games unless they're certified DRM free on GOG or a similar service.
I hope this comes to something, but the ordinary guy doesn't have a bunch of lobbyists and lawyers working for him, so he generally ends up just getting whatever the crooks have rubberstamped through.

I'm sure there will be quite a few folks from the likes of the EFF and the FSF there to pull for us little guys.

This is all we will end up getting out of this, another label on the box, right next to the age rating that everyone also ignores.

you know I'd be a big supporter of DRM as long as it didn't fuck over the honest consumer and if it actually WORKED to slow piracy...
As it stands, DRM is like putting a bag of money in a glass box in the middle of a busy footpath with a sign next to it saying "please do not take this money". The only people affected are the honest ones

you know what they say, if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have them.

The thing is that DRM simply as a concept can never be effective as an access control measure. This is because as long as people can access the protected data on an open system (pretty much the requirement for a product to be usable) the DRM can be cracked. And due to the ease of distribution all it takes is one person to crack it to make it available to everyone. The only way DRM could be effective is to include a TPM element in it, but there's no way hardware makers and the general public would buy into that (and rightly so).
What needs to happen is that the games/music/movie industries need to realize that DRM is a losing proposition, and furthermore recognize that their focus should not even be on preventing piracy, but rather on increasing sales; and adding value to a product to entice people to buy it is far more effect for this purpose than trying to force them to buy via technological restrictions.
We also need a massive overhaul on the laws surrounding the attempts to create artificial scarcity on what amounts to nothing more than information and ideas... but that's an entirely different discussion and one that I probably shouldn't get started on.

Some DRM schemes work though, and cause near no fuss.
This is really only in the multiplayer-only/MMO community, where the game/cd/dvd is tied to an online account. Sure cd's can still be cracked, and 3rd party servers setup, but the game is worthless (or nearabouts) without the main community and updates that forms under legit copies.
I have an issue when such online authentication (as we saw in 2008) is used on Single-Player games though. Personally, it's an instant ignore of the title.

Whether or not the content being included in the game can be pirated should not even be a concern; remember that the focus needs to be on making an attractive product that will sell well, not on stopping piracy (as this will simply be a losing battle, and even if it is won it will not necessarily bring about more sales). The goal is simply to put together an overall product package that people will consider a highly worthwhile purchase. The simple fact is that if someone decides to pirate a game you're not going to be able to stop them, and more importantly even if you could stop them the pirate/don't pirate decision has no direct effect on your bottom line. It's the buy/don't buy decision that you need to be focused on, and game companies need to reallocate the resources they waste on fighting piracy to try to favorably influence that buy/don't buy decision.
The problem with any remote activation is that you're dependent on that company's servers in order to access the content you "bought". There have already been several cases with videos and music where people were cut off from their purchases when the companies they bought from decided to shut down their activation servers. And I'd expect the folks here to appreciate that many will want to go back to a good game 10+ years down the road; how many of the activation servers will still be around then?

well with any luck it means that the writing might be on the wall for securerom who want to be in the firing squad that shoots it?