Exactly. And if, say, a business owner refused service to a gay couple, it used to be his god-damn right to do so. But the so-called gay rights movement,
made it more-or-less illegal.

is != ought

You are not really putting that into the same category?

Gay rights are rights by people coming from the very core of being human. DRM is a convenience issue.
I was part of the DRM free movement when it actually was a worthy pursuit. You know, back when they were packing frikking root-kids on music CDs ...

Heh, all Steam games are pirated. It works because Steam got the right idea: Throw enough convenient features on top of DRM and people will embrace it. It works and it's fine, for the most part it's good for customer (well Steam itself isn't because it's becoming monopoly, but the idea that's copied by more clients is.)

And... WoW? As in World of Warcraft? Seriously? Try and pick a worse example, for instance some of Newgrounds flash games.

Due to piracy there can never be a monopoly. Steam will always compete with pirates.

That's actually an angle I've never bothered to look at. If they push prices too high, more people will just turn to piracy instead, because fuck them.

The Hammer Legionnaires justify this by claiming that Steam's authentication system is somehow "not DRM" but an intrinsic feature. I've spent years trying to understand the logic behind this insanity.

And for WoW's success, there are countless numbers of other games that have gone the intrinsically online route and have failed massively for it. There are countless F2P and P2P MMOs going south every month.

Maybe so, but if you look at it from the other end of piracy, from the perspective of the "real" pirates (meaning the few that upload the games, not the faceless masses who download them), you'll see an entirely different picture. For the uploaders, the meta-game is about who can crack the DRM first and release the cracked version of the game. If a game has no DRM, why bother to upload it? That won't extend anyone's e-penis.

That is why the copy of The Witcher 2 doing the torrent rounds was the cracked retail version, rather than the DRM free GOG version. A cracker needs to crack. You don't get any geek cred for just hitting "upload" on something that was never protected to begin with.

Regardless of the relative value of gay rights and absence of DRM, it is logically invalid to discourage people from campaigning by claiming something is currently legal. That's the point: X is legal, and people "raise awareness" and try to gain enough momentum to attempt to change the law and have it banned. If X was illegal in the first place, there'd be no need for a campaign, people could just sue.

What huge cost ? There is a cost but it's the service provider problem, not the publishers, heck creating and managing a download service with auto-patching, multiplayer support, etc... also involve immense costs.

OnLive failed because they were a game centric service, if not enough peoples were playing using their service then their servers were just taking dust, but if similar services uses existing cloud farms like the ones using Azure, or have at least have other uses for their processing power than just gaming, then it greatly limit the costs.

Another thing is that streaming doesn't just prevent piracy and second hand sales, it also open to the industry all sort of new "opportunities". With it they can implement subscription, pay per minute, charge per "features" (per save slots, per characters), charge for improved graphics and even add unresolvable and unskipable commercials whenever they want.

That's for them a lot more interesting that some few extra copies earn by limiting second hand sales or piracy.

no, that is just silly and taking things to the point where everything becomes meaningless.

There is a huge difference between argue awareness for discrimination and suppression of basic human rights and a luxury convenience. If you want to argue that it is the same, then I am going to call you a very, very silly person.

Yeah like they have the "god-damn right" of content creators to threaten to sue those who pirate their game but yet it doesn't prevent some peoples (let's not give any name) from saying "but with those actions they were unmasked as being amongst the most despicable players in the industry", but I guess those saying that are also a bunch of egoists who want others to act according to their own sensibilities.

Seriously, I always found this kind of argument to be very silly, yes it's their creation, yes it's their right to do what they damn please with it... but hey guess what... they are trying to sell their stuff to other peoples, and as soon as they do that then it's perfectly normal for the buyers or at least "potential" buyers to complains if there are some things they don't like and/or what to be changed, it's not being egoistic it's basic offer and demand relationship.

If you sue people you go outside the customer-creator relationship. WIth DRM I choose the business relation. Not when I get dragged to court. Two completely different things.

Edit: And the point isn't the right holders defend their rights. It's how they do it.

I don't know what they claimed specifically, but Steam's authentication system is definitely not DRM. The evidence is the large number of DRM free games on Steam (which are listed on this thread).
True for pirates, but if it has no DRM, then average "non-pirate" people will make it available. Or do you think that nobody is sharing music because there's no DRM on it.

Wut? Look up the discussion.

SimonG: It is perfectly legal for rightsholders to use DRM.
Me: Sure, but you don't shut up campaigners by pointing out something is legal.

That's how society, ideally, should work. If the law is on your side, you can sue. If it's not, you can try to have it changed.

You can say that campaigning against DRM should not be, ethically, a top priority within (your vision of) the campaigners' professed moral frameworks. But you know what? It's their free time. It is perfectly possible to have an opinion on more than a single issue and support more than one campaign. I'm a horrible person. I play games instead of volunteering at hospitals, and I eat lunch at restaurants instead of eating noodles and donating the savings to the poor. I'm getting punched in the face by a neonazi at my own schedule, and I'm not apologetic about it.