I've been able to buy a lot of e-books without DRM (mostly tech books). But still, it is rather ridiculous, I can't help but think that the people of, say, 2050 will look back at the way we have gone about "managing" content in this era and think we were all mad.
Big corporations don't even have a monopoly on multimillion dollar videogames (thanks to Kickstarter), let alone novels or nonfiction books which are typically produced by a small handful of people in a year or two.
A dystopian DRM future is not impossible, but generally I think people do want to "own" things, and eventually we'll see digital goods treated as such legally.
Based solely on what seems to be a technological advantage to those who desire content to be un-DRMed, I'd say that scenario is very unlikely. At least not without an extensive world-wide police state enforcing it.
For many years when I bought a console game I was able to sell that game when I'd finished with it. Japanese[1] companies were especially unhappy with the second-hand market, and took vigorous efforts to stop it. US companies are also keen to prevent this re-sale of games.
Now many games are unable to be sold on.
When I buy a DVD there is a clear benefit to me in being able to play that DVD in my player, no matter where I buy it. Yet DVDs are region locked. VHS tapes had Macrovision anti-copy signals; DVDs had region protections and CSS; BluRay has region protections and several layers of DRM; restrictions continue to get tighter, not more relaxed.
Laws are also getting stricter. The 1996 WIPO treaty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO_Copyright_Treaty) led to the introduction of the DMCA and similar laws in other regions. (Circumventing technical protections is illegal under the DMCA but it's also illegal throughout Europe, with various difference in each country).
I agree with "unlikely", but I'm not so sure about very unlikely.
[1] Japanese companies have been doing this longest, since SNES times. I think, but I could be wrong, that they managed to make second hand sales of games illegal. Maybe they just wanted to do that?
>I can't help but think that the people of, say, 2050 will look back at the way we have gone about "managing" content in this era and think we were all mad.
Only if those people have progressed beyond capitalism and big corporations having control over laws.
