only USA? I’m from UK & … not that it’s a horror story - but the utter pointlessness of DRM!
I’ve been mildly annoyed, does that count as a horror story?
Getting a Lord of the Rings DVD gift from the US, unable to play it on a family brand-name DVD player. (To add insult to injury, the family did not believe me it was a faulty player.)
Dad got a Sony Minidisc to record stuff of his band. Then had problems with digitally moving the files from the disc to the computer. His own records. Well, I told him so in advance and he did not believe me. He had to move the things via analog hole.
Every time DH tries to resynch his iPhone and his iPod with iTunes so he can move around the audiobooks he listens to on the road, he invariably has to fight with iTunes about putting them back where he wants them. His iPod is dying, and it appears most of his library may become hard to access, because not all of the books were bought via iTunes, but that’s all Apple recognizes.
When Barnes & Noble killed Fictionwise and eReader, they couldn’t move over all my books from my Fictionwise and eReader libraries. I lost at least $200 worth of e-books, and that’s a conservative estimate, including the entire 29-book The Survivalist series by Jerry Ahern. Thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, I couldn’t legally back those books up, because they were protected by DRM.
And I would never do anything illegal. o:)
(Adding insult to injury, I checked my Nook bookshelf just now and found that Barnes & Noble has replaced the first e-book I ever bought with a Bookrags study guide to said book. And B&N’s customer service rep’s most “helpful” suggestion was that I could buy the book again; he could give me the link. Way to make me want to shop there, Barnes & Noble.)
is it the new mash-up of fashion and trends we used to die younger but now we live longer because of magic that happened now we get fat because we have so much stuff it clogs up our brains so we cannot even remember simple phone numbers
I had been reading e-books on my original US Robotics Pilot, and in 2000 bought the Compaq iPAQ for the better screen. A big selling point for the new generation of Pocket PCs like the iPAQ - lots of advertising included with each device - was Microsoft Reader and the partnership with Barnes & Noble.
The big day finally came when the online store opened. Lots of people purchased books… And discovered that they didn’t work on their Pocket PCs.
It turns out that there were multiple levels of DRM. The “optional” highest level didn’t work with Pocket PCs. And who could’ve predicted it - the publishers all used the highest level.
“Don’t worry,” Barnes & Noble said, “You can still read the book on your desktop.” Missing the point of an ebook reader that could be carried around like a book.
So they posted some public domain books from Project Gutenberg along with some Star Trek fanfic in the store and declared “all fixed!”
Note: I’m not American, so I can’t post on the EFF form.
Losing e-books because their format is no longer supported by your reader of choice is like allowing the Firemen to come into your house and ransack your library.
Lost my copy of Fahrenheit 451 that way.
To add insult to injury, the pirates don’t have these problems.
Does DeCSS in 99/00 count, or is this just for recent stuff?
I’ve got one of these things, an Oppo Region Free Blu-ray Player, which is hardware modified to play any 120mm optical disc you put in it, whatever the region encoding. Everything from my wife’s collection of Asian soap opera VCDs to 3D BDs from wherever. Good picture upscaling too. 
But it was horribly expensive for what it is. If it weren’t for DRM then a player that does everything would be nowhere near as expensive.
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