DRM, now available on hardware!

Seeing that consumers have been so receptive of increasingly draconian DRM policies, Razer peripherals have adopted an ingenious implementation: now you can have always-online DRM handling the features of your own mouse!

In some corporate meeting room somewhere, someone must have thought this was a successful idea. And in that room, the other heads nodded in unanimous agreement. Perhaps a few hands were shaken, a compliment passed around, and undoubtedly a comment was made as to how their mouth-breathing consumers would never notice.

All that, I can believe easily enough. My bewilderment stems from the mental process necessary to pass this idea through logic checklists. In what circumstance does this benefit the company, even if the consumers were indifferent towards the restrictions? Are they being hurt by counterfeit distributions of their own hardware? The cheap knockoff peripheral market doesn't offer ergonomic, high-DPI, multi-button, programmable mice that utilizes Razer software.

As far as I can tell, Razer has decided that maintaining and updating DRM software and its respective authentication servers with no beneficial outcomes and purely upkeep costs and customer inconvenience is in their best interest. Who thought this was a good idea? Or perhaps there was no logic checklist at all, and the responsible individuals at Razer had coincidentally aligned their inebriation.

Update: Oh. They're spying on you. How nice.