Adobe DRM is evil

It may seem to the casual reader that I use this blog as a way to complain about the failures of various computer vendors. Perhaps this is true. Adobe has earned my wroth. I had to replace my drive controller and restore from backup. This ticked off Adobe Acrobat's DRM, which said that I had activated the product one time too many. I had to call Adobe's registration hotline and beg for a new activation code; I received a lecture saying that before any major hardware change, I had to deactivate the product and then reactivate it on the other side. This is a load of crap. Why should I be the one to make a special effort to accomodate Adobe's DRM? What if I were restoring from backup in an emergency situation? Would I have thought to have deactivated the Adobe product before making the backup? The same thing goes for iTunes. Windows XP, which also uses hardware-based DRM, is actually more lenient than either of these two; as I recall, it makes a hash of ten hardware attributes, and only deactivates the product if more than three of them change over six months.

I would boycott Adobe, were it not that I need Creative Suite 2. :-) Ineluctable evil and computers: two great things that just go together.