Derek Slater points to this article about new technology movie producers use to stop people from making illegal digital copies in advance screening rooms. The system described inserts annoying stripes not visible to the human eye, but remaining on a digital copy. The article also mentions enforcers with night-vision goggles and metal detectors.
That article reminds me of an idea.
Think of some kind of extreme technical protection for copyright. For example for movies, as in that article. If you want to see a movie in that system, you need to agree to a strip-search before entering the cinema, a twenty minute interview session checking your motives for watching, a polygraph test to make sure that you are telling the truth and that you don't have any dishonest intentions (like telling someone else anything about that movie), a background check for connections with people who have been known to use terrorist pirate tools as the Internet, etc. etc. (insert some other fun draconian measures here).
I think there would be no need whatsoever for any regulation guaranteeing any minimum consumer rights against this system. Market forces should be enough.
Anyone crazy enough to want to watch a movie even under that conditions does not deserve any protection. Market forces should be enough to annihilate any chances for this kind of system as long as there are other cinemas who behave in a reasonable way.
So I think extreme DRM measures are not evil under any circumstances. As long as consumers have a choice, anyone should be free to offer any extreme form of technical copyright protection.
The market situation is important when discussing DRM measures. As long as there are free channels and less free channels, I don't see much need to completely eliminate less free channels of distribution. Like I said before: The Berlin wall worked only because it closed the whole border. One hole somewhere would have been enough to assure freedom.
The horror of the world described in Stallman's "Right to Read" comes from the fact that all books are available only in that extremely controlled DRM channel. If someone started to sell e-books in a Stallman-like DRM system today, consumers could just ignore them and keep on reading normal books, or PDF files distributed under a Creative Commons license.
Update April 20: Slashdot discussion of the article here.