I'm guessing it's purely for DRM purposes. In that sense, it's a case of "We'd like to price this physical item at two different price points, and control it in a soft fashion".

Playing devil's advocate, I guess there are certain situations where you could justify this type of thing. Let's say that a product has an additional capability which 90% of the market doesn't need, but required significant research to accomplish. It's a soft-capability, so there's nothing additional that you need to manufacture to enable it. You have a couple of options - you can make two different models (essentially identical underneath, except for the cheaper one disabling the extra capability), but this is inefficient. You can of course have one product, one price. But this is also less than perfect, as you have everyone paying for a feature 10% want, and you can be outcompeted at a cheaper price for the basic product. Another option would be to DRM the product and soft-enable the feature for the 10% who want it, at a higher price.

I mean, it's a bit of a stretch, but it's plausible in some situations.

The problem is you're not making the case for DRM, you're just making the case for copyright.

Laws against circumventing DRM have a simple fatal flaw: If the DRM is strong enough to prevent a given user from circumventing it then you don't need a law to prohibit it, but if it isn't then it still isn't any easier to get the user for circumventing the DRM than it is for the underlying copyright infringement. The law is utterly useless for its stated purpose.

But it still causes all kinds of grief for innocent people when companies abuse it for things other than its intended purpose.

I donno, I thought I made a (rather far fetched) case for when it's actually physically cheaper / more efficient / beneficial to have DRM, for all parties involved. I.e. a case where we'd actually want to have DRM, I'm not sure how it relates to copyright by itself.

In the general case though, I'm also relatively strongly against DRM for everyday consumer goods, but mainly from an experience and cost efficiency perspective. Companies seem to spend large amounts of money on heavy DRM, and it seems to cause products to be inferior (persistent connectivity, etc).

> I donno, I thought I made a (rather far fetched) case for when it's actually physically cheaper / more efficient / beneficial to have DRM, for all parties involved. I.e. a case where we'd actually want to have DRM, I'm not sure how it relates to copyright by itself.

Your argument seems to be that the seller is only going to go to the effort of designing the extra feature if they can charge a premium for it to the market segment that wants it. That is the traditional argument in favor of copyright (and patents). Those things do what you're asking for without a separate law prohibiting circumvention of DRM. The seller can copyright the enabling software or patent the feature (depending on whether the difficult part of implementing the feature is part of the enabling software or the hardware).

It doesn't. The drm needs it as a very simple way to tell the chip inside that you've paid for it. SD cards can be trivially bit-banged from almost any processor, unlike other protocols such as USB.