I think you may be referring to businesses making an anti-user decision to withhold content, and mistaking exceptions to that to be things useful to a user.
DRM schemes are anti-user decisions in the sense that users are presented with a choice of either allowing companies to hijack their machines to enforce a subpar experience, or walking away.
Of course, I'd argue most DRM pushes normal people to piracy because the restrictions usually suck. Had they just distributed the content in a more unrestricted way, they'd do more business. But that is a business problem, not a technical one.
Another way is to not do it. The law does not require you to implement crazy DRM schemes, it requires me to not distribute copyrighted work to which I don't own the copyright.
The law doesn't force companies to implement DRM. It's a choice, and as a choice, it can be considered malicious action by customers.
Grocery stores doesn't hire large amount of security people so that every customer would have a security person assigned to them that follows them around and ensures they don't steal anything. They could do it, I don't think any law anywhere prevents them from doing that. But the first one to try it would quickly lose all its customers. If such a practice happened to get ultimately established (e.g. normalized by stores in non-commodity position), I suspect the meatspace equivalent of FSF would be ranting about it too.
How about:
- Using the fast forward function in media playback software to skip over advertisements.
- Ripping DVD and Blu-Ray movies for use with a media server.
- Playing movies and games from other countries (region locking.)
- Recording or streaming console gameplay (e.g. HDCP on PS3, disabling the share function in certain PS4 games.)
- Running certain software, even some single-player games, if you are not connected to the internet ("always-on DRM.")
DRM sucks, but you don't have to use it.