Not really. After the Atari generation, Nintendo released the NES which was locked down to prevent developers from selling games without paying them first. So regardless of where you were selling your game if it ran on NES then Nintendo got a cut. At first that cut was small but when that market grew they jacked up the percentage enough to cause some arcade manufacturers to leave the home console market for years.

These types of restrictions are all over the place, and I'm not sure if they're good or bad. TVs and audio-listening-devices come built-in with dmca protection, meaning you can't watch pirated footage or listen to pirated music even though you own the device. Is that good? Is that bad?

That's bad, 100% bad. My TV does not need to be playing detective and monitoring every use of it. My car doesn't prevent me from exceeding the speed limit, not does it report me to authorities if I do.

Give it a few more years.

I suspect this was a bit of a throwaway comment, but ...

“EU ruling means speed limiters will be mandatory in the UK [and EU] by 2022“

https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/news/motoring-news/mandatory-spe...

I did think we had a few more years :/ thanks for letting me know though.

I'm not aware of any such devices? I believe you have that backwards - many (most?) devices support HDCP, a form of DRM (and thus legally protected against reverse engineering by the DMCA). This is supposedly to prevent you from pirating (ie copying) otherwise legally purchased content.

In other words, the claimed motivation is to prevent you from running off a copy of whatever you happen to be streaming from Netflix. In reality though it doesn't seem to be very effective, leaving me wondering why so much time and effort is invested in it.

How would a TV know it's being sent something pirated? I can't find a source on this.