When I was at EFF, I often made arguments like this. I was surprised to find that, in the video game console context, a pretty significant number of gamers vocally disagreed!

Basically, they felt that a "good" console ecosystem was a rare and precious thing, and that it required things like curation, and inducement to developers to invest, which in turn required extensive control over players to make sure that they used their consoles only in approved ways, with approved software.

I'm trying to think of analogies to make this make more sense to me or other people like me. I think there is some comparison to be made to security checkpoints that someone might try to require before giving the public access to some place or activity. Probably not coincidentally, I don't like those either and don't want to see them expanded to more places and circumstances and parts of life. However, someone might sympathize with the concerns of the people creating the checkpoints strongly enough as to say "although these measures are intrusive and could be viewed as intruding on my rights, I feel that realistically the likely alternative is not getting to (fly|meet the president|meet the Queen|hold this expensive diamond) and that I can't see a path to getting to do that otherwise, so the choice for me seems like I should naturally accept the intrusions in order to get to do the thing".

Some of the gamers were saying, well, I want to play games that cost many millions of dollars to make, and the people who make those games say they want to target platforms where they get certain guarantees about restrictions on the players, otherwise they won't be able to invest that kind of money.

Some possible responses that come to mind, both in the analogy and the world we live in:

* We should have more Schelling fences to stop the spread of restrictions and control into more areas of life.

* We should find other ways of addressing the legitimate parts of other people's concerns, without intruding on individual freedoms as much.

* These rights should be treated as sacred, so too bad if other people aren't willing to respect them, or if they then don't do things that you wanted. (Or maybe activities that require certain levels of intrusion in order to be feasible or safe should just not occur at all.)

* Maybe people are lying, or mistaken, about the level of control that they actually need in order to let you do the things you want. Can we coordinate to call their bluff?

It's also a little complicated if you include the cheating part alongside the illegal copying part (and the games -- or HPC applications! -- developed with no royalty to the console maker part). There, many gamers do see gamers-in-general as the enemy, though not necessarily themselves; like "we're not trustworthy, as a group, so we need measures to stop the numerous cheaters among us from ruining things for the rest of us".

I was genuinely surprised to see many of these phenomena. (In a couple of cases, I think EFF announced some kind of support for people who were reverse engineering hardware to make it able to run unofficial software, and some gamers said "hey, you're supporting the bad guys here"!) But I'd like to hear other people's ideas about how to contend with them.