It had been a great day: dinner with friends, raucous stories, cold beer, lots of laughter. And now, a movie to cap it all off—some new, Oscar-buzzworthy flick. There’s no Blockbuster in my town (what few brick-and-mortar video stores remain feel like stubborn holdouts from an era past). For better or worse, media—movies, books, music—exist in the digital world now. A few clicks on a mouse are all that stood between me and a new release.

Still, a 15-inch computer screen isn’t ideal for groups. So I fired up the living room projector, hooked it up to my computer, and pressed play on my rented movie. We waited. Nothing happened. Turns out, my projector isn’t an Apple-approved device. Buried in the movie’s encoding, a secret command made the movie unplayable on my projector.

Welcome to the weird world of DRM.

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, though it’s more accurate to call it Digital Restrictions Management—because DRM restricts what people can do with their digital stuff. DRM makes it so you can only buy your apps from Apple. DRM is why you can’t fast forward past previews and warnings on your DVD. DRM is the reason why that ebook you bought on a Kindle won’t play on a different e-reader. And the list goes on.

So, why does DRM exist in the first place?

We are told that digital locks and DRM protect creative content and the creative-types who make it. Copy protection measures are designed to ensure that one digital copy of Adele’s new single Hello doesn’t reduplicate into a thousand identical stolen digital copies.

Except that DRM has been increasingly ineffective at preventing copying. Pirates just pick the locks over the content and share it anyways. So, in many cases, DRM punishes the people who follow the rules. The people who want to backup their files. Or move to a different platform, without rebuying all the stuff they had on the old platform.

That’s where DRM gets particularly exploitative. Making sure an ebook bought on a Kindle stays on a Kindle doesn’t protect authors. It protects Amazon. And it does so at the expense of consumers. Because once you’ve purchased a copy of a book, don’t you own that copy? Shouldn’t you be able to read it on another device?

Common sense says yes. DRM says no.

If you’re technologically inclined, it’s not difficult to strip DRM off digital stuff and play your media wherever and however you want—just like if you’re mechanically inclined, it’s not hard to remove limiters from car engines. But US copyright law actually makes it illegal to break DRM—even if you have no intention of pirating copies. Just this week, the Copyright Office loosened a few of the restrictions on which forms of DRM are legal to bypass. But the deck is still stacked overwhelming against the consumer. And so, for law-abiding netizens, the DRM remains on the products they buy, locking media down.

As author and copyright expert Cory Doctorow puts it in his book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, “Any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and won’t give you the key, that lock isn’t there for your benefit.”

As Doctorow notes, in 2009 Amazon remotely wiped George Orwell’s 1984 from Kindles after a licensing disagreement (a move straight out of the playbook of Orwell’s “Ministry of Truth”). Customers balked at Amazon’s backdoor deletions. Without their knowledge, readers had been sold DRM-encumbered books whose ones and zeroes could evaporate at Amazon’s command.

Big Brother is watching; he’s deleted your e-books.

DRM used to be limited to digital content. A problem of bits and bytes. Of software and code. But with meteoric speed, the digital world is crashing into the physical world. We are entering an era that tech analysts like to call the Internet of Things, which means we are unfortunately entering an era of the DRM of Things.

Computers brew our coffee. Computers take our calls. Computers heat our homes. Computers take our pictures. And everywhere there is a computer, there could be DRM. There’s DRM in our smartphones. DRM in our cars. DRM in our tractors. Even DRM in our automatic kitty litter boxes. And DRM means all these computers are programmed to subvert the will of their owners.

Last year, Keurig introduced Keurig 2.0—its new, smart, single-serve coffee machine. It had a lot of cool new features … and one really crappy one: DRM. Keurig 2.0 was programmed to stop owners from brewing non-Keurig coffee.

Big Brother is watching; he’s denied your request for coffee.

But the thing is, people hate being told what they can and cannot do with their own stuff. In fact, they outright rebel against it. Unable to brew “banned” brands, Keurig 2.0 owners brewed themselves a steaming cup of fury. Customer reviews were scathing. Units gathered dust on the shelf. Keurig stock took a 10% dive.

But here’s where it really gets interesting: Keurig’s competitor, Rogers Family Company, capitalized on the DRM-debacle by giving away “Freedom Clips.” Snapped into a Keurig, the clip fooled the machine into thinking any off-brand coffee pod was manufacturer-approved, officially-licensed, 100% USDA Prime Keurig coffee. Thereafter, the modded machine brewed all coffee, including Rogers Family Company coffee. Rogers Family Company came off like a java justice warrior—defender of choice, hero of home brew (and they made money). Keurig came off like a bunch of Scooby-Doo villains (and they lost money).

As I see it, there are three lessons here:

In many forms, DRM is anti-consumer. Treating your customers like criminals is a great way to turn them against you. There’s a market opportunity for DRM-free platforms.

DRM pisses people off. (I, for one, haven’t rented a movie from Apple since that disappointing evening.) When the limitations imposed by DRM become conspicuous enough or annoying enough, people will find something that pisses them off less. Keurig customers bought their coffee pods from Rogers Family Company. Kindle users can use programs like Calibre to give them greater control over their ebook libraries. Audiobooks from Downpour are proudly marketed as being DRM-free.

Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Digital Right to Repair Coalition (which I founded) are pushing for changes to copyright law that would make it legal for owners to break digital locks for non-infringing purposes. Still, I have no doubt that more manufacturers will slap DRM onto things they make. And I have no doubt that DRM will continue to frustrate customers. But where there is frustration, there’s an opportunity. Build a DRM-free solution to customer frustration, and people will love you for it.

Big Brother is watching; now he can watch his customers walk away.