Summary: Advocates of technological enforcement of manufacturers' rights to lock in their customers and to discriminate in pricing goods will propose laws against reverse engineering and other countermeasures, analogous to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

The most important feature of the PRM policy argument is that it won't be about copyright. So fair use arguments are off the table, which should clarify the debate all around -- arguments about DRM and fair use often devolve into legal hairsplitting or focus too much on the less interesting fair use scenarios. Instead of fair use we'll have the simpler intuition that people should be able to use their stuff as they see fit. ...

So the advocates of PRM-bolstering laws will have to change the argument. Perhaps they'll come up with some kind of story about trademark infringement -- we want to make your fancy-brand watch reject third-party watchbands to protect you against watchband counterfeiters. Or perhaps they'll try a safety argument -- as responsible automakers, we want to protect you from the risks of unlicensed tires.