None of those examples are equivalent. The hardware examples are where companies refuse to sell a product (so you never own the product to begin with) where as the EA example is where you’ve been kicked off online services (you still have the capability to play the game offline, you just can’t access their servers, but you don’t buy their servers when you buy the game) and the HN example is a termination of subscription. Neither of those examples demonstrate legal limitations to software usage with a product you own (though the EA one at least comes close from a superficial perspective).
> you still have the capability to play the game offline
EA famously uses online-only DRM in many of their modern titles; if you get banned from, say, SimCity, you can't run the game at all. There is no "offline mode".
It's not a single player game I'm pretty sure - there are leaderboards and achievements that allow you to compete with your friends. Obviously these features are moot if the top 10,000 players have a score of MAX_INT. It would have been nice to "disconnect" your city from the leaderboards if you wanted to go crazy, but unfortunately this mode was not added.
For the record I am against always on DRM so I did not buy this game nor any other game that uses it. I don't believe we need to codify laws banning the practice or any such thing that requires software developers to build things they don't want to build (with the exception of critical fields such as healthcare and aviation).
It's desirable in that a one time purchase does not entitle a customer to a lifetime of server resources; they paid for the game and they can certainly keep the game, but they don't have a right to the services required by the game (those are recurring costs). This makes sense since the alternative is forcing EA to pay to host servers for people that violated their terms of service.
You are correct that it got an offline mode eventually, I overlooked this. But this demonstrates that the market corrected this problem: Enough consumers complained to force a change. Therefore, is there need for external intervention? The simple solution to always-on DRM seems to be to just avoid buying any products that use it.
