Wrong, and completely wrong. The profit is a means to an end - even, especially, within a company perspective. Basically, the company needs to make a profit in order to be able to pay an interest on equity and loans, to invest into newer products/services, i.e. to invest in further growth (however you may define 'growth') and to have some money left for 'rainy days'.

Profit here is defined as the difference between revenue and costs - if revenue is higher, you have a profit, if it's lower you have a loss.

In any case, the profit is NOT the only purpose for a company's existence - it is a means to to exist, being able to re-invest and grow and pay an interest to those people who provided it with the capital it is using.

The assumption that companies' ONLY purpose of existence is profit is a fallacy and has been debunked already with Adam Smith.

Going back to the OP (an on-topic):
No, there is in fact not a really good reason for DRM from the consumer's perspective - DRM usually restricts the consumer's right to do whatever he/she wants with the product in question.

There is one potential use of DRM though - if, by using certain DRM techniques, you (as the producer) offer differentiated pricing, e.g.:
1) Watch/read/listen once - 0.19 USD
2) Watch/read/listen unlimited times - 0.99 USD
3) Unlimited watch/read/listen incl re-sale and lending to friends & family (used-sale) rights - 1.49 USD
4) Unlimited rights, except creating and distributing multiple copies for commercial purposes - 1.99 USD

In this case, it could be of interest even for consumers as the pricing is tiered based on the rights - again, it is important that the *pricing* matches the rights (the prices above are just examples)

Oh, and forgot to mention:

I would suggest NOT to use any (commercial) solution that stores your emails in some weird BLOB from which there is no export possibility at one point. As long as any (commercial) solution supports something like maildir, you will be fine - anything else will be a sure guarantee that you won't be able to read your emails anymore once the solution-provider is gone and there is no documentation about their storage format.

Lastly: on backups - don't look for anything that is email-specific - I mean with that: treat your emails like any other important file/data that you have. There's nothing wrong with being paranoid with regards to backups (I have a 4-level-backup system for my emails, photos, music, and other important documents... the only thing I'm missing at the moment is an off-site backup solution for these...)

There were enough really good solutions proposed above:

1) Standardize on one format - preferably maildir(1)
2) Convert all your emails into rfcxxxx (i forgot - but you can look it up) and copy to maildir-format
3) on Linux or other *nix-based systems, you can use many tools to search

(1) I have 15 years of email, about 60GB, roughly 120,000 Emails (sent + received). I use Mac OSX, so I have stored them in Mail.app - because Mail.app uses something like maildir-format and I will never lose my emails, even when I switch to another client.
Every time a year ends, I create a two new folders under Archives/Inbox and Archives/Sent respectively with the year in for digits, e.g.:

Archives/Inbox/2012
Archives/Sent/2012

Then I move the emails to the respective folder. From then on, I exclude these entries from "standard default search"; Only when I purposefully want to search in them, I choose to do so.

This has worked quite well for fifteen years now - and before Mail.app, I used to use PowerMail, Eudora, Outlook Express, Mutt, Pine, and so on - now I standardized on Mail.app with its maildir-structure and am happy.

You, Sir, are starting a new Holy War! It might be the War to End All Wars, but, nevertheless, it is a new Holy War...

Photoshop 1 was only available on a Mac. I remember receiving the first "public beta" (Photoshop 0.9) some time in 1990 or so and it was awesome - jawdroppping awesome...

In any case, you would use MPW (Macintosh Programmer's Workshop) those days, which I think is still one of the best team-development tools. And the language-of-choice (well, in fact, nearly the only choice) for developing on a Mac at those days was Pascal + Assembler.

So, it makes sense that this code is Pascal.

All these comments and requests for "blasphemy" etc, somehow remind me of "Fahrenheit 451" - I'm afraid, because of all these demands, we're really on the wrong track and move towards the world described in Fahrenheit 451...

Start with that and you might have still have a girlfriend afterwards

I already commented on Tomi Ahone elsewhere, but here is my repeat. Tomi Ahonen and people like him did all this mess at Nokia. When you read his bio, you'll see the worst self-praising bulls... I've ever seen in my life. And no, he really has no clue.

I had couple of articles written between 1984 - 1987, all restored without any problems. Reason? They were written on paper, which shows that that's probably one of the longest-lasting and most transferable/restorable data storage media. http://www.caps-project.org/cache/DigitalMediaLifeExpectancyAndCare.html Then again, the access time, especially the random access time, is not really good. Anyway, I could restore them to harddisc easily and without any mistakes - I could actually fix some mistakes in the original file. Joking aside, I have an original NeXTcube OD and would like to restore some data from that, but I can't find a NeXTcube OD drive anymore... Any help?

Luckily, there is also the European High Court of Human Rights as well as other EU regulations, which would prohibit such a law. Sometimes, the EU, even though it's a bureaucratic monster, seems to be the last resort for citizens of countries like Italy. (Yes, I know, the EU itself also introduces some stupid, unconstitutional regulations, but again, there we have the European Courts of Appeal ...)

Actually, throughout Schengen countries (this is around 23 in Europe), you don't need any ID to travel except for airline travel where they check your name on your boarding pass against your name on a photo ID (but this could also be just a drivers license, or any other official looking photo ID) - and this check is done by airline personnel only.

When you travel by car, feet, train or ship throughout Schengen countries, you will notice the border crossing only by change of street signs, language or car plates - or by the ratio of beer:wine, good cuisine:bad cuisine, and so on.