Well, it's not really drm -- the chip in there is used for lots of stuff. There was an article about the thunderbolt cable (which has a similar design to lightning) where it has a chip inside that cable as well. Note that thunderbolt was actually designed by intel.
I think lots of future cables will have these chips in them. In thunderbolt, the chip mutiplexes & demultiplexes the data. Perhaps the idea is that speed increases can be had just by upgrading your cable instead of upgrading the port.
In the lightning cable, the chip is also responsible for determining the orientation of your connection, since the connector is reversible.
The pins are on the outside of the connector. It's trivial to short-circuit them by accident, which could easily cause a fire if there were not a chip in there to control when you "shove 5V over the wire".
Doesn't DRM stand for digital rights management? I think you may have confused it with something else. DRM doesn't prevent people from manufacturing cables -- it's to prevent the end user from accessing content they don't own. DRM was never aimed as a way to reduce the number of manufacturers out there. In fact, DRM wanted to increase the number of manufacturers so that there would be less hardware that could play media that you didn't buy (pirated content).
DRM prevents digital data/signals from going where an end-user wants them to. So you cannot play DRMed media on a open-source player, but only players blessed by the DRM-vendor. The end-user has his choices artificially limited.
And now the end-user cannot use any cables he likes. Only those cables blessed by the proprietary connector vendor. You have authentication where none is needed, exclusively to give the vendor power, not to provide the end-user with benefits.
Both are about digital data/signals and having artificial restrictions imposed on them. I think the similarities are good enough to warrant the name DRM.
To the layman it may appear that way, but I assure you the lightpeak cables don't have any DRM logic in them, they merely mux/demux signals. I think you're just a bit misinformed, or think anytime there's chips in basic things like cables, to consider them DRM devices. I suggest you wikipedia DRM to brush up on your definitions.
If there are more adopters of lightpeak, there will be other cable manufacturers, and users can buy any cable they want. People who don't understand electronics also wouldn't understand how this might benefit the user.
Personally, I think lightpeak is a fairly interesting way of implementing something, it enables ports to be a lot more capable without having to replace electronics on the motherboard.
Perhaps users who don't fully understand what is going on inside would prefer to think that it's something evil...
I think lots of future cables will have these chips in them. In thunderbolt, the chip mutiplexes & demultiplexes the data. Perhaps the idea is that speed increases can be had just by upgrading your cable instead of upgrading the port.
In the lightning cable, the chip is also responsible for determining the orientation of your connection, since the connector is reversible.