Well, I bought Skyrim on disk and it installed Steam for me... Later, I've read that there might have been a possibility to play it unpatched without Steam, tried it but didn't work. Do you mean by "no one ever activated it" the possibility of buying the game and not playing it? Or cracking it or something?

Great that we'll be on the same side if there's a major anti-DRM movement - Still, I don't find your argument about DRM/Steam "thriving" convincing. I'm sure that is perfectly true for these yearly series' like Battlefield and major EA games (I mean the typical DRM candidates) that I mostly don't have any interest in. :)
But a game like Skyrim, as you say, might have been released as a Steam-free version a year later if the former TES fan base would have been unwilling to buy it (I only bought it because I didn't know Steam then).
There are probably better examples, though.
If you don't start with your anti-Steam movement yourself you could still stop prolonging the life of Steam by funding Steam. The more people do that the better as long as they have a quasi-monopoly! :)

-Funnily enough, I find these typical DRM infected EA games are often of bad quality (e.g. current Simcity vs. Cities Skylines from what I hear)

Ah ok, the main problem is we don't know most of the time at which moment the DRM is installed, because of it's silent intrusion in the pc : (

By the way, is someone knows the difference between Securom versions ?
Sometimes, I see on pcgamingwiki "Securom disc check" instead of "Securom".
Is that means this Securom version is just checking you have the original retail cd and doesn't write files in your HD ?

Well and that "if" didn't work obviously. I've waited quite some time before giving in to my TES urges (got the Legendary Edition which was already discounted as a present - it was on my Amazon wishlist).

Do I fund Steam? I don't even have an active Steam account. I don't know if Valve gets a cut from people buying physical media - I could imagine it's quid pro quo - publisher has DRM and Steam (as a store) gains potential customers. People buying on Steam are people funding Steam. And that's something I don't do. And I don't buy Steam keys at Humble or anywhere else, I don't take part in Steam game giveaways. If there is any money going to Valve from me, it's very very marginal. I'm sure I support more bad business practices with my money every day just by buying food.

So when you buy a retail game the money might not go to Steam at all? That would be great because that would mean that I have funded Steam very little with my earlier purchases. :D I will have to check if that's correct. Still no reason for me to buy any more games on there, though, because what it definitely does is contribute to games being only available on Steam.
Yeah, Skyrim probably was a bad example since Bethesda have started to dislike CD’s and DRM-free and seem to be looking to produce a lot of horse armor in the future

Worse, they want to have a share of other people's horse armours...
I don't know if you will find out anything, since the agreements between the publishers and Valve are not public. But if you find something - please share. :-)

so new user agreements which states that i rent the game instead of owning it, don't belong to drm? i'm confused.

That they want 75% of the horse armour is so ridiculous imo. Strange that any modder would be willing to do that since they could probably get much more on Nexusmods. I assume that the modders who first started to monetize a mod of theirs have a different deal with Steam.
25% aren't a payment for the modder but a compensation for providing Steam and Bethesda with extra revenue.

All right. :)

I don't think the user agreements have changed in that respect, anyway. They only rephrased that passage, I think.
Keep in mind that lawyers mean something different than we do when using the verb "own".
The way I understand it, the user agreement is no drm because it doesn't keep you from doing what you want with your purchases. There's a lot that you mustn't do -legally- but that doesn't classify as drm.