Mark Shuttleworth has a great tagline on what DRM is an instance of:

There are some ideas that are broken, but attractive enough to some people that they are doomed to be tried again and again.

He goes on in a brilliant essay about the pointless costs the content industries (music and movies in particular) have piled on themselves in their vain attempts to stay with their pre-digital business model. Here's the question the content owners ought to ask themselves:

I wonder what the cost of all the crypto associated with HD DVD/BluRay is, when you factor in the complexity, the design, and the incremental cost of IP, hardware and software for every single HD-capable device out there.

Now ask the same question about the worst DRM schemes around (including the absolutely ludicrous PVP-OPM on Vista). All these schemes do is irritate the people who want to pay you, while doing reasonable things (like taking the content from a DVD they own onto a PC for travel purposes). The pirates? They aren't even slowed down. So DRM persists mostly via mindless inertia, and a sheer lack of interest in the customer base.

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