I have personally seen both sides of the this and have worked on DRM solutions. The merits and efficacy of DRM highly depends on what you're locking down, how y

I have personally seen both sides of the this and have worked on DRM solutions. The merits and efficacy of DRM highly depends on what you're locking down, how you lock it down, and who is being locked out. For example. Hardware DRM (TPM/dongles/etc) is near impossible to crack, or worthless if you did crack it. Try and find a contemporary version of Steinberg/Avid software that has been cracked - to my knowledge it doesn't exist, at least not in a usable form. I've also heard of some content where DRM increased revenue by a moderate integer factor. On the other hand, I'm also aware of content in the same market that saw significantly increased revenue due to piracy, and other content where legitimate users pirated because it was easier to access than the legitimate content! It's all a balancing act over how much your users can tolerate and how much benefit you see. There's no one solution for all digital content, and sometimes none is the best business decision. I will say that people deciding to use DRM are not stupid and have better numbers than the author of this article. The big guys know exactly how much money they would lose by abandoning DRM. In a smaller shop it's more of a guessing game, but that's just because we have less information and forecasting ability.