I have been that engineer on occasion, though not specifically with regard to DRM. The pushback has typically been something like, "There is too much money on

I have been that engineer on occasion, though not specifically with regard to DRM. The pushback has typically been something like, "There is too much money on the line," or even, "If we are not setting the standard on this, someone else will, and it will probably be even worse." In the end, work is not voluntary for the majority of engineers involved in these things, and so you just have to accept that you are not going to win the argument unless you have a good argument that what you are being asked to build is not possible. Engineers often speak of how DRM is basically impossible, but that is only true in an ideal world; in practice DRM is good enough to satisfy business needs and concerns about web openness have yet to materialize (at least in a way that would undermine the business case for it). The relatively small number of hardware and software platforms one must deal with now further weakens the arguments against DRM.