Let me give you an alternative view: DRM is a highly effective way for the movie industry to make money. No, it is not perfect, but DRM creates a system where

Let me give you an alternative view: DRM is a highly effective way for the movie industry to make money. No, it is not perfect, but DRM creates a system where: 1. Sharing is hard. Plenty of people legally purchase a movie, and then want to give it to their friends; DRM makes that difficult and thus generates at least some additional sales. 2. Forced obsolescence -- people who buy media legally can be forced to buy it again and again every time they buy a new entertainment device. 3. Creative business models -- in a world without DRM, you could not offer "rental" downloads, "streaming" would just be a form of "downloading," and the industry could not offer special "deals" like "family" passes that permit more than one account holder to view a purchased movie. All of these are ways to make money that could not happen in a world without DRM. Yes, DRM is always broken after enough time -- that is not as much of a problem as you might expect. As long as the time between a DRM system being deployed and being broken is long enough that the industry makes back more than the cost of developing the DRM system, the system worked. Developing new DRM systems from time to time is just the cost of doing business, not really a problem for anyone in the industry, and as you point out it may even work to the benefit of certain participants. I am not a big fan of DRM (in fact, I would argue that the entire movie industry needs to rethink its business model, embrace the true power of file sharing as a means of distributing movies and focusing more on using movies as a draw or value-add for other lines of business), but it is not as if the movie industry executives are a bunch of buffoons who continue to waste their money after decades of broken DRM. If DRM was not adding to the industry's profits they would have stopped bothering with it -- see e.g. the music industry, which has a somewhat different business model and which has largely given up on their DRM dreams.