> the enginners implementing these schemes must surely realize it's in vain
I wonder, if it is so "in vain", why have so many folks been so spooked by it (e.g. Stallman, Doctorow)? Are they worried about the needless increased cost to consumers, or maybe they think it might actually work well enough? If you are really against DRM, I don't get how saying DRM "will never work" will help avoid it.
I worked at TI on OMAP MShield, TrustZone stuff (iirc we were the first (w/ Galaxy Nexus) to have good-enough DRM to be the first to have Netflix HD) and later at Trustonic which is the OS (and more) vendor of AMD PSP and many ARM-based devices.
Everyone* knew that some use-cases of DRM meant a single successful hack meant the content being leaked. It is mostly the low-level designers (CPU arch, physical die, OS/firmware etc) to be responsible for making it more difficult/expensive. Some use-cases will be necessarily be concerned with simpler attacks e.g. recording a few key pages of a secure/DRMed PDF with a hidden camera (and thus more complex protections like a Central Licensing, watermarking server becoming involved). There are some use-cases of DRM where leaks are not a big issue (e.g. a more dynamic content which involves occasionally communicating with peers/servers).
[*] This is probably not true. That basic case is easy enough to see, but I've personally seen other schemes where customers leave out key steps or end up trusting something that shouldn't be trusted.
@hlandau makes good points, I think.
I've always been on the fence regarding DRM. I think property rights seem like a decent idea so why not extend that to the digital realm? Do we not want digital scarce goods, collectibles? Is a technical enforcement of property rights superior to meat-space? I see many cool uses for DRM, trusted computing (and in the end I think it would transfer power from publishers, platforms, manufacturers to creators and owners). It's interesting (and makes sense) to see how blockchain people are generally in favor of trusted computing (though for many it seems to be too much of a "silver bullet"); iirc bitcoin wallets were some of our first customers after video DRM.
I've talked with many folks over the years (including EFF people) and I've still not gotten a sense of why the theory of DRM is bad (I would agree that most implementations have been horrible), other than it starting a snowball towards a cyberpunk dystopia future, maybe. I 100% agree that "you own the device, you should be able to control it". That means I support the right to tinker, am against DMCA, and think owners of devices should be able to run whatever software they prefer and be able to wipe, disable, replace whatever they want (e.g. root of trust). While I worked at Trustonic, I pestered the CEO many times (and rallied co-workers to do the same) to open source the OS. In the end there was (allegedly) not a good enough business reason to do so (and of course open source competitors began to pop up: trusty, tlk, OP-TEE, etc).