If it works with WINE, I am guessing the situation is not quite that simple?
Most computers don't have TPMs but Netflix runs on any Windows OS that has Silverlight. In the end, it is still software using the Win32 API, it just required implementing some Microsoft-specific functionality they had going on.
I do wonder how the Netflix apps not on Microsoft platforms work though. The Android, iOS, and game console versions mainly.
When the Netflix android application came out I had high hopes for Netflix on desktop GNU-ish/Linux, particularly when I learned that the Netflix application would work on rooted/otherwise open android phones. That hasn't happened though, so I guess either nobody has bothered to see that through, they got hit with law stuff, or for some reason it isn't technically feasible.
Which is all Wine provides, hence the name: Wine Is Not an Emulator.
(Alternately, I guess you could insist that glibc is a POSIX emulator on top of the OS kernel.)
(My point? All of a sudden I need a point? When did that happen?)
For most intents and purposes they both smell the same, but the devil is in the details.
In fact, I often make the container distinction: you have containers (Zones / Jails / OpenVZ) and you have virtual machines (VMWare / Vbox / Qemu / etc). WINE falls more into the containers category because it runs Windows PE natively on the host but in a sandboxed environment (and in an approximate sense of the term, chrooted) but with hooks that go between the host and client.
But, like with WINE, many lump containers into the virtualisation pigeon-hole as the full hardware emulation suites even though you're not actually emulating any hardware with containers.
You can very easily get the raw file using Wireshark. Ever heard of protocol analysis? You don't need to reverse engineer anything to get the file.
Not sure where you're getting those facts from, but Netflix does use DRM extensions in Silverlight as was pushed into using Silverlight because the copyright holders demanded Netflix to do so (just as Love Film were forced to switch from Flash as well).
It would be daft for a company who's business is based on streaming content to the masses (such as Netflix's business is) to switch to a platform that fewer people use simply because fewer people use it. No sane web company would do this unless their content was threatened to be pulled by the content owners.
Downloading a copy over the net that someone else ripped can be detectable.
That being said, I agree that piracy is just piracy. In my mind grabbing something from bittorrent/usenet is the same as using a VPN provider to stream from a different country, is the same as watching an illegal streamed copy on some website, is the same as ripping a copy from a friend/public library.
Did you pay to access it? Does the copyright holder make it freely available? No?
Then it's piracy.
Is there a reason then that they use Silverlight instead of flash?