DRM, or digital rights management, is not very effective, and it never truly will be. That doesn’t mean someone shouldn’t pursue a job in a content creation field, however, because, in practice, people won’t sell much less than they would have anyway. They just need to remember that their work is going to be pirated, and the best they can do is delay it.
As long as we have DRM, we will have piracy. Piracy is in a constant arms race with DRM, and for every new DRM development, an old technology is cracked. Take DVDs for example; at the time their copy protection was phenomenal and could not be beat, but by the time Blu-ray came out, it had been fully cracked. Blu-ray’s AACS (Advanced Access Content System) encryption has been broken, too, constantly having to revoke the keys used to encrypt the discs. DRM is also expensive to implement, so having tougher DRM technologies means that a product will cost more as a result, meaning more people will want to pirate it. This means big companies can only hope to delay the pirates long enough to get a return on their investment.
DRM in its current state relies almost completely on the secrecy of encryption keys. The second they get out, the encryption is rendered useless. The device playing the content will always have access to these encryption keys, which means someone could very easily obtain this key.
Not all DRM techniques involve encryption technology, however. While significantly weaker, sometimes all someone does is say what you can or can’t do through a license. For example, some websites use these licenses as a condition of entering, similar to how you need to accept the terms and conditions before you can install software. These are called “clickwrap” licenses. While not as common for things like music and movies, this is one of the easiest ways to implement DRM, and is still fairly common, even if it can be easily bypassed.
Cost is also a big factor. Even if you manage to create a theoretically perfect and unbreakable DRM technology, the people who were going to pirate whatever you created just won’t buy it. The cost of the DRM also forces you to raise the price of the final product, which means even less people will buy it. This theoretically perfect DRM technology could never exist, however, because at some point the raw data needs to be accessed in order for the product to be experienced by the user, creating a vulnerability that makes piracy possible.
DRM, while ineffective do to cost and piracy, won’t go away any time soon. It currently is the best option we have for distributing copyrighted content without allowing illegal copying and access, and likely will remain the best option for years to come.
Mark P • Sep 28, 2025 at 3:22 pm
You raise several valid points, but I don’t think they support your argument that DRM “is not very effective.” I would argue that DRM is effective enough, for the following reasons:
1. The incremental cost of DRM is likely close to zero. Once you’ve created it, I strongly suspect (lacking actual facts) the cost to protect additional content is very low. The total cost of DRM spread across all content should similarly be tiny.
2. The point isn’t to prevent all piracy – it’s to reduce it. Same as putting locks on your house. Anyone can kick in the door if they really want to. Not an argument for forgoing the lock.
3. It’s also not the case that everyone who would steal content wouldn’t buy it. It depends on the relative ease and cost of purchasing the content legally. If a Porsche cost a dollar, they probably wouldn’t get stolen. Similar to MP3s on Amazon. I guess I could find a way to get them for nothing, but my time is more valuable.
It’s not that DRM is ineffective IMO. It’s just that it’s imperfect.