Earlier quoted context omitted.
DRM punishes paying customers and does nothing to stop piracy. It reminds me of those "you wouldn't kill" segments at the start of DVD's that you couldn't skip, but just moaned at you to not pirate the DVD. But the only people they were telling this to was paying customers who bought the DVD. People who pirated the DVD, just plugged it into their computer, ripped out the content then published.
Sure, but why? Do the rightsholders believe that these mechanisms are effective at making them money somehow? How correct are they - are these mechanisms effective at stopping some amount of casual piracy and converting that into purchases?
Yes. Contrary to popular opinion among the geek crowd who tend to be very hostile to DRM, the people using it are not in fact completely ignorant and stupid. I write this as someone who used to believe similar things myself in my younger days, but who has now seen both sides of the coin and has moderated some of those views in light of that experience.
One thing that a lot of people don't seem to realise is that piracy often isn't about the price, but rather the convenience. If it's easier to find a ripped copy of something online, for example because it's not available in a certain region from legal sources, then people who want that content will go looking and they'll find the illegal sources. If it is available from legal sources, then to some extent DRM doesn't have to stop someone from being able to find a pirate copy, it just has to make it more inconvenient than finding a legitimate one. Given that any pirate content found online comes with a certain degree of risk, from malicious payloads pretending to be something else, poor quality or incomplete content that frustrates the person who gets it, and in some cases from honey traps that can result in legal action, this isn't entirely unrealistic.
One specific but very important instance of this, briefly mentioned already elsewhere in this discussion, is that if DRM can delay the widespread availability of some popular new work via pirate channels for a few weeks or even just a few days, that can make a huge difference to profitability. There have been AAA games where the DRM has been cracked but not for several months, and that might have saved the developers and legitimate distributors many millions of dollars.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is lots of content that is going to be many orders of magnitude less profitable even with a good run, simply because it's aimed at relatively small markets: niche music genres, software for running some specific type of shop or leisure facility, a documentary programme about an obscure interest, and so on. There is much less desire from the kinds of people who would be able to crack substantial DRM schemes to spend time on these things, so even simple measures can be quite effective in preventing that content from being trivially findable online, thus preserving the limited market for these kinds of products.
And finally, there is the simple but still relevant issue that some people genuinely don't realise piracy isn't legal or that what they're doing is piracy. "If it's on the Internet, it's free, right?" Even the most basic DRM schemes mean people probably have to do something that is clearly not the intended way of getting hold of the content, and that itself can be a useful deterrent for the "unwillfully ignorant" crowd.