"It's easy to point fingers, it's tough to propose meaningful solutions."
Precisely. When The Singularity (TM) comes, and all work is executed by software and robots, I can easily wrap my head around the idea that we would have no DRM, yet a vibrant creative ecosystem - after all, an artist wouldn't have to sell his wares in order to eat. The FSF position seems to amount to little more than realizing this potential future ideal, and then stubbornly insisting that we should act this way about intellectual property right now. It is completely divorced from the practical considerations of the life of h. sapien on Terra in the early twenty-first century.
I actually wrote a research paper several years ago that predicted the demise of DRM in music as the hassle of piracy vs. the cost of legitimate music consumption reached a point where it made more sense to buy a song for $0.99 than to try to torrent it. This prediction obviously came true, viz our present day Amazon and iTunes music stores. And I think that, generally speaking, so long as the cost of the media in question is below the "who cares" threshold for the mass market, DRM will be moot. The free-marketeers insist that economic progress will continually raise that threshold, theoretically straight on through to The Singularity (TM). This implies a "wait and see" approach, as one day $50 will seem like nothing for the average citizen to drop on a vidya game, which at that point will be DRM free.
Not an air tight case, but it at least has a few empirical data points in its favor. On the other hand, what the FSF has is a secular techno-liturgy that is highly seductive to a certain kind of mind - one which is very well represented in the techie parts of the world. I'm as guilty of that as anybody. I remember being 17 and voraciously reading and espousing every iota of output from the GNU crew. I /facepalm about that now, but c'est la vie. Perhaps this is just our demographic's homologue for The Communist Manifesto - a phase that everyone goes through, but that some never leave.