I used to think this way until I met more people in music, art, entertainment, etc., and generally learned more about how the world actually works.
These people aren't dumb, and they pay a lot of attention to customer behavior just like marketing professionals do in any industry.
They also don't necessarily like DRM for intrinsic reasons. It's actually cumbersome. There are some interests in the industry that like it -- such as DRM vendors themselves and various hardware/console/software interests -- but the actual content producers are largely indifferent to it in itself.
All they want is for people to actually pay for their content. At the biz level they don't care how or why.
If users paid and refrained from engaging in bulk, industrial-scale piracy without DRM, then DRM would wither and die. There'd just be no value proposition to it -- it would add a layer of complexity, cost, and inconvenience to no benefit. You think these guys want to license an expensive proprietary DRM platform if their data shows it makes no difference in their sales numbers?
You've seen this happen within one or two semi-closed ecosystems. iTunes no longer uses DRM because data showed that users of iTunes who purchased music on iTunes were no more likely to pirate it without DRM than with it. But my guess is that users of iTunes who also purchase on iTunes are people who are generally in the habit of purchasing their music/movies and like the convenience of being able to do it with one click. These results from that specific user group do not necessarily translate out to the entire general public on all platforms.
I've also heard that Amazon has made DRM optional on Kindle and that many publishers don't check that box, but I've never published on Kindle so I'm not sure.
But I guarantee you that if Netflix allowed HTML5 video with no DRM mechanism you'd have a direct scripted cron-jobbed pipeline from Netflix to Popcorn Time and similar industrial-scale piracy ecosystems. I know it, and they know it, and that's why you're not gonna see DRM-free open Netflix or Hulu until people stop behaving in this way.
I mean come on people. It's cheap. A movie rental on iTunes (much more expensive than Netflix) costs what a freaking latte costs at Starbucks. Netflix is like 1/10th the cost of cable. Grow up. People have to eat and art must be a viable profession (with you know benefits, 401ks, etc.) or you're not going to get much of it beyond garage quality.
Yeah, record companies and movie studios can be jerks just like VCs and such, but all you're accomplishing is to bust the bottom out of the industry. When that happens, scarcity-driven thinking takes over and people act like even bigger jerks and everyone gets squeezed even more. You're not empowering the artist -- you're moving the artist even further down the totem pole while reducing the amount of money that's even available to trickle down to them.
VCs might be jerks sometimes but think about what would happen to the software industry if they disappeared or were no longer able to raise funds? What do you think programmer salaries would do over time? What would happen to innovation? What would happen to VC behavior if they were squeezed even more?
The stupid thing is I've actually seen people pay more to pirate via HideMyAss-type VPNs and torrenting VPSes (e.g. Digital Ocean nodes) than it would have cost them to just buy the damn feed. Now there's an ideology for you. (Not talking about people who use VPSes to watch outside the U.S.... that's a different issue. I'm talking about people here in America spending over $15/month to chug and seed pirated torrents instead of getting a Netflix account.)
(Again not aimed at anyone in particular in this thread, but at prevalent behaviors in the community.)