I can't tell you how much I agree with you.
I'm puzzled that so many people find this idea surprising. It's already proven to work. Of course, it doesn't work if your goal is to get rich, and it doesn't work for faceless corporations.
And I wouldn't consider standardized DRM "overreaching preemptive policing". Compare that to the existing legal consumption options and you'll realize that this "policing" has been happening all along.
Look, its great to say that everybody should be nice, but you've got to realize that this existing control is the backbone of the big media industry. Without DRM and the control it ensures, there is no way to ensure advertisments get watched. The ability to track the success of an ad would be lost. As it stands, media consumption is very easy for the industry to monitor and control. This is a huge industry with enormous power- why would they give that up over some upset rights activists?
I'm all with you when it comes to indie studios. If the non-DRM party is going to win, its going to be with our wallets. I'd love to see more indie video and music. Maybe new non-DRM offerings will win out, as we are starting to see in the game industry.
tldr: At the end of the day, if you want to consume mainstream media, you've got to put up with the mainstream consumption hardware/software.
I get the feeling it's the opposite. They didn't do any math and do it out of inertia or because "everyone does it", or because of the completely other and crooked reasons (like the article linked in the thread explains). DRM doesn't affect casual or non causal piracy - this was already discussed at length in the past here. Because once DRM is broken, piracy occurs using those DRM-stripped copies. I.e. it takes one pirate to break it in order for others to never deal with it. Therefore it doesn't lower piracy rate.
And I already explained how not using DRM can actually increase sales. And about DRM increasing piracy, there was an example from CD Projekt Red about their own game which they originally released with DRM (on disks) in parallel with DRM-free version (on GOG). And it was immediately pirated. But not the DRM-free version like you'd assume. It was the DRM-ed one! They said it was an interesting case study for them, which demonstrated that some pirates apparently break DRM for sport (i.e. who beats others to break DRM and pirate it). So it demonstrated for them that DRM boosted piracy. They never released games with DRM since, and advance the DRM-free distribution cause through their GOG service.
By the way, music is largely available DRM-free for quite a while already. You can buy DRM-free files on Cdbaby, Amazon or tons of other music sites. Which again demonstrates the point that DRM-free distribution works just fine.
> This is a huge industry with enormous power- why would they give that up over some upset rights activists?
That's exactly the point. DRM is all about certain control (over the market for example), but not about piracy. Surely those who have that control want to retain it. But they lie to the public claiming that DRM is used for preventing piracy, while really it's used for control. It just adds to the reasons to always oppose it.
Many who would casually pirate (or who would pirate without even realizing they were pirating) do not know about those DRM-stripped copies.
I don't put up with it, and hence have chosen to avoid devices which would impose DRM on me.
I'm a voracious reader. Several of my friends have asked why I don't have a kindle, and the answer is simple. Kindle may be the best reader right now, but unless I can freely move any books bought for it to another device down the road, I will REFUSE to pay the prices of e-books.
If I can not move it the same way I can move a physical book, I haven't bought it. Therefore, I will not pay even close to the amount of a paperback copy. Something like 30-40% of the physical copy price, at most, would be the correct range. And since I don't own it, I should expect to pay for it about the same amount I would get for it when taking it to a used book shop.
So, in reality the correct DRM'd e-book price for me would be something like 10-15% of the physical book's price. Anything more and I simply won't bother unless the book is supposedly really good. All in all, I'll rather leave the book unread for now and eventually get it for ~25% of the price second-hand.
That's a market the publishers don't make a penny on. Their loss.
Except that it's not legitimate. First of all as the post above implied, DRM simply doesn't advance the goal of "living off one's art" in any way. Or to put it in business terms, DRM doesn't increase sales (because it doesn't reduce piracy). I'd even say it decreases sales because some users avoid DRMed products and it as well increases piracy (because some pirates see breaking DRM as sport - i.e. they are more likely to direct their attention to a DRMed product to pirate it, rather than to a DRM-free one).
Plus, it's not legitimate to employ overreaching preemptive policing justified by "need to live off one's art". Same way it's not legitimate to violate everyone's privacy by installing police cameras in people's houses as a preemptive measure against crime.
> How would content producers possibly deter copying without exerting control on the consumption hardware and software?
They can't deter it. They can reduce it (i.e. turn part of the pirates into paying customers). The way to do it is old and well known, yet many fail to remember it - treat customers with respect (and not as criminals by default). Establish more direct relation with your users, don't be a jerk, be user friendly and so on. People appreciate services which are explicitly DRM-free. On the other hand, paranoid attempts to "deter all copying" result in treating all customers as criminals by default, which turns many of them into pirates (i.e. serves exactly the opposite purpose).
For some reason not being a jerk and being user friendly is a novel idea for many legacy publishers which they find hard to digest. Independent studios get it way better.