There's a difference between "In a perfect world, DRM is necessary" and "In the world we live in, DRM is useful".
To make a possibly-emotionally-charged analogy, it's like patent licenses for free software. In a perfect world, software patents wouldn't exist. But in the world we live in now, you cannot build practical systems without acknowledging that they do exist and they need to be dealt with, and that you need to be as clear about patent rights as you are about copyright. So e.g. the Apache License and GPLv3 have some text about software patents and how they interact. It is hugely important for some people (depending on their jurisdiction, quality of counsel, amount they care, etc.) that they use licenses like those that acknowledge software patents. That's not to say that software patents are inherently useful, and certainly we should work towards a world where they're not, but if you're building a real project, you have to work with the world as it is.
In the world we live in, the people who own the content that lots of people want to see have decided that they care about DRM. Whether they should care about DRM (or whether the viewers should want to view that content, for that matter) is beside the point for the discussion of whether DRM is currently useful. By all means—including the means of making DRM technically cumbersome—convince them to stop caring about DRM. But the ability to provide DRM is, unfortunately, useful today.
> But the ability to provide DRM is, unfortunately, useful today.
It's useful in the sense that snake oil is useful after somebody signs a contract to use snake oil. That doesn't mean it's actually useful, it means somebody signed a dumb contract.
When that happens you can go out and take bids from snake oil suppliers and rub snake oil on your skin every day that does nothing but cost money and make you smell bad, or you can fix the contract.
To make a possibly-emotionally-charged analogy, it's like patent licenses for free software. In a perfect world, software patents wouldn't exist. But in the world we live in now, you cannot build practical systems without acknowledging that they do exist and they need to be dealt with, and that you need to be as clear about patent rights as you are about copyright. So e.g. the Apache License and GPLv3 have some text about software patents and how they interact. It is hugely important for some people (depending on their jurisdiction, quality of counsel, amount they care, etc.) that they use licenses like those that acknowledge software patents. That's not to say that software patents are inherently useful, and certainly we should work towards a world where they're not, but if you're building a real project, you have to work with the world as it is.
In the world we live in, the people who own the content that lots of people want to see have decided that they care about DRM. Whether they should care about DRM (or whether the viewers should want to view that content, for that matter) is beside the point for the discussion of whether DRM is currently useful. By all means—including the means of making DRM technically cumbersome—convince them to stop caring about DRM. But the ability to provide DRM is, unfortunately, useful today.