DRM is fool's gold for content providers on its own. What it's really there for is Palladium/Trusted Computing/... Now, if you can hear it, you can rip it, and the content providers can go fish. If TCPA is enabled in hardware (as new PDAs are beginning to do), then even if you can rip it, you can't distribute. You can't tell people how to crack the protection, because of DMCA. Each person that wants a copy (even for themselves) has to break the protection, one by one or buy from the people that have the copyright.

On its own, DRM is stupid and evil. Alloyed with TCPA, it is stupid, even, suffocating, and unavoidable. Stopping DRM is not the key - stopping Palladium is.