Pretty much this.
The people who will pirate are going to pirate regardless, you could offer all your movies DRM free for $1 each and some people will still pirate them.
So the purpose of DRM is to make maximum revenue from those who won't pirate, for example by charging more for group viewings of the movie or viewing on multiple devices.
It's important to identify that the price of a piece of media is not the only cost associated with it.
If it takes me 30 minutes round trip to get to a store, 15 minutes in a store. Let's say an hour total. Blockbuster went bankrupt because that expense was too excessive for people. You could rent from Netflix for a monthly fee and the DVDs got delivered to you, then the movies got streamed to you instantly. When I can sit on my arse and take 30 seconds to put on a movie, there's a massive 'cost' difference between a $1 DVD rental and a $8 monthly subscription, and the monthly subscription is extremely cheap.
Our world has entire industries worth billions of dollars around convenience and it's getting bigger every day. DRM is purposefully inconvenient, which means it's constantly on a losing battle.
However the question we have to ask is, is this losing battle a necessary evil to ensure the production of content?
I'm a writer in my free time. I do it for fun, and I might make money from it. A $100mil budget movie isn't going to be made for fun and the chance of making some money from it.
I don't have much disposable income so rarely buy movies that aren't on DVD in the bargain bin at the supermarket. However, recently I wanted [an excerpt of] a specific Disney movie - so I assumed, it's the 21st Century and all - that I could go to the Disney website, pay and download the movie and watch it (as you can skip the first two steps and do the rest elsewhere).
It was a genuine surprise to find that wasn't possible. What was more of a surprise was that I couldn't find anywhere to buy it, not Amazon, not the supermarket websites, it was almost impossible to find referenced on a Disney site.
That movie was of course available online - just not somewhere that I could directly pay for it.
It's definitely not about serving the content creators when you get to this situation.
This could be a special case, since Disney has an official, named policy to make titles available for only limited periods of time, then they're put on moratorium for some years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Vault
Disney employees are the content creators, no? You may find that point moot, I find it highly pertinent. People create artistic works. Copyright is supposedly - in it's base form - for those people (and the public) and not primarily intended to ensure shareholders get rich.
You don't just stick a bunch of creative people in a room and get a movie, any more than you put 100 people in a field and get a factory. Yes, it's a creative endeavor, but (speaking as someone who works in film)95% of the input consists of grunt work, spread across technical specialties from accounting to schlepping things into and out of trucks. Even the writing, acting, directing involves tons of grunt work. Indeed, the whole skill of film/TV work is to aggregate the work of hundreds or thousands of people so as to make present an illusion of a few people engaging in (mostly) effortless natural behavior.
Putting on my screenwriter hat (which is maybe 10% of my activity in this field), I very much want the option of selling my work to a producer for cash money. Money up front pays the bills. I have ownership interests in a few films too, but it isn't worth anything. since most films don't make any money this is sadly unexceptional. It's a brutal market, but also extremely egalitarian.
Take a potter. His visual style, assuming it is distinct, bears copyright protection. Rightly so, then an upstart can't legally come in and reproduce his work and steal away his customers without having put in the work needed to create the design initially. But the copyright in that work doesn't, and shouldn't, bear any sense of protection towards the jobs of those that quarry the clay, or the steel-workers that make the steal used in the potter's tools.
An entire network rests on the potters creative work, but the copyright is there to protect only the creative portion. If the potter is producing work without a distinct style then there will be no effective copyright in it's visual appearance and still all the others will get paid if there is demand for the product.
I'm not sure what your point is. You say the creativity resides with the employees who make the film, but my point is that the creation is only possible through their aggregated efforts and there is nothing wrong with pooling their collective effort on a for-hire basis and assigning the copyright for the result to a commercial entity with shareholders.
Your pottery analogy is broken because it doesn't reflect how a film is put together. Imagine, rather, a giant sculpture that requires the collective efforts of 100 potters.
Most of the inconvenience around DRM is because implementations can be buggy and it's often built into sub-par software but I don't think it's necessarily by design. Services like Steam and Netflix are doing well by providing more convenient implementations.
The endgame for DRM could well be that it becomes totally transparent, you consume whatever media you want on whatever device you want whenever you want and you get a bill every month based on some complicated price matrix and people will just pay it the same way they do their phone bill.
DRM is necessarily inconvenient by design. It exists to prevent customers from doing what they want to with the product. Perfectly reasonable actions become impossible or illegal due to DRM. I'm not sure how that's convenient in any way.
The idea would be to allow the end user to do anything they wanted with the product but to price discriminate between different users and different use cases. So it wouldn't be less convenient , simple more expensive in some cases but perhaps cheaper in others.
This end user always wants to be free to make copies of his products, use them without an internet connection, share them with family members, and use them on any platform of my choosing, even converting them to a different format if necessary.
No DRM system will allow me to do that, because that fundamentally challenges their control over the product. I'm happy to pay more for a product without DRM, but they're usually not available.
From a legal perspective you were never free to make additional copies for others without the permission of the copyright holder. Even format shifting was controversial in some jurisdictions.
The idea of DRM would be to allow you to do these things, but have a mechanism to bill you for them. The problem at the moment is that the ecosystem for this is incomplete.
It is absolutely legal to make a backup copy of a copyrighted work. [0] It is also legal to lend your purchased work to anyone you choose (making a copy). DRM prevents you from exercising your rights under the law.
Rick Falkvinge presents a history of the "Copyright Wars" since the invention of the printing press in 1453 ("But how will the monks get paid?"). I think a look at the 500 years of the history of this topic is relevant here.
at some price point you cross the convenience threshold.
that's how steam won.
content providers are not competing against the pirate bay, they're competing against the clients that facilitate their consumption: popcorn tv, etc.
I think the real change will happen when the old guard of advertising finally dies off -- the only thing keeping these old fashioned advertisement distribution networks (TV networks) afloat.
The Nail in the Coffin will be when TV stops being a cost effective form of advertisement, and the decision makers behind those dollars realize that fact.
So the purpose of DRM is to make maximum revenue from those who won't pirate, for example by charging more for group viewings of the movie or viewing on multiple devices.