shmerl: No, that's quite wrong. Stuff will be pirated regardless. I'm not endorsing it, just saying that it's not something publishers will ever get rid of. However, you can indeed vote with your wallet by not using any DRMed services and not buying anything with DRM. That kind of vote publishers understand very well (i.e. losing money). If more people would have rejected DRM outright, it would have been dead long time ago.
You raise some pretty good points.
I'm a living example of how DRM doesn't work.
Since Steam appeared on the market I had to pirate every Steam game, because I was feeling that Valve's client was being forced upon me.
Since GOG appeared I've stopped pirating games. I wait for GOG's games to be on promotion and I buy them.
And, to be honest, I don't even bother to pirate Steam's games anymore. I have enough GOG games as it is.
Fact is: no form of DRM will ever prevent pirates from distributing the games.
The only reasonable policy is for publishers to trust the customers and sell their games at reasonable and honest prices.
I always use an old example to prove that most publishers have (had?) bad intentions:
In the old days (80's - early 90's) people would complain that videogames were too expensive. The software houses would justify the price by saying that game piracy was responsible for the steep prices.
If piracy was banned (they'd say) then the videogame prices would lower.
When the first CD games appeared it was very difficult to find pirate CD games. CD writers were too expensive and I think we can say that during 2 years (1993, 1994?) there was a very low rate of pirated CD-Rom games.
Was the price of games lowered? NO! It remained the same.
Except that, this time, the software houses would justify the price by giving the excuse of production values: CD burning, digitised voices, 3D intros, etc.
When a company plays dirty with its customers, then don't expect any love back.