The trick of the whole situation is that the only protections that even kinda work are the ones that use bad data. However, it can't be TOO bad or you wouldn't be able to play it at all, and the amount of peopel who watch movies/listen to music on their computers is too large a segment to ignore.
I recently got a copy of Hitch to take with me on vacation. My plan was to rip to my external drive, with some other movies, and stick it in a bag. We can watch it on a laptop when we get there, or pipe it through the laptop to composite-in on the TV. However, the copy I got was a used movie rental and has that Sony protection with the bad sectors. Mythtv, dvd::rip, and mencoder all freaked trying to rip it. Maybe there's a way around it with those, but I don't know.
What I do know is that mplayer didn't care as much about making the file a perfect rip and played it just fine. Once I realized that, it didn't take me long to do the math and just play it to a file through mplayer and create my own nice little vob. Even the best CD copy protection isn't going to stop people from connecting line-out to line-in -- old school tape recorder style.
Ditto for DVDs, it's not that hard to play your DVD out to PVR in. Standard formats just can't be protected too much or they become useless, and you aren't going to sell a new standard to people who are very happy with the old standard. No one is going to be able to force everyone to change their TV, stereo equipment, computer hardware, car stereo, radios, boomboxes, dvd players, VHS players, and put special DRM chips in everything, including ALL speakers and microphones and video cameras. That's what you'd have to do to keep any copies from being made ever.
No law can protect a bad business model forever.
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