https://lobste.rs/s/jb6ftd/gpu_not_tpm_is_root_hardware_drm#c_scdl2i
It’s not about preventing piracy, it’s about controlling the distribution chain, and the people being scammed are the copyright holders.
Tech companies convinced media companies that they needed DRM to ‘prevent piracy’. Apple was initially the most successful. They convinced three of the big four music labels to let them distribute their music as pure data files, with no associated physical medium, and promised that their DRM would prevent piracy. Apple controlled the DRM scheme and so no one could create a competing music store that let people put their purchased music on the iPod and, since the iPod was the most popular mobile player, this gave Apple a near monopoly on the Internet distribution chain for music. That was great for Apple. Less good for the music labels and, somewhat shockingly, they noticed and allowed DRM-free downloads from other music stores. As I recall, piracy actually decreased after this (shockingly, if you sell people the product they want at a sensible price, they will buy it).
The movie industry didn’t learn from this. A load of tech companies wanted to replicate the success of the Apple experiment and kept telling movie studios how important DRM was. Netflix got various SmartTV vendors to add a Netflix app. You want to stream to them after they stop getting updates from the vendor? Sorry, has to be via Netflix. The DRM isn’t there to prevent copying, it’s to give Netflix control over the distribution path that ends at the TV.
Meanwhile, one person extracts a BluRay decryption key from some device or software player and dumps the high-definition video from a 0 disk and then distributes it. You only need one BluRay key to get any movie released before that key was revoked (and if it’s from a player that doesn’t have a secure update mechanism, studios may avoid revoking it to avoid complaints that their movies don’t play). Or, in some cases, people dump the cinema streams (modern cinemas are digital, they get movies distributed via satellite, encrypted with a per-studio key). This is a bit more risky because some studios have started watermarking the cinema streams so they can tell which cinema was responsible for the leak.
People probably could break Netflix DRM, but there’s little point when there are much easier paths. None of this matters because the point of the DRM isn’t to prevent piracy.