Digital Restrictions Management

Contrary to Jake I actually see DRM as the main driver to invent new proprietary formats. Sure, lazyness can induce programmers to just shove their data structures on disk, but outside of the embedded space, I see that less and less often. Actually, this prime virtue of all programmers works in the other way too: there are readily available libraries that help to export pdf, odf, mpeg, etc -- why not just rely on these and be done?

That's where DRM comes in. Since it is basically an arm's race there is always motivation to crank out new schemes and formats.

The most problematic restrictions managment requires an online server to open a document. When this server inevitably goes away, the only hope of future historians is that they can easily crack our puny crypto on their (quantum?)computers.