Some of us knew this 30 years ago

> there is a reason: it makes them feel warm and fuzzy that their copyrighted content is "protected"

I think they aren't that stupid. Most these days realize fully that DRM does nothing to prevent piracy. DRM is used for different reasons IMHO. Firstly to control the technology advancement (there were a few articles about that). Secondly as an excuse for incompetence. I.e. if some publisher doesn't do well having poor sales, they can always blame the pirates, and say - "at least we weren't sitting idle, we put the DRM on it!". Of course they won't say that they attempted to sell something that few people want to buy to begin with and that's what's causing their poor sales.