Sure. Search for a recent videogame on pirate bay, download a youtube-to-mp3 browser extension, get the calibre DeDRM plugin. Or, if you really want to understand my point, download and learn how to use a disassembler.
For the casual law-abiding user, it succeeds in making it harder to save/distribute. For everyone else, it's only a matter of time before the DRM is broken.
First and foremost that depends on the content being popular. For example there's a ~30-minute video I paid for on Amazon Videos that I would love to have a copy of so that I don't need an Amazon account and internet access just to play the video, but I can't. Why? Because of their DRM and the fact that I can't find it anywhere else. (Admittedly I haven't directly searched on piracy sites since I'm not into that sort of thing, but Googling didn't pop anything up even on piracy sites, and I would be surprised if it's actually out there somewhere.) Sad reality is it's not even because I wouldn't pay for it; I already paid for it once and I'd even pay for it again if someone sold a copy. But the DRM is "working" in terms of making it too hard to get a copy.
But even if some content is popular, DRM certainly prevents people like me from saving a copy, since I'm not one to go on piracy sites and the only reason I want a copy is so I don't have to get authorization from someone every time I want to play something I already paid for. It might be a dumb business decision since I'd already pay for it before getting a copy anyway, but maybe they think that still makes business sense even if I'd pay for it. Regardless of that it still seems to be working as intended.
Yeah, but that doesn't give me a "copy". It will lose quality (and I expect frames as well), and it requires letting the computer run through the entire movie at normal playback speed, which I haven't gotten around to doing. Again, it's been enough of a deterrent for me to do this, which is my bigger point. I never said it's 100% foolproof, just hard enough to be a deterrent.
> They've been trying to accomplish this for many years now, to no avail.
Any evidence that they haven't had any success whatsoever in making it harder to save/distribute?