One problem that I've realized is that creativity in copy protection seems to be the goal with these companies. Thwarting the bad guys leads to more and complicated ways to protect the software and that makes using software more and more difficult.
The success of Steam has, unfortunately, spawned this online trend for DRM. Its my understanding that their digital authentication system wouldn't have even been necessary if they had a proper distribution method.
--
I think I wouldn't mind copy portection so bad if it was treated as a necessary evil and wasn't constantly tripping over itself to try and work better. If companies could allow an acceptable number of "losses" as something that actually gets the product out to the public and threw on the protection as an afterthough it would be a lot more helpful.
Those who are determined to get a working copy for free will regardless, but it could slow joe q gamer from running off a copy and giving it to all his friends if they aren't willing to really push the issue and make it too complicated to play.
---
On the comment on NWN and SecuROM, I will remind everyone on how it cracked the playdisks and Bioware recommended you copy it so your original wouldn't break. In at least one patch they had to remove SecuROM because it caused so many problems and nearly every version that it was patched up had problems being read in most disk drives. Patch 1.68 finally removes the CD requirement.