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dgatwood, as someone who reads widely about computer security, I can only agree with most of what you wrote.
Note however that the main (potentially useful) counter argument goes something like: DRM stops users who don't know any better from casually sharing what they bought. With consumer products like books and music this is likely to be a significant proportion of purchasers. (In the past I've even, partly tongue-in-cheek, suggested that DRM "protects" such users from accidentally breaking the law when they don't know any better.) Obscurity is indeed all that is required for those that don't know how to look deeper.
The second argument, specific to books, is that a significant proportion of readers buy a book and read it just once, so they're not going to care a lot if they can't get it back again. This doesn't cover everyone (it doesn't cover me), but it does mean that the problem of disappearing servers is less significant (statistically) than it may appear.
Note that the stuff about being able to scan and OCR a book is, I think, I bit of a furphy (or at least misleading). The ability to do this has existed for a long time, since well before ebooks became commonplace. (And, even before that, there were plenty of fast typists that could quickly reproduce the content of a book.) Indeed Project Gutenberg has operated on essentially this basis since 1971. It may be getting easier and easier, but there still remains considerable work involved in getting a good end-result, enough that most people are not going to do this just so they can pass a copy on to their friends and neighbours (professional pirates are a separate issue). For this reason I earlier suggested that print-only publication was still one of the more effective (and acceptable) forms of DRM.
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