I know very little about encryption aside from general principles on what it is, why we have it, and what it's goals for existence are. That being said, piracy, love it or hate it, it's here to stay for the time being.

I see the "problem" as a simple one. If there is chance that a systems DRM can be broken by merely one person, all efforts by that provider, and now most other providers, at least those that share methodologies, is pointless.

If a song, book, or movie are locked down, only legitimate subscribers can use that media under the terms the owner or distributor of that media define. But if only one person of the potentially millions is able to break that encryption, one person has now made all the work and man hours of into said encryption completely worthless.

If it takes a few weeks to break encryption that took months of multiple man hours to create, was that time wisely spent? Once it's broken, the data is now open to everyone. That being the case, I feel were in a "why bother" scenario.

The main reason I see illegally pirated material not proliferating even more is the technical barrier to acquiring the files. And often times, applications and protocols like bit-torrent, tor, VPN's, SSL links, etc. have too high a technical barrier for the common user to start pirating their media.

Once that burden is removed, it's game over and everything will be free at a click of the mouse, until something new comes along or a better business model that works with the fast changing technology world we are in.

When you are waging a war of one against millions and the one can actually win without putting themselves in harms way, you have a war that many will think is a sure fire win for the millions. A million against one is a pretty good ratio. But in this case, the one has a very good chance of annihilating the millions.

Eventually we will learn there is no point. In the meantime, people do this type of reverse engineering for a number of reasons I imagine. Curiosity, the challenge, making a political statement, and most importantly, to learn.

From this, perhaps something new is learned. And from that a new library is made which then gets adapted to detect intrusions on our personal computers and embedded devices. Who knows what may come of this research.

In the end, my position on piracy doesn't matter. What I do know is it will happen, encryption will be reverse engineered or broken, and those who can't learn the technology to use the new research will continue to find the barrier to piracy too high. Others won't, and will get their media freely, sans any lockdown from what you want to do with what you purchased.

Cars can go well over the speed limit. Some to speeds that make no sense to even exist. But they are legal, and most people follow the speed limit laws. The cost and barriers of breaking those laws are too high so people follow the rules. With DRM, the cost is negligible, so the rules will be broken.

But mainly, I think the answer to your question is that curiosity drives a lot of this. Aside from curiosity it could be a lack of trust. Researchers want to know what is going on with their media and hardware.

How do you know an encrypted file is not up to nefarious deeds? The common user never will. But a researcher like this would discover that the file was up to more than just DRM, and that could potentially help those millions of people become more aware of security, and learn to be more skeptical of what they buy.