I see Sun's decided that they don't have enough problems - now they plan to offer an open source DRM solution. I think this quote from their lead on the project, Glenn Edens, says it all:

But Edens isn’t so pessimistic about DReaM. He maintains that while DRM isn’t perfectly secure, it can still work, as long as it doesn’t force users to circumvent it in order to use the product normally. “We’ve started a very fruitful dialog with the EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation]. We have been working on a white paper to describe a possible solution to the fair-use issues. The hard question is: ‘How can you have an access and authentication system that also respects fair use?’”

The problem is right there in the premise - that DRM can work so long as users can use a product normally. For a music CD, that means making as many copies for personal use as I want, and playing the music in any format I want. In other words, so long as I don't start giving (or worse, selling) the product to others, how I make use of it shouldn't matter. That runs smack into the DRM wall, as it's highly concerned with those exact issues - how many copies (and what sorts of copies) I make.

At the end of the day, the pig is still a pig, regardless of how nice the dress is.