I have trouble seeing it as that complex of a calculus
They wanted to make a DVD player.
DVDCCA (or someone) required them to block screen grabs during playback as a condition of giving them a proper license for CSS (or something) for their DVD player.
They blocked screen grabs during playback.
I doubt "is this really going to achieve anything" ever entered anyone's mind. It would just complicate the licensing negotiation for something Apple doesn't really give a crap about (some random third party app)
Thinking as a software developer, if a third party asked me to do something I thought wasn't a good idea for the end user, part of how heavily I'd push back on it would be how big a deal it really was to the user.
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Of course, it only applies to the inbuilt DVD Player application.
Obviously Apple would have known this.
I wonder if part of the reason they agreed to it is that they knew ultimately it was, in reality, basically no restriction at all.
I have trouble seeing it as that complex of a calculus
They wanted to make a DVD player. DVDCCA (or someone) required them to block screen grabs during playback as a condition of giving them a proper license for CSS (or something) for their DVD player. They blocked screen grabs during playback.
I doubt "is this really going to achieve anything" ever entered anyone's mind. It would just complicate the licensing negotiation for something Apple doesn't really give a crap about (some random third party app)
Thinking as a software developer, if a third party asked me to do something I thought wasn't a good idea for the end user, part of how heavily I'd push back on it would be how big a deal it really was to the user.
You may be right though.