Baen is basically the equivalent of the indie bands on emusic.com or whatever. They’re not relevant to the bigger picture.
I put in my vote for it going away, but I’m not at all sure about that. Here’s my rationale for and against DRM going away:
AGAINST: Consumers don’t care. DRM on MP3s was irritating, because you probably wanted to put your music on a USB stick to listen to it in your car, or stream it to your Squeezebox, or burn it to a CD (and yes, I know iTunes had some limited allowances for that), or whatever. But books? You can read them on your Kindle, on your phone, on your iPad, on your PC. What do you want to do with your book that you can’t do with it?
FOR: Consumers don’t care NOW. As they start buying next-gen readers, they might. If the Nook 3 is way better than the next Kindle, a lot of people might buy it, and then realize they can’t read their Kindle books on it, and then get upset. But I’m not actually optimistic about that happening, as it never did with MP3 DRM. People just used their DRM lock-in as a reason to keep buying the same device brand over and over.
AGAINST: Publishers are morons. DRM on ebooks is essentially irrelevant anyway, and doesn’t stop much in the way of piracy at all, because the people uploading to torrent sites aren’t stopped by it, and everyone who’s pirating just downloads the torrents. And meanwhile, Amazon is really good at making it so super-easy to just buy books from them that probably half their audience literally is technically incapable of pirating. So DRM is pointless. But publishers don’t care.
FOR: DRM locks in ecosystems. If you have 500 Kindle books, you are never going to buy anything other than a Kindle. And if you’re never going to buy anything other than a Kindle, you’re going to buy all your books at Amazon. And if most people are doing that, well, when Amazon decides to renegotiate terms with publishers in five years, boy howdy do they have some awesome bargaining power. Publishers won’t want Amazon to get that much market power, so eventually they’ll sell their stuff DRM-free, so that B&N can sell to the Kindle crowd and curtail Amazon’s power somewhat. (This is the main reason they ultimately went DRM-free with MP3s, after all.)
AGAINST: Publishers are morons. They’ve been taking counter-productive actions one after the other through this whole ebook transition, so just because something’s in their best interest is no reason to expect they’ll see it. I mean, it’s obvious NOW that the ecosystem lock-in thing is boosting Amazon’s power to dictate terms to them, but they’re still insisting on DRM, so.
Personally, I find that I really don’t care this time around. It’s easy enough to de-DRM stuff in Calibre, and if they make it hard, then I’ll just download de-DRMed copies after I buy the DRMed ones.