That's a USA problem. In most places, interoperability and backups are legally valid reasons to break both DRM systems and EULA's.
So "ignoring DRM" may bea reasonable strategy, but you need to work on your laws to ensure that things that are both socially accepable and morally good (such as breaking DRM to make backups) are not criminalized.
Even if it's illegal, society at large ignores it, and there is nothing practically wrong with ignoring it. Surely the right thing to do would be to nullify the 1201 section altogether, but currently it already makes unrealistic demands on reality and people simply don't consider this restriction valid.
The only thing that is illegal are immoral laws, besides, the culture that DRM laden companies bring to the world is utter trash anyway, we the world can easily do without that.
Nothing of value is lost.
Edit: it seems that again my post ends up as the wrong reply, it's for the grandparent, not the parent. :-S
But the fact that it's illegal has wider implications than the prosecution of the infringing person. For example, it becomes hard to distribute tools to remove DRM, should someone build them. Thus, it is unfeasible that DRM removal could become commonplace, since everyone has to do it for himself, or make a big effort to get help. There can't be legal commercial incentives to help people solve this problem, and even if someone made a free good tool for that, it would be legally attacked if it became popular; that means it probably won't be solved.
Who said those incentives should be commercial. They probably should make a point not to be. But practically this usually happens with placing the tools outside the jurisdiction of DMCA. For example repositories that host libdvdcss are located outside US, since the whole purpose of libdvdcss is to remove DRM from DVDs to enable playing them in open source players (which is naturally 100% fair use - i.e. to view the legally purchased content). And it is widely used - all Linux users basically use it to watch their DVDs.
The level of "mainstream" penetration of such tools will depend on the level of DRM penetration. The more DRM will be pushed on people, the more commonplace the circumvention tools will become. In practice however the developing trend tends to be to use less DRM in various areas, so circumvention tools are kind of not very widespread either.
Are you really so stuck on not breaking the law, just because it is the law? It is the twenty first century, everybody breaks the law either by downloading stuff or by driving too fast or by ripping a cd and putting it on an mp3 player.
