I don't think protection is useless. I don't think it's particularly succesful either. What makes developers money is good games and good public/community relations. Would i pirate Oleg's games? Hell no, because the guy and his team delivers good titles and listens to his customers. Ok, maybe if the US release of SoW was earlier than the EU one, i bet most of the european fans would download a copy while waiting for their original boxed set to arrive, but since they would buy it anyway that doesn't count as piracy
Just like i said before if a company wants to do something about it, all they have to do is chose a method that will delay the widespread pirating of the game for the first 6 months so that they can make some good sales because wether anyone of us likes it or not, beyond the 6 month point ALL high profile games are already cracked. At that point, the company can aknowledge this fact and instead of keeping in place a system that's already been bypassed by pirates, they can patch it away themselves and save some legitimate customers the hassle of dealing with DRM.
I mean, it makes sense as long it serves a purpose, if it has been cracked it doesn't serve a purpose any more other than to annoy legitimate customers with silly requirements. Again, just look at bohemia interactive and ArmA 2, they sold quite a lot of copies for a niche genre, the game eventually got pirated and they decided to remove the DRM from their game. This happened with the first ArmA as well, there was a patch that removed the copy protection for that too.