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I think if you use VLC you can circumvent this despicable attack upon our freedoms.

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.

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