I am no coder but wouldn’t it be simple to lock the assets with a unique alphanumeric key when their uploaded. (basically auto encrypt them on upload). the buyer would then get a key after purchasing to unlock them during import, better yet ask them to log in first to unlock the asset inside the engine that way you know a resisted user unlocked them. (Require a key when the asset gets imported to another engine). . 
or maybe this is already been done? . . .or maybe it would be a waste of money on Unitys part? . . I say encrypt them, they would have to buy them first to pirate them. . .(Who would waste their time cracking asset files) . . .but then again i know nothing about computers 
Noob out!
In practice DRM tends to hurt legitimate users and does virtually nothing to deter pirates. While it hasn’t been tried on the asset store, the general idea has been tried before. Not likely to be something that will work well.
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I think my favourite historical copy protection disaster was the LensLok back in the 8 bit home computer days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenslok
Anyway yes I think it is a counterproductive waste of time trying to implement this sort of protection in Unity. What would be helpful is if Unity did more to help asset store devs to provide support only to users who actually bought their assets, since some cheeky pirates seem to have no qualms about trying to get support from devs. At the moment devs have to implement their own support systems using the fairly basic stuff Unity provide to determine legit customers via invoice number.
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Asset store purchases are shipped in .unitypackage files. These are the same format that can be exported pretty much any time you want for any files in your project. You can take the files and put them in a .unitypackage file and host it publicly. Even if Unity redistributed asset store packages in a different way, there would always be a way to export them as a .unitypackage which makes attempts at DRM practically impossible. If the DRM went super deep and dug itself into the files this would create online/offline issues, bloat files, potentially fail, require authentication servers, etc - all the hallmark issues that DRM systems already currently exhibit, but on a per-file level.
tl;dr : don’t waste your time.
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It would create a nightmare with collab and version control too, requiring Unity keep an auth server around at all times. It’s really not happening.
The funniest thing is I kicked a pirate off these boards a while back and he created a fake thread on pirate sites trying to defame me, claiming that I was the major cracker of asset protection and so on.
Too dumb to even realise there isn’t any protection 
The best form of asset protection authors can have on the asset store is simply - regular updates. The pirate versions will always lag behind and eventually stop, which forces pirates to abandon the asset or purchase it, unlike a game which generally will keep on working for the short time the pirate would need it.
Specially since Unity breaks things from time to time…
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You could always require a hardware dongle. 
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This is the answer to piracy right there. Create a good product. Keep innovating and updating it. Price it fairly. People will buy it.
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That sounds like a fun programming challenge to recreate!
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No. To use contents of the asset, you need to decompress and decrypt them. Once they’re decompressed, people can just copy and share decompressed data. Also, if assets are “encrypted on upload”, then they can be decrypted with the same key. Meaning someone can just share the key.
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The process would go like this: you buy an asset, you get a key that is attached to your untiy license. a key that work only for you. you import the asset, enter the key and decompress inside the engine. The key would become useless to someone who doesn’t have your unity license since that one time key is attached to your Unity license. When entering the key, the engine verifies it with the server before decompressing. . .
I bet those smart people at Unity could crack this easy in a 3 months, revenue for the asset store would definitely increase since the pirates are harming sales for store. . .
If the music industry, movie industry, etc. have failed why do you think Unity could do it in 3 months? Those industries have massive budgets and have invested tons of resources and time to their schemes and they all fall sooner or later. I think the record for one of their schemes was 2-3 years but most fail a lot sooner some almost instantly. Also they are usually protecting binary files usually on closed hardware which is easier. Protecting source code that has to be human readable on a generic PC is a much tougher task. It’s not worth the time to implement and DRM slows down legitimate users.
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The point is once decompressed and on your computer you can just export it like you could with any of your local stuff that has nothing to do with the asset store. Even if Unity didn’t provide the nice Assets → Export package functionality or did that same check when you try to export it would be trivial to just zip up the contents.
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Unity uses the exact same system (license key with server validation) to verify that you are a legit Unity Pro user. Yet there are ways on the Internet that can be found with only a little searching that allow you to completely bypass their system.
The concept itself has been around for a very long time (3ds max used it in the 90s) and is fully understood by pirates now with multiple techniques such as modifying the executable, emulating the remote server locally, and so on. It’s not effective.
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Even if you find a way to make it work, its just going to hurt paying users. So i buy a asset install on my work computer, make some changes and commit it to my git repo. Than if i go home, do i have extra hoops to jump through to make the asset work due to DRM or does it just work because it is already decompressed completely nullifying the point of DRM in the first place? Either outcome make it more trouble than its worth.
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No. Untold money has been spent over decades by very smart people and most of it didn’t work effectively, and anything that was moderately effective made things difficult/inconvenient for legit users. Also it’s utterly pointless for assets, which by their nature must be unprotected (even if it was possible), since you frequently need to use them outside Unity (modify code, tweak textures and models, etc.).
–Eric
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There are some assets I like so much that I’d be happy to ‘subscribe’ to them, especially in this era where frequent major updates to unity subsystems seems to have added maintenance workload to asset store developers and some form of ongoing revenue stream for them seems appropriate.
That would be nice, if unity did provide support for subscriptions on the asset store. Hopfully if so it would not be abused, and only used by those who maintian and update there products though.
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The sooner the industry treats entertainment as a consumable medium like food, that people keep buying over and over, rather than keeping and storing as property, the better (for all sides).
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games is one of the best examples of this as well since the cost of a game has not kept up with inflation at all.