10 ms·

Sorry for the obligatory anti-DRM content, but I have to defend my right from this poor management scheme. Stay off my loan, DRM. I unchecked this box myself w

• Toenex 10y ago
  >Moreover, if it works on Firefox/Linux, how can they prevent someone grabbing the video from X and the audio from Alsa? What is the usefulness of DRM in the first place, in this case? This is such an important flaw in all DRM. At some point all this digital wonderment has to be turned in to light and noise. This is the weakest point in the chain and it only takes one person with a decent re-recording setup to create a copy and then distribute it for any DRM to be bypassed. A £50 mic setup in a home studio will allow a good enough copy of most pop music to be made. Even if the hardware was in on the DRM game (looking at you Apple), my ears and eyes are not.
  • sgift 10y ago
    That's nothing new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole DRM is not there to make it impossible, but to make it inconvenient, to copy the things, so as long as it is "harder" with DRM than without it will persist.
    • loudmax 10y ago
      Agreed. They don't need to make it impossible, they just need to make it inconvenient enough so for most users, copying stuff out of DRM isn't worth the hassle. This cuts both ways. It's more convenient to watch a movie from a file on a NAS than it is to watch a DVD, especially if the DVD has unskipable ads or is coded for the wrong region.
      • sgift 10y ago
        > It's more convenient to watch a movie from a file on a NAS than it is to watch a DVD, especially if the DVD has unskipable ads or is coded for the wrong region. Absolutely. One of the reasons for Netflix success is that it is so simple to use compared to alternatives. Open, click, watch.
      • Toenex 10y ago
        Yes, but the question is do you even need the DRM or is the 'copy hassle' sufficient? You only need one person willing and able to subvert the DRM to make and then distribute an unrestricted version. Individuals don't need to 'unDRM' content themselves it's out there if they want and know how to get it. I think that what DRM provides is the illusion of control. This illusion is good enough to allow Netflix and similar companies to gain access to other peoples content upon which they build a very convenient system for media consumption by anybody who can use a TV.
        • ams6110 10y ago
          Sure, but again, for most people Netflix is cheap enough and simple enough that they won't even bother looking for torrents or other "illegal" versions. That in itself takes some time and know-how that the average consumer just doesn't have or want to bother with.
      • lewiscollard 10y ago
        > They don't need to make it impossible, they just need to make it inconvenient enough so for most users, copying stuff out of DRM isn't worth the hassle. I disagree. It merely requires one clever person to crack it and then it's available to anyone over BitTorrent within hours. Any functioning DRM scheme must make it practically impossible for everyone.
    • jasonkostempski 10y ago
      Funny thing is, it's 10 times harder to get the DRM'd version than the clean version.
    • tskaiser 10y ago
      The problem is that, at least for stuff like music and video, the "harder" part is an illusion for most popular stuff given the sheer size of the demography watching. Out of so many people there is bound to be quite a few who decides to do this right away anyway. Especially as the methods given can essentially be automated once you got the setup. This means that DRM is, by all accounts, completely and utterly useless for the given media. Meanwhile people who desires to legitimately consume the content are hit by the side-effects of draconian DRM due to no fault of their own. It becomes easier to consume the pirated rather than the actual content, making the pirated content a superior product. Money doesn't even factor into this equation.
      • intransigent 10y ago
        Be nice and play ball, or you'll be subjected to a set-top-box appliance again. (it puts the lotion on its skin or it gets the hose again.)
      • bisby 10y ago
        I was trying to watch rick and morty on linux the other day. popcorn time was the easiest route to take. I did the free 7 days of hulu. but cancelled immediately because their flash player couldnt make it more than 30 seconds without crashing. I eventually settled on Amazon Video (which I had to spoof being chrome on windows to get it to allow HD). I really dislike that my wife can't watch the videos I purchased on amazon video even though we have a linked account. So the only place I could find that would actually give me the content in exchange for money, wont even let other people in my household watch it. The only downside to piracy at that point was any ethical/moral/legal issues. But those wont stop people for long if the issues with other methods become too unbearable.
        • tskaiser 10y ago
          Exactly, and the problem with DRM then becomes that, outside making the pirated content a superior product, it outright antagonizes the legitimate consumers. In short money is poured into making the product less desirable by making it harder to acquire and consume legally. Of course this is all lamenting how utterly bonkers DRM is conceptually. It still leaves the problem of pirates unaddressed. To survive in the digital age we need a debate about how to make a business model where this problem is a fact of reality rather than putting on blinders and saying it can be prevented.
  • jstanley 10y ago
    Just wait until a special brain implant is required in order to listen to DRM'd music :)
    • ajford 10y ago
      Don't... don't give them ideas... They come up with such crappy ideas on their own, we don't need this horror suggested to them.
      • throwanem 10y ago
        Why expect this won't be demanded functionality in any brain-computer interface that supports media playback? The technology isn't there yet; when it arrives, the rentiers will be there to meet it.
  • phs318u 10y ago
    :-) You just reminded me of this classic. Hope the younger readers enjoy... "DRM Helmets: An idea whose time has come" http://archive.oreilly.com/1540.html http://archive.oreilly.com/1540.html
  • nothrabannosir 10y ago
    DRM isn't here for ("against") the consumer; it's done to control the media playback device vendors (screens, tivos, ...). There's a great essay on this which I can't find right now but it comes down to: even with flawed drm, content providers have control over the media devices market. Planned obsolence of playback media, etc etc. Once you look at drm from this perspective, it suddenly makes a lot more sense. A good counter example to the incompetence-over-malice rule of thumb. Edit: this, btw, is also why you can't meaningfully "opt out" of DRM. It isn't about you. (Edit 2: I now realise that without proof this is nothing more than a conspiracy theory, and being plausible just makes it more susceptible to confirmation bias.. if someone has the actual essay that might shed some light on this :p )
  • a3n 10y ago
    > Even if the hardware was in on the DRM game (looking at you Apple), my ears and eyes are not. Until they start selling the iEye. People will buy it.
• doikor 10y ago
  > Seriously, I have no words to describe the hoops content providers want us to get trough, so that we can play our "legally owned" (well, it technically is closer to a lease nowadays) content. Usually it is the content owner not the provider putting in terms that requires DRM schemes for playing their content on the internet. And once you have the requirement for some content you usually require it for everything so you won't confuse users if they only could play some content.
  • wolfgke 10y ago
    > Usually it is the content owner not the provider putting in terms that requires DRM schemes for playing their content on the internet. But at the end it's the customer who decides. As long as there are people who still subscribe to watching un-movies (DRMed streams), the studios can say to Netflix "see, our requirements for DRM don't hinder customer adaption". If on the other hand people would cancel their Netflix account becuase of DRM (and state the reason) and even began to cancel friendships to people who still subscribe to DRMed services, the whole situation would be quite different: As a first step probably Netflix would probably introduce a Netflex-NoDRM subscription, which only gives access to few, but DRM-free movies and would try to regain the customers who canceled their subscription because of DRM. Now it's a market decision: If lots of people switch to Netflix-NoDRM (despite less movies), Netflix will get very convincing arguments for negotiations with the rights holders (since this will probbaly not happen spontaneously, I suggested to cancel friendships to people as long as they still subscribe to the DRMed subscription to increase the social pressure for NoDRM a lot).
    • TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Well, it's exactly why the situation is what it is. "If only millions of people could each, individually, make a huge personal sacrifice, things would be different" is true, in the sense that if things like that ever happened, we probably wouldn't recognize the resulting society. Humans don't coordinate like this. It's our weak spot. To fight DRM, we need to make DRM-free solutions better than DRMed ones, in the same way piracy is better than copy protection - more convenient, faster, hassle-free. EDIT: To clarify apparent misunderstanding: what I mean is that people don't suddenly, spontaneously coordinate in large groups. It always requires an external influence that will align the default, short-term human thinking with the goals of the group at large. That influence can either push people into coordination (e.g. governments enforcing laws), or pull them (charismatic leaders). But without that influence, coordination generally doesn't happen - it doesn't work "by itself".
• legulere 10y ago
  I think the fact that it's streaming is actually taking one of the main arguments against drm away: If I own it, I shouldn't be hindered by drm to do with it whatever I want. Still all DRM in the end is futile and can be reduced to a cat -and-mouse game.
  • pwdisswordfish 10y ago
    Modern cryptography isn't mathematically impossible to break either; you just need to put a high amount of computational resources into breaking it. And even that is only presumably; nobody has proven yet that NP-complete problems (on whose hardness its robustness rests) cannot be solved in polynomial time. Despite all this, nobody seems to claim that cryptography is 'futile'. Sometimes mere infeasibility is enough.
    • amalcon 10y ago
      Modern cryptography is typically in the class where, barring some mathematical breakthrough (a la the P/NP thing), it would take many times more compute resources than the Earth has for longer than the Earth will likely exist to break. Modern DRM is typically in the class where you can either spend at most a few days with a debugger and a code editor, or buy a $20 knockoff device to break it. These are not really comparable.
      • j1vms 10y ago
        > (...) it would take many times more compute resources than the Earth has for longer than the Earth will likely exist to break. Claims like these are often misleading as they assume that i) malicious parties' capabilities, ii) what is and isn't possible, and iii) implementation correctness, are all static known factors. Cryptography is more akin to putting a lock on a fence - it's going to keep most people out or perhaps deter prying eyes, but it's all probabilistic in the end and depends on who's doing the prying.
    • tskaiser 10y ago
      DRM is fundamentally broken, compared to cryptography, in that by necessity everyone has access to the keys and the content has to be decrypted to be consumed. This makes DRM a client-side security issue with some pretty bad premises. It is not a question of theory, but practice, DRM gets systematically broken all the time because of this.
• syshum 10y ago
  While I too oppose DRM, I find it less objectionable on a Subscription service like Netflix because there no assumption of ownership. I do not own the content on Netflix I did not buy it, I am renting a access licenses to a library of content for a monthly fee. Now DRM on BluRay, DVD, Digital Downloads, Games, etc that do have an assumption of ownership because I pay a onetime fee with the expectation of accessing that content in a non-time limited way. Those types of things should never have DRM
  • kuschku 10y ago
    Technically, it's like getting a DVD from a library for a day — you can still make a private copy (Privatkopie) under copyright law.
    • coldpie 10y ago
      Whose copyright law? Certainly not in the US.
    • ajmurmann 10y ago
      I guess you are referring to German copyright law. But I don't think even there it's legal to make a copy of you are just renting the movie.
      • kuschku 10y ago
        It is, as long as it’s for personal use, and you don’t have to break DRM on movies or music (this last part was added due to the WIPO treaties requiring that).
    • lorenzhs 10y ago
      Only as long as you don't circumvent DRM, which in practice voids the whole Privatkopie thing because even CSS is counted as "wirksamer Kopierschutz" (effective copy protection), which is kind of a joke.
      • kuschku 10y ago
• pipio21 10y ago
  "Moreover, if it works on Firefox/Linux, how can they prevent someone grabbing the video from X and the audio from Alsa?" Well, that's exactly what they want to remove. HDMI for example forces all companies that use it to "respect intellectual property" removing the option of copying without errors. If the companies don't do it, the permission to use HDMI gets voided, so everybody has to do it. With Linux and Firefox they want to add firmware and special hardware so Linux could "manage the video" but not see it. For example an nvidia graphic card uses a firmware that is closed source, even with noveaou project. In their perfect world a Linux program could give orders like "draw this frame on the screen" without actually being able to access the frame. Of course the screen also has DRM. With new CPU processors DRM and secret firmwares even OSes are being installed in the chip. This DRM has total control of your machine including all memory peripherals and so on. They are actually making this DRM mandatory so they can spy on users and report "illegal practices" automatically. Microsoft is already sending home all your watching media metadata. Most video is also compressed so if you take single frames or audio buffers and compress it again you lose a lot of quality. That is because for example DCT blocks positions will change.
  • AnthonyMouse 10y ago
    > This DRM has total control of your machine including all memory peripherals and so on. The foundational premise is false. You can build a machine that follows DRM, what you can't do is know if you're talking to that machine or some other machine controlled by pirates who extracted the keys from the that machine. Nor can you stop them from extracting the keys when they have physical control. But the futile attempts are certainly expensive for everyone. Though much less expensive for the pirates, who don't have to follow the rules and so don't suffer the consequences when they're inconsistent, inconvenient, unreasonable or bureaucratic.
• onion2k 10y ago
  What is the usefulness of DRM in the first place, in this case? It gives the content owners enough peace of mind that they're not going to be denied sales of their content in the future that they're willing to rent their assets to Netflix for streaming across the internet. Whether DRM works perfectly or not isn't actually very relevant here. All that's necessary is that the content owners believe it works well enough to protect the future of their businesses. The practical alternative to DRM-in-the-browser is not DRM-free distribution; it's either physical media (with DRM) or native apps for every device (with DRM). My opinion is that I'd rather have DRM in my browser (along side open alternatives) than have the pain that comes with either of those choices.
  • discordianfish 10y ago
    > well enough to protect the future of their businesses. I'd even say the expect platforms like Netflix to 'do what they can', even if it's not enough to prevent pirating. At least that's what was communicated to me when I asked and worked on a similar platform.
• billybofh 10y ago
  Just to add some anecdotal pain... I recently bought my first audio book from Audible. I didn't realise it was a proprietary DRM'd format which has no sensible playback on Linux. So rather than spend time hacking together something to rip it, I ended up torrent'ing an mp3 of the book I'd just bought. It's entirely put me off buying anything else from Audible :-/
  • lucb1e 10y ago
    Same here. I know they have DRM but it says it plays on "all devices". It actually includes an impressive number of mp3 players, but a notable omission turned out to be Linux. Then I discovered ffmpeg can decode the files and turned back to my girlfriend who has wanted to share an audible account for a while now. ... which is when I discovered there isn't just Audible, there's Audible US ($15=14eur), Audible UK (8 pounds=9.50eur), Audible DE (10 euros) and others, all of which have different offerings of course. The German one has English stuff, but less. The English ones obviously have hardly any German audio books. My girlfriend is German but we speak English to each other and most stuff we'd read is originally American. Which do we get now, US, UK or DE? Can't we "just have audio books"? And as m4b/mp3 please, we both want to load it into Smart Audio Book Player which has some features on Android that Audible's player doesn't. Wasn't the whole point of getting Audible to get access to audio books without having to buy and rip each individually? What a mess. Oh and for those who are considering Audible without planning on converting them into mp3s, note that the Android app wants to: - read accounts from the device - read your contacts - record audio - see your phone number - view WiFi connections - view network connections - prevent the device from sleeping (=battery killer and unnecessary for uninterrupted playback with screen off) ... I just want to listen to audio books.
  • cpeterso 10y ago
    I've also found audio books on Audible that they won't sell me because I live in the wrong region (US). I wanted to give them money for a product they carry, but they can't/won't accept it.
• oliwarner 10y ago
  With Netflix it is explicitly a lease. That's the sort of scenario when DRM is now acceptable.