4 ms·
The point where things break because of it. It hasn't happened with Netflix on any large scale, yet. But it has happened in the past. There are videos games th
by sqeaky 9y ago
The point where things break because of it.
It hasn't happened with Netflix on any large scale, yet. But it has happened in the past. There are videos games that are single player and can't be played without an active connection back to the publisher. What happens when the publisher doesn't like you or mislabels you as a pirate? What if you just want to play the video game you bought and payed fro without an Internet connection?
There were music stores that only played music through special software after getting decryption keys from an active connection to the Internet, and some of those stores shut down. What happened with the millions of dollars paid into those stores? What about the songs? Did you know that decrypting a song you bought and paid for is a crime?
Consider: https://xkcd.com/488/ https://xkcd.com/488/
I would rather get out in front of this entirely artificial problem before I have to support my friends and family who don't understand the nature of this problem.
- overcast 9y agoYou're comparing a subscription service to a game that you purchased a license for. The former you're not entitled to a copy of, the latter you are. With or without DRM, companies are also entitled to revoke your licenses regardless. You don't own any of it. DRM would also not exist, if it wasn't for everyone stealing the stuff. Do you really think companies want to pour all of the money and resources into this, if they didn't have to? Should games even have keys without DRM? What if I lose the key, and the company folded years ago. Now I can't play the game because they dared to require a key to play. Is your solution making everything openly available to download, and just relying on the goodness of the human heart to pay for it? Good luck.
- silly_goose 9y agoWe could call it "shareware"
- jclardy 9y agoI must have missed the part of Netflix ToS that gives me ownership of all their content for $9.99 a month. I do agree with you for purchases that have DRM, but this is a subscription service - you watch when you pay, not when you don't.
- sqeaky 9y agoI was answering in the general sense about what was wrong with DRM not anything specifically about Netflix, I even prefaced my comment with "It hasn't happened with Netflix on any large scale, yet". But why can't I use their service on a device of my choosing at a resolution of my choice? Why is my perfectly capable Ubuntu machine limited to 720p and a windows machine isn't? Having some kind of standardized access where I didn't have to put up with their BS would go a long way towards making that easier for me to deal with.