18 ms·

DRM Is Toxic to Culture

394 points by jrepinc 9y ago

gaius 9y ago
We offer research reports and white papers for your management and Board from experienced advisors Strangely, I couldn't find any of these reports available for free download and in the public domain...
- AlexandrB 9y ago
  Not sure what you're getting at. Lack of DRM does not mean not getting paid for your work.
  - gaius 9y ago
    "All intellectual property should be free! Except the IP I create which I should be paid for!" is problematic. The author of this piece contributes to the (perceived) necessity of copy protection. Also those armed policemen in Paris aren't there to shoot fare evaders...
    - AlexandrB 9y ago
      > "All intellectual property should be free! Except the IP I create which I should be paid for!" That's a strawman. People should be paid for their work, but that doesn't give them the right to impose extralegal restrictions on how I use their work through technology. If you think that DRM is about piracy, you're living in a fantasy world. Almost all DRMd content - movies, books, music, news - is readily available through illegal or alternative channels with the DRM stripped out. What IS true is that DRM enables several consumer-hostile revenue models for content producers. For example, unskippable ads at the beginning of Blu-Ray releases.
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- _jal 9y ago
  If only snappiness were logic, that would be a stinging rejoinder.
- comex 9y ago
  Strangely, I couldn't find any of these reports available for free download and in the public domain... No, but I bet if you pay for them you get them as PDFs, unencrypted, which you can view on a vast breadth of devices and OSes and applications, annotate/modify, clip parts out of, convert to other formats, and otherwise manipulate as you please, with no arbitrary technological restrictions getting in the way. (Compare to, say, Adobe Digital Editions wrapped PDFs, which can only be read in designated apps and limit you to the capabilities of those apps.)
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  - gaius 9y ago
    with no arbitrary technological restrictions getting in the way How does the arbitrariness of those technological restrictions differ from the arbitrariness of the legal restrictions which I'm sure the author would insist upon, should you decide to republish their work? To me they are the same thing - mechanisms for saying "you might've bought this but the original owner still has a say in what you do with it". The world IMHO is a better place because there are mechanisms by why IP creators can be paid. Yes there is poorly written DRM (Sony, we're looking at you) but that is a problem of execution, not one of concept.
    - type0 9y ago
      > Yes there is poorly written DRM (Sony, we're looking at you) but that is a problem of execution, not one of concept. So you mean that there are Rootkits that are written in a good way?
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
      > How does the arbitrariness of those technological restrictions differ from the arbitrariness of the legal restrictions which I'm sure the author would insist upon, should you decide to republish their work? One of those is decided by a democratic process, the other is dictated by one party. > but that is a problem of execution, not one of concept. Actually, it is a problem of the concept. It is asking for computers to be robbed of their defining characteristic, and to be put under dictatorial control. See also Cory Doctorow's talks on the topic, like maybe this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI (he gave this and similar talks in many places, you can find quite a few of them on youtube, I have no clue whether this particular one is good)
nerdponx 9y ago
It’s like checking the lift ticket, yes, but also the guy checks you are only wearing gear hired from the resort shop, skis with you down the slope and trips you if you try any manoeuvres that weren’t taught to you by the resort ski instructor; then as you go down the slope he pushes you away from the moguls because those are a premium feature and finally you get to run the gauntlet of armed security guards at the bottom of the slope checking for people who haven’t paid. How is this at all an accurate analogy for DRM?
- tjoff 9y ago
  How do you play your blu-ray discs on linux btw.? Bonus question if you succeeded: did you break any laws doing so?
  - ioquatix 9y ago
    1. Realise that you don't have a blu-ray drive. 2. Install Transmission and download a rip. Bonus answer: I probably broke laws making my morning coffee.
    - paraselene 9y ago
      1. Realise that a BD drive costs $100 2. Use PS4 to play the drive instead. Bonus answer: Instructions unclear, di__ stuck in PS4
    - hellbanner 9y ago
      "The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day." https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6611240-three-felonies-a-day https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6611240-three-felonies-a...
- 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
  This is probably an analogy for frameworks like the Protected Media Path [1] [2], which revokes authorization/decryption when "untrusted" components are detected. [1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa376846(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_Media_Path https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_Media_Path
makecheck 9y ago
DRM and advertising tech have a similar problem of bad execution. Sure, there exists a way to do each of these that many may consider "reasonable" but in practice industries have shown that they would rather be obnoxious and make everything annoying or just much more difficult than necessary. This means they can't be trusted to do it well, and the solution must be to avoid it completely (DRM-free content and ad blocker).
- izacus 9y ago
  I don't get this - why is DRM is friggning' NECESSARY? What makes it this forced law of nature? The current multi-billion media conglomerates grew at times when being able to copy a piece of content from TV was encoded in the LAW. Content providers earned billions of dollars at times when you could press REC on your VCR and ("THE HORROR" now every content provider shill screams) rewatch the show many times and (GASP) give the tape to your friends to watch too! What exactly was so horrible at being able to rewatch, store and borrow a movie to a friend that now seems to completely incomprehensible to people here on HN and outside? What kind of irreversible damage is done by existence of torrents when WB, Netflix and other content providers earn record profits? Why are we even debating DRM as something that has a right to exist and helps anyone? EDIT: Ergh, sorry for the tone, by DRM is something that really touches my nerves a bit.
  - DanBC 9y ago
    > The current multi-billion media conglomerates grew at times when being able to copy a piece of content from TV was encoded in the LAW. Content providers earned billions of dollars at times when you could press REC on your VCR and ("THE HORROR" now every content provider shill screams) rewatch the show many times and (GASP) give the tape to your friends to watch too! TV and Movie industry spent considerable effort tackling exactly that type of home taping. You might want to have a look at Disney, who wanted to have "single use" video tapes that would need to be sent back to a factory to be rewound, or special DVDs that were sent in sealed packs and would oxidise to uselessness within 24 hours of being opened.
    - 9y ago
Silhouette 9y ago
The problem with technology-enforced restrictions isn’t that they allow legitimate enforcement of rights; it’s the collateral damage they cause in the process. Indeed, but the problem with not making any effort to enforce restrictions technically is that typically you then aren't enforcing your legitimate rights. The metro analogy was interesting. If the system in Germany works, it is because people are honest and pay for what they are using without physical compulsion. Sadly, if you try to start a business creating original content and making it available online in the same spirit of trust, you will quickly learn that many people in the world are not so honest. You will also learn that unlike a citywide metro system, it is all too easy for someone of less noble intentions to not only take your content for themselves without paying but also set up their own redistribution channels and steal your customers and your revenues. A third lesson you will learn is that a lot of people may quite innocently assume that if they can do something then it's allowed, particularly if they speak a different language and don't necessarily understand the deal being offered. DRM can be quite effective at deterring this sort of casual and often unintentional infringement.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  > set up their own redistribution channels and steal your customers and your revenues. And DRM prevents that how exactly? > A third lesson you will learn is that a lot of people may quite innocently assume that if they can do something then it's allowed I would take this as a hint that it probably should be allowed then. If lots of people innocently assume that something is perfectly legal, the way of tyranny is to build a police state, the way of democracy is to make it legal.
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    And DRM prevents that how exactly? It depends on the form of DRM and its effects. One practical scenario is that most of the revenue from a new work may be generated in the early days. This is often the case with things like computer games, pop music, and big ticket movies. If DRM delays those trying to set up copycat channels, even by a few days or weeks, much of that revenue may already have been collected. Another is that fingerprinting techniques may allow for things like automatic takedowns on the major hosting services, or identification of the source of a major leak so full legal action can be taken against the right targets. I would take this as a hint that it probably should be allowed then. It's not that simple. To give an obvious example that upset a lot of people, Google added a video download icon in Chrome a few months ago, right there in the controls alongside changing the volume and so on. A lot of people running small web sites that provided video content saw a spike in people who were sharing that content in violation of their terms, and it turned out that many people assumed the download button was a new feature on the site without realising that it was Chrome that had changed. This caused big problems for web developers working in this area, and a lot of complaints to Google about actively encouraging people to violate copyrights. And simply changing the way videos were served so Chrome couldn't provide that facility in the same way then fixed the problem again. If lots of people innocently assume that something is perfectly legal, the way of tyranny is to build a police state, the way of democracy is to make it legal. Democracy only works when the population is properly informed and understands the implications. That's hardly the case in the sort of situation I mentioned above.
skywhopper 9y ago
I would say that DRM is merely an inevitable outgrowth of our society's enshrinement and worship of the idea of "intellectual property". That word, "property", gives the opposite connotations of "copyright"--permanent rightful ownership vs a temporary grant of monopoly on an idea. But yes, it's definitely the case that the cultural idea that humans and corporations have the right to own a copyright for a length of time greater than the duration of any human life means that for 99.99% of all works, the effective duration of copyright truly is forever, which reinforces the idea that copyright should be forever. And if it's forever and it's "property" why shouldn't strong, user-hostile DRM exist? It's the barbed-wire, severe-tire-damage, border-wall of electronic media.
- ThrowawayR2 9y ago
  > I would say that DRM is merely an inevitable outgrowth of our society's enshrinement and worship of the idea of "intellectual property". If intellectual property rights cease to exist, then there's no longer any legal basis to enforce the GPL and similar licenses and the Free Software ecosystem would collapse. Are you sure you want that? EDIT: Replaced "open source" with "Free Software". My thanks to other posters for the correction. Yes, BSD-style open source would still survive.
  - AlphaWeaver 9y ago
    If intellectual property rights ceased to exist, we wouldn't have a need for the GPL, wouldn't we?
    - mhluongo 9y ago
      Copyleft virality requires IP enforcement. Doing away with IP doesn't necessarily imply a world where everyone wants to share publicly
      - 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
        In practical terms, copyright-free software would be "viral": you would be free to redistribute under the same (lack of) terms that you received the software under. There would be no mechanism for things like tying source to binaries or the anti-Tivoization terms, but those aren't defining aspects of copyleft. I'm not sure what "share publicly" has to do with anything. GPL doesn't apply until you do share the software, and even then doesn't require you to do anything publicly.
microcolonel 9y ago
Just don't use it, today it is entirely within your power not to use DRM. If you want it to stay that way, you'll have to be the demand you wish to see in the world.
cygned 9y ago
Lately, I wanted to buy an eBook. I usually buy prints, but this time I needed it as soon as possible. Upon searching, every book store told me, I would need to install some Adobe stuff on my computer to read the file. I am neither a fan of Adobe nor of the idea of being locked in to an application to view a book. After realizing that there is no other digital way, I simply bought the printed version and waited the two days it took to ship. It's a very frustrating situation for someone who just wants to read something.
- 2OEH8eoCRo 9y ago
  Yeah that's how it works I had to do that when I rented an eBook from the library. DRM removal tools are a godsend.
- Veratyr 9y ago
  That's actually the best case for DRM, since Adobe's has been cracked for ages. Just buy the book, do whatever Adobe wants, then run DeDRM [0] on it and enjoy your DRM free ePub. [0]: https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/ https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/
- gordaco 9y ago
  I was in the same position a few months ago, and there was no printed version. My solution: pay for the damn book, use the required Adobe product to be able to unlock it, use a tool to create a DRM-free pdf (IIRC it was Calibre), and finally unistalling the Adobe product. I wish I didn't have to give money to DRM sellers, but in this particular choice I had no option. Apparently this makes me a pirate, despite having paid for the product and not having any intention of releasing it.
- asdfpoiuqwer 9y ago
  Did you consider pirating the e-book? To check the ethical box, I would've just used the pirated e-book version immediately and ordered a hard-copy.
  - cygned 9y ago
    Yes, I considered it out of my frustration, but I always try to give back for good work.
ctulek 9y ago
My only concern with DRM in browser is that, as far as I understand the technology, any website can put a small piece of arbitrary DRM content and your browser will send information to that website uniq to your device, and your device will be tracked by DRM providers and probably also by that website. Firefox gives you the option to disable DRM in the settings. Chrome also has it but it is buried deeply in advanced settings. Safari does not seem to have it at all.
- abecedarius 9y ago
  I think I found this as "Protected Content" in the Chrome advanced settings. (Searching for "DRM" didn't work.)
rayiner 9y ago
I disagree with the characterization of all this media as "culture." They're entertainment products that exist for the sole purpose of generating a profit.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  And as such they are at the very least displacing "culture" to some degree, and the argument thus still applies?
- harryh 9y ago
  Shakespeare didn't write all those plays for free.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    If a modern day Shakespeare wants to create "culture," they can license their works appropriately. But for the most part the stuff that people want to copy are entertainment products.
    - kasey_junk 9y ago
      I think the point he was trying to make is that you don't start out with culture. You start out with profit generating entertainment products, and then via the market bringing lots of people to this enterprise and survivor bias, you end up with "culture".
- DonbunEf7 9y ago
  Welcome to your modern culture, which is centered around neoliberal consumerism.
- floatboth 9y ago
  Everything is culture. But yeah, the stuff produced by copyright mafia/Big Entertainment/Hollywood/whatever is far, far from the only culture that exists. A lot of culture is happening on DRM-free places like YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, DeviantART, Tumblr, itch.io, etc. Especially YouTube. It's huge. And it's full of people who download other videos and remix them in interesting ways.
musesum 9y ago
Some background: I developed a software binary sandbox, in the 90's; patent cited 500+ times ... mostly by developers of DRM. Now, I am working on an open source project. IMO, DRM extends a presumption of scarcity. Hunters share their meat, whereas farmers guard their harvest. For the hunter, the kill is a short term abundance of value; if it isn't shared, it will spoil. For the farmer, the harvest is a long term store of value. Scavengers exploit the asymmetry of effort in which to obtain that value. Once value became easy to copy, the symmetry of effort has shifted. As a result, culture is shifting with it. Freely copied recorded music shifted the value back to live concerts. Back to a short term abundance of value. When was the last time you posted on Twitter or FB? These are freshly hunted moments. Wait too long and that muse will spoil.
- eropple 9y ago
  > Freely copied recorded music shifted the value back to live concerts. Overall, I get what you're saying and I don't disagree with the premise (though I'm ambivalent about the conclusion), but the word "shifted" doesn't usually mean "eradicated"--most live concerts net vanishingly little money and that's a real impact on creators. Whether that's a net societal good or not can be argued about, but "shifted", IMO, paints a misleading picture.
  - 0xbear 9y ago
    Most other distribution methods for those artists have also been shown to net vanishingly little money. If you can't make money with a live performance, you sure as heck aren't making any selling CDs through a record company.
    - DanBC 9y ago
      Have you ever played live in a band?
      - nine_k 9y ago
        Have your ever been selling music via a label, or via a service like iTunes or Bandcamp? How much, as a percent of sales, did you receive? (Not rhetorical questions, I'm genuinely interested.)
zanny 9y ago
This is just the tip of the leaf of the IP tree that is destroying culture. Since the advent of permanent copyright there is no more commons. The commons stopped in 1923. Disney will continue to buy the US government into guaranteeing there is no common heritage of America for as long as they are able. It will be interesting to see how, in a thousand years, (hopefully) scholars of the time will reflect on how systemic the damage was to American society to artificially constrain creativity so fundamentally and for so long. It is human nature to take your experiences and reinterpret them in new ways. That is how creativity is defined. But copyright and IP, especially in perpetuity, prevent that, all for what is claimed to be the protection of profits by the original creators, even for decades after the creators are dead.
scarface74 9y ago
The usual spiel about DRM is that you don't own what you "bought" but in the case of subscriptions and rentals, why would anyone think they have a right to ownership when they are clearly paying for access? Why should I have a problem with paying Apple for DRM free music from iTunes and paying for a subscription to DRMd music for Apple Music? I haven't pirated music since the iTunes Store opened in 2003. Even from 2003-2008 when it was DRM encumbered, there was a simple built in way to remove the DRM -- burn it to a CD and rip it. I also don't have a problem paying to rent a movie from Apple/Amazon, but I would never "buy" a movie from Apple/Amazon with restrictive DRM. I also wouldn't have thought about buying a physical disk without an easy way to rip it to my Plex Server and use in the way I see fit.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I suppose people in general are not yet used to have everything in their life be some kind of service. With DRM, the part of the issue is how quickly we went from ownership (buying paper books, or even music/video on physical media) to renting. Personally, I'm not sure what to think about it. On the one hand, one could argue that everything becoming a service is a sign of a maturing society. On the other hand, it makes individuals less autonomous, and society more fragile. Currently I lean more towards thinking that service-oriented economy is a problem, and in particular that SaaS and DRM are cancer.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    > it makes individuals less autonomous Really, I think the problem is not so much the decreasing autonomy of the individual, but rather the increasing concentration of power. In a modern society, you are already massively dependent on other people, in a normal day you get into contact with the direct result of the work of thousands of people (as in: not just people who had the idea to bake a bread, but actually people who contributed to the specific bread that you are eating now), and I think that's perfectly fine. What is problematic is if a small group of individuals/companies get a massive amount of centralized control over a large part of the population.
    - 9y ago
erikpukinskis 9y ago
All forms of DRM can be defeated by pointing an iPhone at them.
- Buge 9y ago
  It depends on what the goal of the DRM creators is. If their goal is to prevent copies that most people would consider watchable, then they would not consider the iPhone to defeat the DRM. But some screen recording technique with framerate sync would defeat the DRM. If their goal was to prevent sharing of the original compressed stream, then they would consider even screen recording to not defeat the DRM.
- audi100quattro 9y ago
  Why do you need a car when you can walk? Why use encryption when you can physically hide things? The answer to these questions and more is that when it isn't about faster/better/cheaper, it's about improving quality of life. Be it increasing privacy, or removing undue burdens.
rmrfrmrf 9y ago
I would love to see some use cases of what people want to be able to do with DRM'd media that 1) can't be done with current DRM limitations and 2) is within the guidelines of what the distributor allows (or within the rights given by the user's local government). For example, my local library buys a set number of digital licenses for ebooks, so there's a waitlist system for ebooks and each digital copy is time gated to a certain number of days before becoming unusable. In that time, though, you can read the ebook offline once downloaded through the library's app. Annoying sometimes, but overall seems reasonable. How would that example translate to a non-DRM version while making sure that the library isn't distributing an unbounded number of licenses to customers?
- josteink 9y ago
  > I would love to see some use cases of what people want to be able to do with DRM'd media that 1) can't be done with current DRM limitations and 2) is within the guidelines of what the distributor allows (or within the rights given by the user's local government). Simple. Play it on any device I own, now and in the future. None of the drm formats sold 20 years ago live on today. Had my collection been based on those, and not open formats, it would be dead now. What makes you think today's DRM will have a different fate?
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  > I would love to see some use cases of what people want to be able to do with DRM'd media that 1) can't be done with current DRM limitations and 2) is within the guidelines of what the distributor allows (or within the rights given by the user's local government). Play it on my linux machine? Copy it to a different medium for my own personal use? Inspect it for security vulnerabilities? Build and sell a device that allows you to split the video signal into multiple parts so I can watch it on multiple screens arranged into one large screen? Buy a device that allows me to inject home automation information onto the display on which I am watching it? Do you need more?
  - pdkl95 9y ago
    > more? How about the highly experimental, expensive, poor-user-interface, precursors to whatever the next truly innovative killer app will be? We don't know what the really important use cases will be; we don't even know[1] which events or innovations are in the general direction of the next killer app. The very idea that some ideas - aka information, intellectual works, or (bleh) "content" - can be owned is already offensive enough. For DRM to make any kind of sense you first have to presume you can enumerate the ways an idea will be used. If we knew that, we could skip most R&D. Instead of trying artificially re-create scarcity, the Silicon Valley startup culture should be worried about of DRM fencing off next-decade's products. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29#Content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29#Co...
Phenomabomb 9y ago
DRM only hurts legitimate customers. It seems increasingly rare that people aren't able to crack DRM's fairly quickly. So the only people that even see the DRM are the paying customer, and there is always some sort of inconvenient drawback for them.
- 3dk 9y ago
  A good example of this is the Denuvo DRM for games. As I understand it, game data was temporarily decrypted, while playing which led to poor performance. Denuvo games were cracked and the pirate versions performed better. Developers paid a lot for Denuvo DRM which didn't even fulfill the promise of stopping piracy.
  - kgbier 9y ago
    Once the game has been cracked some publishers/devs have opted to release an update that removes the DRM and the potential performance hit (eg. Mass Effect Andromeda, Hitman, DOOM). The performance hit in question, however, is an implementation detail that some developers handle better than others (Rime comes to mind as a game that performed Denuvo DRM checks many many times per second, it's speculated it was tied to per-frame update calls). Denuvo still has a place (if it stays effective) in reducing the number of day-one pirates, which is its main selling point at this time. On Steam, interested players have a choice to put money down on release (with the potential to refund), or wait an indeterminate number of days (weeks?) to download the cracked version. This uncertainty period has a conversion rate that Denuvo clients balance against the costs of the DRM.
jancsika 9y ago
> Thus your children won’t get to play your music, show your favourite films, read your books, share your culture, with your grandchildren because they won’t inherit anything digital from you that’s usable. Historians won’t be able to track the influences on an event because the sources have digitally corroded. You’ll not even be able to share what you like with your friends. Even Kodi assumes by (sane) defaults that the user does not want to save their own particular copy of the relevant media on their own particular device. Imagining a future where grandchildren can't inherit the digital libraries stored on their family devices is early-2000's futurism that somehow skips completely over the year 2017 where the greater bulk of these future grandparents are streaming everything.
tomcam 9y ago
It's all true--but it does nothing to explain how artists can be paid for their stuff at prices they set.
mcbobbington 9y ago
Interestingly the DMCA prohibits creating software to bypass DRM. It is completely unconstitutional, violating freedom of the press. That part of the law should be struck down.
ucaetano 9y ago
"Travelling frequently in Europe, I’ve had the chance to use two approaches to the underground/metro/subway, the Paris Metro and the U-bahn in various German cities." The author failed to understand the actual cultural issue driving the two approaches: In Germany you don't need a gate to have people pay the ticket, most people will do it anyway. In Paris, most people won't pay and just ride for free, and tragedy of the commons ensues. So by his own argument, DRM is a product of the culture of a people.

394 points by jrepinc 9y ago

We offer research reports and white papers for your management and Board from experienced advisors Strangely, I couldn't find any of these reports available for free download and in the public domain...

AlexandrB 9y ago
Not sure what you're getting at. Lack of DRM does not mean not getting paid for your work.
- gaius 9y ago
  "All intellectual property should be free! Except the IP I create which I should be paid for!" is problematic. The author of this piece contributes to the (perceived) necessity of copy protection. Also those armed policemen in Paris aren't there to shoot fare evaders...
  - AlexandrB 9y ago
    > "All intellectual property should be free! Except the IP I create which I should be paid for!" That's a strawman. People should be paid for their work, but that doesn't give them the right to impose extralegal restrictions on how I use their work through technology. If you think that DRM is about piracy, you're living in a fantasy world. Almost all DRMd content - movies, books, music, news - is readily available through illegal or alternative channels with the DRM stripped out. What IS true is that DRM enables several consumer-hostile revenue models for content producers. For example, unskippable ads at the beginning of Blu-Ray releases.
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_jal 9y ago
If only snappiness were logic, that would be a stinging rejoinder.
comex 9y ago
Strangely, I couldn't find any of these reports available for free download and in the public domain... No, but I bet if you pay for them you get them as PDFs, unencrypted, which you can view on a vast breadth of devices and OSes and applications, annotate/modify, clip parts out of, convert to other formats, and otherwise manipulate as you please, with no arbitrary technological restrictions getting in the way. (Compare to, say, Adobe Digital Editions wrapped PDFs, which can only be read in designated apps and limit you to the capabilities of those apps.)
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- gaius 9y ago
  with no arbitrary technological restrictions getting in the way How does the arbitrariness of those technological restrictions differ from the arbitrariness of the legal restrictions which I'm sure the author would insist upon, should you decide to republish their work? To me they are the same thing - mechanisms for saying "you might've bought this but the original owner still has a say in what you do with it". The world IMHO is a better place because there are mechanisms by why IP creators can be paid. Yes there is poorly written DRM (Sony, we're looking at you) but that is a problem of execution, not one of concept.
  - type0 9y ago
    > Yes there is poorly written DRM (Sony, we're looking at you) but that is a problem of execution, not one of concept. So you mean that there are Rootkits that are written in a good way?
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    > How does the arbitrariness of those technological restrictions differ from the arbitrariness of the legal restrictions which I'm sure the author would insist upon, should you decide to republish their work? One of those is decided by a democratic process, the other is dictated by one party. > but that is a problem of execution, not one of concept. Actually, it is a problem of the concept. It is asking for computers to be robbed of their defining characteristic, and to be put under dictatorial control. See also Cory Doctorow's talks on the topic, like maybe this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI (he gave this and similar talks in many places, you can find quite a few of them on youtube, I have no clue whether this particular one is good)

nerdponx 9y ago

It’s like checking the lift ticket, yes, but also the guy checks you are only wearing gear hired from the resort shop, skis with you down the slope and trips you if you try any manoeuvres that weren’t taught to you by the resort ski instructor; then as you go down the slope he pushes you away from the moguls because those are a premium feature and finally you get to run the gauntlet of armed security guards at the bottom of the slope checking for people who haven’t paid. How is this at all an accurate analogy for DRM?

tjoff 9y ago
How do you play your blu-ray discs on linux btw.? Bonus question if you succeeded: did you break any laws doing so?
- ioquatix 9y ago
  1. Realise that you don't have a blu-ray drive. 2. Install Transmission and download a rip. Bonus answer: I probably broke laws making my morning coffee.
  - paraselene 9y ago
    1. Realise that a BD drive costs $100 2. Use PS4 to play the drive instead. Bonus answer: Instructions unclear, di__ stuck in PS4
  - hellbanner 9y ago
    "The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day." https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6611240-three-felonies-a-day https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6611240-three-felonies-a...
0xcde4c3db 9y ago
This is probably an analogy for frameworks like the Protected Media Path [1] [2], which revokes authorization/decryption when "untrusted" components are detected. [1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa376846(v=vs.85).aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_Media_Path https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_Media_Path

makecheck 9y ago

DRM and advertising tech have a similar problem of bad execution. Sure, there exists a way to do each of these that many may consider "reasonable" but in practice industries have shown that they would rather be obnoxious and make everything annoying or just much more difficult than necessary. This means they can't be trusted to do it well, and the solution must be to avoid it completely (DRM-free content and ad blocker).

izacus 9y ago
I don't get this - why is DRM is friggning' NECESSARY? What makes it this forced law of nature? The current multi-billion media conglomerates grew at times when being able to copy a piece of content from TV was encoded in the LAW. Content providers earned billions of dollars at times when you could press REC on your VCR and ("THE HORROR" now every content provider shill screams) rewatch the show many times and (GASP) give the tape to your friends to watch too! What exactly was so horrible at being able to rewatch, store and borrow a movie to a friend that now seems to completely incomprehensible to people here on HN and outside? What kind of irreversible damage is done by existence of torrents when WB, Netflix and other content providers earn record profits? Why are we even debating DRM as something that has a right to exist and helps anyone? EDIT: Ergh, sorry for the tone, by DRM is something that really touches my nerves a bit.
- DanBC 9y ago
  > The current multi-billion media conglomerates grew at times when being able to copy a piece of content from TV was encoded in the LAW. Content providers earned billions of dollars at times when you could press REC on your VCR and ("THE HORROR" now every content provider shill screams) rewatch the show many times and (GASP) give the tape to your friends to watch too! TV and Movie industry spent considerable effort tackling exactly that type of home taping. You might want to have a look at Disney, who wanted to have "single use" video tapes that would need to be sent back to a factory to be rewound, or special DVDs that were sent in sealed packs and would oxidise to uselessness within 24 hours of being opened.
  - 9y ago

Silhouette 9y ago

The problem with technology-enforced restrictions isn’t that they allow legitimate enforcement of rights; it’s the collateral damage they cause in the process. Indeed, but the problem with not making any effort to enforce restrictions technically is that typically you then aren't enforcing your legitimate rights. The metro analogy was interesting. If the system in Germany works, it is because people are honest and pay for what they are using without physical compulsion. Sadly, if you try to start a business creating original content and making it available online in the same spirit of trust, you will quickly learn that many people in the world are not so honest. You will also learn that unlike a citywide metro system, it is all too easy for someone of less noble intentions to not only take your content for themselves without paying but also set up their own redistribution channels and steal your customers and your revenues. A third lesson you will learn is that a lot of people may quite innocently assume that if they can do something then it's allowed, particularly if they speak a different language and don't necessarily understand the deal being offered. DRM can be quite effective at deterring this sort of casual and often unintentional infringement.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
> set up their own redistribution channels and steal your customers and your revenues. And DRM prevents that how exactly? > A third lesson you will learn is that a lot of people may quite innocently assume that if they can do something then it's allowed I would take this as a hint that it probably should be allowed then. If lots of people innocently assume that something is perfectly legal, the way of tyranny is to build a police state, the way of democracy is to make it legal.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  And DRM prevents that how exactly? It depends on the form of DRM and its effects. One practical scenario is that most of the revenue from a new work may be generated in the early days. This is often the case with things like computer games, pop music, and big ticket movies. If DRM delays those trying to set up copycat channels, even by a few days or weeks, much of that revenue may already have been collected. Another is that fingerprinting techniques may allow for things like automatic takedowns on the major hosting services, or identification of the source of a major leak so full legal action can be taken against the right targets. I would take this as a hint that it probably should be allowed then. It's not that simple. To give an obvious example that upset a lot of people, Google added a video download icon in Chrome a few months ago, right there in the controls alongside changing the volume and so on. A lot of people running small web sites that provided video content saw a spike in people who were sharing that content in violation of their terms, and it turned out that many people assumed the download button was a new feature on the site without realising that it was Chrome that had changed. This caused big problems for web developers working in this area, and a lot of complaints to Google about actively encouraging people to violate copyrights. And simply changing the way videos were served so Chrome couldn't provide that facility in the same way then fixed the problem again. If lots of people innocently assume that something is perfectly legal, the way of tyranny is to build a police state, the way of democracy is to make it legal. Democracy only works when the population is properly informed and understands the implications. That's hardly the case in the sort of situation I mentioned above.

skywhopper 9y ago

I would say that DRM is merely an inevitable outgrowth of our society's enshrinement and worship of the idea of "intellectual property". That word, "property", gives the opposite connotations of "copyright"--permanent rightful ownership vs a temporary grant of monopoly on an idea. But yes, it's definitely the case that the cultural idea that humans and corporations have the right to own a copyright for a length of time greater than the duration of any human life means that for 99.99% of all works, the effective duration of copyright truly is forever, which reinforces the idea that copyright should be forever. And if it's forever and it's "property" why shouldn't strong, user-hostile DRM exist? It's the barbed-wire, severe-tire-damage, border-wall of electronic media.

ThrowawayR2 9y ago
> I would say that DRM is merely an inevitable outgrowth of our society's enshrinement and worship of the idea of "intellectual property". If intellectual property rights cease to exist, then there's no longer any legal basis to enforce the GPL and similar licenses and the Free Software ecosystem would collapse. Are you sure you want that? EDIT: Replaced "open source" with "Free Software". My thanks to other posters for the correction. Yes, BSD-style open source would still survive.
- AlphaWeaver 9y ago
  If intellectual property rights ceased to exist, we wouldn't have a need for the GPL, wouldn't we?
  - mhluongo 9y ago
    Copyleft virality requires IP enforcement. Doing away with IP doesn't necessarily imply a world where everyone wants to share publicly
    - 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
      In practical terms, copyright-free software would be "viral": you would be free to redistribute under the same (lack of) terms that you received the software under. There would be no mechanism for things like tying source to binaries or the anti-Tivoization terms, but those aren't defining aspects of copyleft. I'm not sure what "share publicly" has to do with anything. GPL doesn't apply until you do share the software, and even then doesn't require you to do anything publicly.

microcolonel 9y ago

Just don't use it, today it is entirely within your power not to use DRM. If you want it to stay that way, you'll have to be the demand you wish to see in the world.

cygned 9y ago

Lately, I wanted to buy an eBook. I usually buy prints, but this time I needed it as soon as possible. Upon searching, every book store told me, I would need to install some Adobe stuff on my computer to read the file. I am neither a fan of Adobe nor of the idea of being locked in to an application to view a book. After realizing that there is no other digital way, I simply bought the printed version and waited the two days it took to ship. It's a very frustrating situation for someone who just wants to read something.

2OEH8eoCRo 9y ago
Yeah that's how it works I had to do that when I rented an eBook from the library. DRM removal tools are a godsend.
Veratyr 9y ago
That's actually the best case for DRM, since Adobe's has been cracked for ages. Just buy the book, do whatever Adobe wants, then run DeDRM [0] on it and enjoy your DRM free ePub. [0]: https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/ https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/
gordaco 9y ago
I was in the same position a few months ago, and there was no printed version. My solution: pay for the damn book, use the required Adobe product to be able to unlock it, use a tool to create a DRM-free pdf (IIRC it was Calibre), and finally unistalling the Adobe product. I wish I didn't have to give money to DRM sellers, but in this particular choice I had no option. Apparently this makes me a pirate, despite having paid for the product and not having any intention of releasing it.
asdfpoiuqwer 9y ago
Did you consider pirating the e-book? To check the ethical box, I would've just used the pirated e-book version immediately and ordered a hard-copy.
- cygned 9y ago
  Yes, I considered it out of my frustration, but I always try to give back for good work.

ctulek 9y ago

My only concern with DRM in browser is that, as far as I understand the technology, any website can put a small piece of arbitrary DRM content and your browser will send information to that website uniq to your device, and your device will be tracked by DRM providers and probably also by that website. Firefox gives you the option to disable DRM in the settings. Chrome also has it but it is buried deeply in advanced settings. Safari does not seem to have it at all.

abecedarius 9y ago
I think I found this as "Protected Content" in the Chrome advanced settings. (Searching for "DRM" didn't work.)

rayiner 9y ago

I disagree with the characterization of all this media as "culture." They're entertainment products that exist for the sole purpose of generating a profit.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
And as such they are at the very least displacing "culture" to some degree, and the argument thus still applies?
harryh 9y ago
Shakespeare didn't write all those plays for free.
- rayiner 9y ago
  If a modern day Shakespeare wants to create "culture," they can license their works appropriately. But for the most part the stuff that people want to copy are entertainment products.
  - kasey_junk 9y ago
    I think the point he was trying to make is that you don't start out with culture. You start out with profit generating entertainment products, and then via the market bringing lots of people to this enterprise and survivor bias, you end up with "culture".
DonbunEf7 9y ago
Welcome to your modern culture, which is centered around neoliberal consumerism.
floatboth 9y ago
Everything is culture. But yeah, the stuff produced by copyright mafia/Big Entertainment/Hollywood/whatever is far, far from the only culture that exists. A lot of culture is happening on DRM-free places like YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, DeviantART, Tumblr, itch.io, etc. Especially YouTube. It's huge. And it's full of people who download other videos and remix them in interesting ways.

musesum 9y ago

Some background: I developed a software binary sandbox, in the 90's; patent cited 500+ times ... mostly by developers of DRM. Now, I am working on an open source project. IMO, DRM extends a presumption of scarcity. Hunters share their meat, whereas farmers guard their harvest. For the hunter, the kill is a short term abundance of value; if it isn't shared, it will spoil. For the farmer, the harvest is a long term store of value. Scavengers exploit the asymmetry of effort in which to obtain that value. Once value became easy to copy, the symmetry of effort has shifted. As a result, culture is shifting with it. Freely copied recorded music shifted the value back to live concerts. Back to a short term abundance of value. When was the last time you posted on Twitter or FB? These are freshly hunted moments. Wait too long and that muse will spoil.

eropple 9y ago
> Freely copied recorded music shifted the value back to live concerts. Overall, I get what you're saying and I don't disagree with the premise (though I'm ambivalent about the conclusion), but the word "shifted" doesn't usually mean "eradicated"--most live concerts net vanishingly little money and that's a real impact on creators. Whether that's a net societal good or not can be argued about, but "shifted", IMO, paints a misleading picture.
- 0xbear 9y ago
  Most other distribution methods for those artists have also been shown to net vanishingly little money. If you can't make money with a live performance, you sure as heck aren't making any selling CDs through a record company.
  - DanBC 9y ago
    Have you ever played live in a band?
    - nine_k 9y ago
      Have your ever been selling music via a label, or via a service like iTunes or Bandcamp? How much, as a percent of sales, did you receive? (Not rhetorical questions, I'm genuinely interested.)

zanny 9y ago

This is just the tip of the leaf of the IP tree that is destroying culture. Since the advent of permanent copyright there is no more commons. The commons stopped in 1923. Disney will continue to buy the US government into guaranteeing there is no common heritage of America for as long as they are able. It will be interesting to see how, in a thousand years, (hopefully) scholars of the time will reflect on how systemic the damage was to American society to artificially constrain creativity so fundamentally and for so long. It is human nature to take your experiences and reinterpret them in new ways. That is how creativity is defined. But copyright and IP, especially in perpetuity, prevent that, all for what is claimed to be the protection of profits by the original creators, even for decades after the creators are dead.

scarface74 9y ago

The usual spiel about DRM is that you don't own what you "bought" but in the case of subscriptions and rentals, why would anyone think they have a right to ownership when they are clearly paying for access? Why should I have a problem with paying Apple for DRM free music from iTunes and paying for a subscription to DRMd music for Apple Music? I haven't pirated music since the iTunes Store opened in 2003. Even from 2003-2008 when it was DRM encumbered, there was a simple built in way to remove the DRM -- burn it to a CD and rip it. I also don't have a problem paying to rent a movie from Apple/Amazon, but I would never "buy" a movie from Apple/Amazon with restrictive DRM. I also wouldn't have thought about buying a physical disk without an easy way to rip it to my Plex Server and use in the way I see fit.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
I suppose people in general are not yet used to have everything in their life be some kind of service. With DRM, the part of the issue is how quickly we went from ownership (buying paper books, or even music/video on physical media) to renting. Personally, I'm not sure what to think about it. On the one hand, one could argue that everything becoming a service is a sign of a maturing society. On the other hand, it makes individuals less autonomous, and society more fragile. Currently I lean more towards thinking that service-oriented economy is a problem, and in particular that SaaS and DRM are cancer.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  > it makes individuals less autonomous Really, I think the problem is not so much the decreasing autonomy of the individual, but rather the increasing concentration of power. In a modern society, you are already massively dependent on other people, in a normal day you get into contact with the direct result of the work of thousands of people (as in: not just people who had the idea to bake a bread, but actually people who contributed to the specific bread that you are eating now), and I think that's perfectly fine. What is problematic is if a small group of individuals/companies get a massive amount of centralized control over a large part of the population.
  - 9y ago

erikpukinskis 9y ago

All forms of DRM can be defeated by pointing an iPhone at them.

Buge 9y ago
It depends on what the goal of the DRM creators is. If their goal is to prevent copies that most people would consider watchable, then they would not consider the iPhone to defeat the DRM. But some screen recording technique with framerate sync would defeat the DRM. If their goal was to prevent sharing of the original compressed stream, then they would consider even screen recording to not defeat the DRM.
audi100quattro 9y ago
Why do you need a car when you can walk? Why use encryption when you can physically hide things? The answer to these questions and more is that when it isn't about faster/better/cheaper, it's about improving quality of life. Be it increasing privacy, or removing undue burdens.

rmrfrmrf 9y ago

I would love to see some use cases of what people want to be able to do with DRM'd media that 1) can't be done with current DRM limitations and 2) is within the guidelines of what the distributor allows (or within the rights given by the user's local government). For example, my local library buys a set number of digital licenses for ebooks, so there's a waitlist system for ebooks and each digital copy is time gated to a certain number of days before becoming unusable. In that time, though, you can read the ebook offline once downloaded through the library's app. Annoying sometimes, but overall seems reasonable. How would that example translate to a non-DRM version while making sure that the library isn't distributing an unbounded number of licenses to customers?

josteink 9y ago
> I would love to see some use cases of what people want to be able to do with DRM'd media that 1) can't be done with current DRM limitations and 2) is within the guidelines of what the distributor allows (or within the rights given by the user's local government). Simple. Play it on any device I own, now and in the future. None of the drm formats sold 20 years ago live on today. Had my collection been based on those, and not open formats, it would be dead now. What makes you think today's DRM will have a different fate?
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
> I would love to see some use cases of what people want to be able to do with DRM'd media that 1) can't be done with current DRM limitations and 2) is within the guidelines of what the distributor allows (or within the rights given by the user's local government). Play it on my linux machine? Copy it to a different medium for my own personal use? Inspect it for security vulnerabilities? Build and sell a device that allows you to split the video signal into multiple parts so I can watch it on multiple screens arranged into one large screen? Buy a device that allows me to inject home automation information onto the display on which I am watching it? Do you need more?
- pdkl95 9y ago
  > more? How about the highly experimental, expensive, poor-user-interface, precursors to whatever the next truly innovative killer app will be? We don't know what the really important use cases will be; we don't even know[1] which events or innovations are in the general direction of the next killer app. The very idea that some ideas - aka information, intellectual works, or (bleh) "content" - can be owned is already offensive enough. For DRM to make any kind of sense you first have to presume you can enumerate the ways an idea will be used. If we knew that, we could skip most R&D. Instead of trying artificially re-create scarcity, the Silicon Valley startup culture should be worried about of DRM fencing off next-decade's products. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29#Content https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29#Co...

Phenomabomb 9y ago

DRM only hurts legitimate customers. It seems increasingly rare that people aren't able to crack DRM's fairly quickly. So the only people that even see the DRM are the paying customer, and there is always some sort of inconvenient drawback for them.

3dk 9y ago
A good example of this is the Denuvo DRM for games. As I understand it, game data was temporarily decrypted, while playing which led to poor performance. Denuvo games were cracked and the pirate versions performed better. Developers paid a lot for Denuvo DRM which didn't even fulfill the promise of stopping piracy.
- kgbier 9y ago
  Once the game has been cracked some publishers/devs have opted to release an update that removes the DRM and the potential performance hit (eg. Mass Effect Andromeda, Hitman, DOOM). The performance hit in question, however, is an implementation detail that some developers handle better than others (Rime comes to mind as a game that performed Denuvo DRM checks many many times per second, it's speculated it was tied to per-frame update calls). Denuvo still has a place (if it stays effective) in reducing the number of day-one pirates, which is its main selling point at this time. On Steam, interested players have a choice to put money down on release (with the potential to refund), or wait an indeterminate number of days (weeks?) to download the cracked version. This uncertainty period has a conversion rate that Denuvo clients balance against the costs of the DRM.

jancsika 9y ago

> Thus your children won’t get to play your music, show your favourite films, read your books, share your culture, with your grandchildren because they won’t inherit anything digital from you that’s usable. Historians won’t be able to track the influences on an event because the sources have digitally corroded. You’ll not even be able to share what you like with your friends. Even Kodi assumes by (sane) defaults that the user does not want to save their own particular copy of the relevant media on their own particular device. Imagining a future where grandchildren can't inherit the digital libraries stored on their family devices is early-2000's futurism that somehow skips completely over the year 2017 where the greater bulk of these future grandparents are streaming everything.

tomcam 9y ago

It's all true--but it does nothing to explain how artists can be paid for their stuff at prices they set.

mcbobbington 9y ago

Interestingly the DMCA prohibits creating software to bypass DRM. It is completely unconstitutional, violating freedom of the press. That part of the law should be struck down.

ucaetano 9y ago

"Travelling frequently in Europe, I’ve had the chance to use two approaches to the underground/metro/subway, the Paris Metro and the U-bahn in various German cities." The author failed to understand the actual cultural issue driving the two approaches: In Germany you don't need a gate to have people pay the ticket, most people will do it anyway. In Paris, most people won't pay and just ride for free, and tragedy of the commons ensues. So by his own argument, DRM is a product of the culture of a people.