6 ms·

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 pract

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.
  - izacus 9y ago
    They did, they failed and they still earned billions at that time. Why are we entertaining their sociopathic ideas now? It's not that they're trying to stop mass distribution, they're trying to prevent you from rewatching content later (shows regularly disappear from Netflix and similar services), prevent you from showing them or sharing to their friends (does any service let you share a show from an ipad to another ipad?) or even let you watch anything when you're offline (how many services let you download their full catalog for later watching?).
- _jal 9y ago
  Well, to be fair, the VCR didn't have a distribution system attached that allows sharing worldwide. I still agree with you, though; times change, and nobody "deserves" business-model protection. The legacy copyright industries already get massive state subsidies through the legal enforcement of artificial monopolies - degrading everyone's computing to prop them up further is insane.
  - izacus 9y ago
    True, but they still kept earning billions through peak global torrents distribution and Netflix happily made people pay for them because they were accessible. And now they run after the DRM train like everyone else.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      >True, but they still kept earning billions through peak global torrents distribution Isn't that kind of irrelevant though? Whether a business still makes money is not an argument as to whether torrenting their stuff would be OK. A physical business (e.g. clothes store) might make millions even though people steal stuff, but we wouldn't consider that as making stealing OK. (And I don't care for the "copying is not stealing" argument. It might or it might not be, but I'm making an analogy here, and the core of it is: whether a business is still coming out on top, making money, etc, doesn't mean another practice against them is OK).
      - izacus 9y ago
        It's extremely relevant when we're debating how far we're letting companies go at restricting your freedoms and where do we curb them. A similar example: warranties. In EU at least, we demand that companies invest money to make their hardware work at least 24 months without issues. Even though this costs corporations money and they'd probably prefer your TV to die in 24 hours because that would increase their revenue flow. It benefits the society at large and makes life better for everyone at the expense of some cash flow of businesses. I see DRM as the same kind of issue - it actively ruins cultural experience of society at large, forces locked down devices on people, demands that culture must not be experienced repeatedly and forces people to become renters of content. I'd prefer businesses to lose some profits due to piracy instead of having to tolerate all the horse shit DRM pushes on us. And my talk about profits is all about that - even though piracy exists, businesses still can generate huge profits. As such I argue that thus DRM isn't necessary at all considering all horrible consequences it brings.
- jws 9y ago
  press REC on your VCR and… make a worse copy of the already pretty bad copy you received over the air. Subsequent generation copies would be really bad. Sharing your copy with a friend involved physically transferring it and possibly not getting it back. It really isn't comparable to a directly copyable digital form. If you like the 1970s way, prop your phone up on a table and use the camera to record a movie off of Netflix. You will have a much better result than we did with VHS tape in the 1970s. You can probably find a filter to crap up the video to look like VHS.
  - Retric 9y ago
    VCR's where generally better recordings than the 'cam' footage of the latest blockbuster leaked on the internet. People sometimes are watching films before the special effects are done. The core issue is if a company can make 501 million instead of 500 million they have zero incentives to make less money. Which is why cable companies scrimp on backhaul even when it's a rounding error on their costs. And why companies are so focused on DRM etc.
    - barrkel 9y ago
      You can say that, but I don't think the price levels of current media (particularly digital media) are set to maximize profit. I think they're set to embed an idea of high value, and I'm uncertain of the purpose. It could be for legal reasons, prestige, accounting, I'm not sure. I recently got an Amazon Fire stick, attached to a projector, after many years without any kind of television. Naturally, a projector hitting a 100+ inch screen magnifies any flaws in compression or image quality, so you want to play back good quality media. Amazon generally serves up just about acceptable image quality (I'd say they're about 1 standard deviation worse than Netflix in encode quality), but the prices are just ridiculously high - they're about 10 times more than I'd be willing to pay. As a result, I don't watch anything that isn't available via Netflix or Prime, and haven't bought or rented any other content. I'd spend low thousands GBP on media - I have in other form factors - but not if it nets me only 200 hours or so of content. The prices are just ridiculously high.
      - 9y ago
- jws 9y ago
  press REC on your VCR and… make a worse copy of the already pretty bad copy you received over the air. Subsequent generation copies would be really bad. Sharing your copy with a friend involved physically transferring it and possibly not getting it back. It really isn't comparable to a directly copy able digital form. If you like the 1970s way, prop your phone up on a table and use the camera to record a movie off of Netflix. You will have a much better result than we did with VHS tape in the 1970s. You can probably find a filter to crap up the video to look like VHS.
- ThrowawayR2 9y ago
  > 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? You're forgetting that VCRs and other analog tape-based media had generational losses; every copy made degraded the quality noticeably and put wear on the tape which, from the studios' perspective, kept copying under control. That isn't so for digital recordings. Beyond that, one can't be against DRM and for GPL enforcement at the same time and remain logically consistent. Both hinge on the owners being able to enforce certain rights granted by law on intellectual property. (Note that I'm not defending DRM here, just pointing out the facts.)
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    > Beyond that, one can't be against DRM and for GPL enforcement at the same time So, one can only be for the enforcement of laws against homicide if one is in favor of capital punishment? Is that roughly the point that you are making?
  - 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
    > Beyond that, one can't be against DRM and for GPL enforcement at the same time and remain logically consistent. One can absolutely do that. Technical restraints and legal remedies are not the same thing, and it's completely consistent to say that DRM should be unavailable to both proprietary and free works while legal remedies should be available to both.
    - ThrowawayR2 9y ago
      > Technical restraints and legal remedies are not the same thing, and it's completely consistent to say that DRM should be unavailable to both proprietary and free works while legal remedies should be available to both. "legal remedies should be available to both" was tried for media; that was the era where the studios were suing individuals for copyright violations. Needless to say, that proved to be impractical for a variety of reasons. Unless your intent is to draft laws that specifically don't work for causes you don't like and works only for causes you do, i.e. negotiating in bad faith, you're going to have to admit that the existence of IP rights implies that that other IP rightsholders are permitted to build some mechanism that works to enforce their rights. And, again, note I'm not defending DRM. I find it just as annoying and inconvenient as everyone else.
- coldtea 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! Yes, but you couldn't give the content to everybody in the world. And you had to waste 1 hour or so in real-time to make a copy (which was degraded anyway).
  - izacus 9y ago
    And? As someone in this thread said, DRM-free music is standard these days and overall piracy is still rather low. What do you think DRM is actively doing? Or is there another point you wanted to make?
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > And you had to waste 1 hour or so in real-time to make a copy (which was degraded anyway). No, you didn't. You either watched while recording, or just started recording, went to do something else and came back in an hour. Either way, the time wasn't wasted.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      Why constrain your response to the arguments above? Why not try to answer by covering the whole spectrum and the gist of what I tried to convey? The gist of my argument was about the scalability of today's piracy vs the old time VHS piracy. And that doesn't change just because you could "watch the show you copied" too so "that time wasn't wasted". The "watched while recording" part only makes sense for a show you already wanted to watch. And you just got one copy out of it. And the "do something else" part still takes a few minutes. On top of those you still needed the physical giving of the tape to the other person, PLUS to cover the non-insignificant cost of the tape. And lets not even get about how much selection you could produce or store at your home. In contrast, today you can download and share 10,000s of shows without having watched any of them and without wanting to watch them in the fist place, in just the time it takes to make an upload or share a link. And not just to one person, but to the WHOLE internet. Only the original pirate needs to do any real-time capture (and that's only for some special cases, like camera captures of movies or VCRed shows -- more often than not, they can just rip something in a few minutes). And even them, after the capture can immediately share the digital copy with BILLIONS of people, instead of the just one person you got in the VHS days. There's really no comparison.
- eastWestMath 9y ago
  There's a huge difference between lending your friend a VHS and uploading a torrent. And the idea of owning a license to a piece of intellectual property shouldn't be a hard thing to wrap one's head around if you work in software.
  - izacus 9y ago
    I can wrap my mind around idea of licensing just fine. That in no way means I agree with current one-sided state of affairs in copyright law. I also don't see why did you bring torrenting into the debate - do you consider me sharing am movie to my friend from my iPad to his a crime? Is that the same as torrenting? Or why am I prevented from doing that due to DRM?
    - eastWestMath 9y ago
      Strictly speaking, you don't have the right to do that under the licensing agreement for digital media. You're perfectly within your rights to lend your friend a DVD.
      - izacus 9y ago
        Indeed. Why is that acceptable state of affairs? Remember, we have a law that essentially tells everyone that lending / selling your DVD is legal. Why isn't there such a law for digital content? Why can I sell a Die Hard DVD but not a Die Hard movie file?
        eastWestMath 9y ago
        Because there's a difference between owning a physical copy of media and owning the rights to distribute it.
        izacus 9y ago
        Why do we let that difference exist? You're trying to lead the debate about changing laws by quoting laws.
- panic 9y ago
  Music downloads are largely DRM-free these days, but piracy is still as low as ever. It really is just powerful media companies abusing their power to make a little more money.
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    A legitimate copy of a new hit single costs like $1, though. Not exactly the same for anyone whose work normally costs $50 or $5,000 because it's more expensive to produce or has a more specialised market.
- jimnotgym 9y ago
  some people used to record the chart show off Radio 1 and share the cassettes with their friends. It didn't stop me buying music, I couldn't afford to buy music and would have done without it. In fact it turned me into a music fan, and once older I bought a lot more music because of it. Where the official sources beat the torrents is on convenience. Spotify and Apple whatever are easy to use and busy people will pay. A similar effect is possible with TV shows and films. I have Amazon prime, and Netflix. Prime costs me £79 a year, Netflix costs me £7.99 a month I think. Now I have a Youview box. I can watch Netflix on it but not Prime. For prime I have to buy another device or use my laptop. I wanted to see what the 'Game of Thrones' fuss was about, neither has it (amazon charges per episode actually). NowTV from Sky does, so I got a trial subscription, but the NowTV app on the Youview box only works for films, not TV shows (!), and the NowTV pc app doesn't work on Linux. So I pay for three services and still can't watch due to petty rights issues. I could watch them all on Kodi for free of course, but that would be wrong (even though I have paid for them elsewhere). In summary, if they refuse to get with the 21st Century they will sell less shows. If they allowed easier access to the shows they would beat piracy with convenience. DRM just makes it harder. Don't get me started on HDMI DRM
- rhino369 9y ago
  DRM and other anti-piracy measures are all about making piracy harder, not impossible. It's not an all or nothing venture. Every little bit you make copying harder results in fewer people copying. Cntrl C Cntrl V makes it so my mom can pirate. And she did during the Napster days. But she can't figure out BitTorrent on her own. Well, she could, but there is a learning curve, and most people aren't interested in it. They don't have to make it impossible. They just have to make it annoying. Easy piracy destroyed the music industry. The other media industries are rightfully suspicious.
  - benchaney 9y ago
    The DRM approach to piracy is an all or nothing thing. Once one person cracks a DRM setup they can distribute any movie protected by that setup to as many people as they want in whatever medium they want. I think propagandizing piracy has had a lot more to do with its decline than ease of use. Try using popcorn time. It is incredibly easy.
  - dpkonofa 9y ago
    I don't even know that this is true. In my personal experience (so completely anecdotal), pirated content is always much easier to ingest than paid, DRM'd content. There hasn't ever been a single DRM system that actually made piracy more difficult. If anything, it just made usage for legitimate users difficult. The only exception that I can think of were the DRM systems for video games that existed (and some still do) where it takes them a week or 2 to crack the DRM. Even then, the people that weren't going to pay for those games just wait until the DRM is cracked. It didn't actually make pirating the games harder, it just made it inconvenient for a little while longer but that's never been shown to equate to more paying customers.
  - ZoomZoomZoom 9y ago
    Easy piracy destroyed the music industry. While not exactly false, this statement bears too much of a negative connotation. I'd rephrased it as "Easy sharing of digitized content forced the restructuring of content-distribution industries" or something like that.
JadeNB 9y ago
> DRM-free content and ad blocker While I agree with the rest of your post, I think that comparing these two is not quite accurate. DRM-free content should, I think, be compared to ad-free content; and blocking ads should probably be compared to stripping DRM. (For the record, I'm not making any moral judgement here; I do the first two as much as possible, and the last two all the time.) My point is that the consumption of DRM-free content shows the seller that you approve of it, and encourages the production of more; whereas the use of an ad blocker doesn't (or at least doesn't seem to, in any direct way) discourage the use of ads.
0xcde4c3db 9y ago
They also have a problem of delivering more than was traditionally available, normalizing greater intrusiveness. Ad tech allows a staggering amount of control and analysis that never existed with traditional media advertising. DRM lets you not only prevent user copying like old-school "copy protection", it lets you enforce any arbitrary scheme of "rights" that you can code into the DRM system (e.g. you could make viewing video on high-end displays exclusive to a "premium" option). Advertisers and publishers are now accustomed to these and will fight any attempt to take them away.
problems 9y ago
Ads I can see as they pay for content, DRM, not so much as the content has already been paid for.
the8472 9y ago
Well-done DRM is even worse, because it normalizes usurping control from your machine in the name of protecting the interests of a 3rd party.
audi100quattro 9y ago
As others have mentioned, music is almost copyright free. Book publishers like springer will sell you watermarked ebooks, and you can find almost any game actually worth your time on gog.com. If producers and consumers wanted, the same could happen for movies. If creators and consumers wanted, copyright and patents could be reformed to stop the gouging of culture, creativity, and entrepreneurship for short-term profit.
- audi100quattro 9y ago
  *music is almost DRM free.

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.
- izacus 9y ago
  They did, they failed and they still earned billions at that time. Why are we entertaining their sociopathic ideas now? It's not that they're trying to stop mass distribution, they're trying to prevent you from rewatching content later (shows regularly disappear from Netflix and similar services), prevent you from showing them or sharing to their friends (does any service let you share a show from an ipad to another ipad?) or even let you watch anything when you're offline (how many services let you download their full catalog for later watching?).
_jal 9y ago
Well, to be fair, the VCR didn't have a distribution system attached that allows sharing worldwide. I still agree with you, though; times change, and nobody "deserves" business-model protection. The legacy copyright industries already get massive state subsidies through the legal enforcement of artificial monopolies - degrading everyone's computing to prop them up further is insane.
- izacus 9y ago
  True, but they still kept earning billions through peak global torrents distribution and Netflix happily made people pay for them because they were accessible. And now they run after the DRM train like everyone else.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >True, but they still kept earning billions through peak global torrents distribution Isn't that kind of irrelevant though? Whether a business still makes money is not an argument as to whether torrenting their stuff would be OK. A physical business (e.g. clothes store) might make millions even though people steal stuff, but we wouldn't consider that as making stealing OK. (And I don't care for the "copying is not stealing" argument. It might or it might not be, but I'm making an analogy here, and the core of it is: whether a business is still coming out on top, making money, etc, doesn't mean another practice against them is OK).
    - izacus 9y ago
      It's extremely relevant when we're debating how far we're letting companies go at restricting your freedoms and where do we curb them. A similar example: warranties. In EU at least, we demand that companies invest money to make their hardware work at least 24 months without issues. Even though this costs corporations money and they'd probably prefer your TV to die in 24 hours because that would increase their revenue flow. It benefits the society at large and makes life better for everyone at the expense of some cash flow of businesses. I see DRM as the same kind of issue - it actively ruins cultural experience of society at large, forces locked down devices on people, demands that culture must not be experienced repeatedly and forces people to become renters of content. I'd prefer businesses to lose some profits due to piracy instead of having to tolerate all the horse shit DRM pushes on us. And my talk about profits is all about that - even though piracy exists, businesses still can generate huge profits. As such I argue that thus DRM isn't necessary at all considering all horrible consequences it brings.
jws 9y ago
press REC on your VCR and… make a worse copy of the already pretty bad copy you received over the air. Subsequent generation copies would be really bad. Sharing your copy with a friend involved physically transferring it and possibly not getting it back. It really isn't comparable to a directly copyable digital form. If you like the 1970s way, prop your phone up on a table and use the camera to record a movie off of Netflix. You will have a much better result than we did with VHS tape in the 1970s. You can probably find a filter to crap up the video to look like VHS.
- Retric 9y ago
  VCR's where generally better recordings than the 'cam' footage of the latest blockbuster leaked on the internet. People sometimes are watching films before the special effects are done. The core issue is if a company can make 501 million instead of 500 million they have zero incentives to make less money. Which is why cable companies scrimp on backhaul even when it's a rounding error on their costs. And why companies are so focused on DRM etc.
  - barrkel 9y ago
    You can say that, but I don't think the price levels of current media (particularly digital media) are set to maximize profit. I think they're set to embed an idea of high value, and I'm uncertain of the purpose. It could be for legal reasons, prestige, accounting, I'm not sure. I recently got an Amazon Fire stick, attached to a projector, after many years without any kind of television. Naturally, a projector hitting a 100+ inch screen magnifies any flaws in compression or image quality, so you want to play back good quality media. Amazon generally serves up just about acceptable image quality (I'd say they're about 1 standard deviation worse than Netflix in encode quality), but the prices are just ridiculously high - they're about 10 times more than I'd be willing to pay. As a result, I don't watch anything that isn't available via Netflix or Prime, and haven't bought or rented any other content. I'd spend low thousands GBP on media - I have in other form factors - but not if it nets me only 200 hours or so of content. The prices are just ridiculously high.
    - 9y ago
jws 9y ago
press REC on your VCR and… make a worse copy of the already pretty bad copy you received over the air. Subsequent generation copies would be really bad. Sharing your copy with a friend involved physically transferring it and possibly not getting it back. It really isn't comparable to a directly copy able digital form. If you like the 1970s way, prop your phone up on a table and use the camera to record a movie off of Netflix. You will have a much better result than we did with VHS tape in the 1970s. You can probably find a filter to crap up the video to look like VHS.
ThrowawayR2 9y ago
> 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? You're forgetting that VCRs and other analog tape-based media had generational losses; every copy made degraded the quality noticeably and put wear on the tape which, from the studios' perspective, kept copying under control. That isn't so for digital recordings. Beyond that, one can't be against DRM and for GPL enforcement at the same time and remain logically consistent. Both hinge on the owners being able to enforce certain rights granted by law on intellectual property. (Note that I'm not defending DRM here, just pointing out the facts.)
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  > Beyond that, one can't be against DRM and for GPL enforcement at the same time So, one can only be for the enforcement of laws against homicide if one is in favor of capital punishment? Is that roughly the point that you are making?
- 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
  > Beyond that, one can't be against DRM and for GPL enforcement at the same time and remain logically consistent. One can absolutely do that. Technical restraints and legal remedies are not the same thing, and it's completely consistent to say that DRM should be unavailable to both proprietary and free works while legal remedies should be available to both.
  - ThrowawayR2 9y ago
    > Technical restraints and legal remedies are not the same thing, and it's completely consistent to say that DRM should be unavailable to both proprietary and free works while legal remedies should be available to both. "legal remedies should be available to both" was tried for media; that was the era where the studios were suing individuals for copyright violations. Needless to say, that proved to be impractical for a variety of reasons. Unless your intent is to draft laws that specifically don't work for causes you don't like and works only for causes you do, i.e. negotiating in bad faith, you're going to have to admit that the existence of IP rights implies that that other IP rightsholders are permitted to build some mechanism that works to enforce their rights. And, again, note I'm not defending DRM. I find it just as annoying and inconvenient as everyone else.
coldtea 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! Yes, but you couldn't give the content to everybody in the world. And you had to waste 1 hour or so in real-time to make a copy (which was degraded anyway).
- izacus 9y ago
  And? As someone in this thread said, DRM-free music is standard these days and overall piracy is still rather low. What do you think DRM is actively doing? Or is there another point you wanted to make?
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > And you had to waste 1 hour or so in real-time to make a copy (which was degraded anyway). No, you didn't. You either watched while recording, or just started recording, went to do something else and came back in an hour. Either way, the time wasn't wasted.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    Why constrain your response to the arguments above? Why not try to answer by covering the whole spectrum and the gist of what I tried to convey? The gist of my argument was about the scalability of today's piracy vs the old time VHS piracy. And that doesn't change just because you could "watch the show you copied" too so "that time wasn't wasted". The "watched while recording" part only makes sense for a show you already wanted to watch. And you just got one copy out of it. And the "do something else" part still takes a few minutes. On top of those you still needed the physical giving of the tape to the other person, PLUS to cover the non-insignificant cost of the tape. And lets not even get about how much selection you could produce or store at your home. In contrast, today you can download and share 10,000s of shows without having watched any of them and without wanting to watch them in the fist place, in just the time it takes to make an upload or share a link. And not just to one person, but to the WHOLE internet. Only the original pirate needs to do any real-time capture (and that's only for some special cases, like camera captures of movies or VCRed shows -- more often than not, they can just rip something in a few minutes). And even them, after the capture can immediately share the digital copy with BILLIONS of people, instead of the just one person you got in the VHS days. There's really no comparison.
eastWestMath 9y ago
There's a huge difference between lending your friend a VHS and uploading a torrent. And the idea of owning a license to a piece of intellectual property shouldn't be a hard thing to wrap one's head around if you work in software.
- izacus 9y ago
  I can wrap my mind around idea of licensing just fine. That in no way means I agree with current one-sided state of affairs in copyright law. I also don't see why did you bring torrenting into the debate - do you consider me sharing am movie to my friend from my iPad to his a crime? Is that the same as torrenting? Or why am I prevented from doing that due to DRM?
  - eastWestMath 9y ago
    Strictly speaking, you don't have the right to do that under the licensing agreement for digital media. You're perfectly within your rights to lend your friend a DVD.
    - izacus 9y ago
      Indeed. Why is that acceptable state of affairs? Remember, we have a law that essentially tells everyone that lending / selling your DVD is legal. Why isn't there such a law for digital content? Why can I sell a Die Hard DVD but not a Die Hard movie file?
      - eastWestMath 9y ago
        Because there's a difference between owning a physical copy of media and owning the rights to distribute it.
        izacus 9y ago
        Why do we let that difference exist? You're trying to lead the debate about changing laws by quoting laws.
panic 9y ago
Music downloads are largely DRM-free these days, but piracy is still as low as ever. It really is just powerful media companies abusing their power to make a little more money.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  A legitimate copy of a new hit single costs like $1, though. Not exactly the same for anyone whose work normally costs $50 or $5,000 because it's more expensive to produce or has a more specialised market.
jimnotgym 9y ago
some people used to record the chart show off Radio 1 and share the cassettes with their friends. It didn't stop me buying music, I couldn't afford to buy music and would have done without it. In fact it turned me into a music fan, and once older I bought a lot more music because of it. Where the official sources beat the torrents is on convenience. Spotify and Apple whatever are easy to use and busy people will pay. A similar effect is possible with TV shows and films. I have Amazon prime, and Netflix. Prime costs me £79 a year, Netflix costs me £7.99 a month I think. Now I have a Youview box. I can watch Netflix on it but not Prime. For prime I have to buy another device or use my laptop. I wanted to see what the 'Game of Thrones' fuss was about, neither has it (amazon charges per episode actually). NowTV from Sky does, so I got a trial subscription, but the NowTV app on the Youview box only works for films, not TV shows (!), and the NowTV pc app doesn't work on Linux. So I pay for three services and still can't watch due to petty rights issues. I could watch them all on Kodi for free of course, but that would be wrong (even though I have paid for them elsewhere). In summary, if they refuse to get with the 21st Century they will sell less shows. If they allowed easier access to the shows they would beat piracy with convenience. DRM just makes it harder. Don't get me started on HDMI DRM
rhino369 9y ago
DRM and other anti-piracy measures are all about making piracy harder, not impossible. It's not an all or nothing venture. Every little bit you make copying harder results in fewer people copying. Cntrl C Cntrl V makes it so my mom can pirate. And she did during the Napster days. But she can't figure out BitTorrent on her own. Well, she could, but there is a learning curve, and most people aren't interested in it. They don't have to make it impossible. They just have to make it annoying. Easy piracy destroyed the music industry. The other media industries are rightfully suspicious.
- benchaney 9y ago
  The DRM approach to piracy is an all or nothing thing. Once one person cracks a DRM setup they can distribute any movie protected by that setup to as many people as they want in whatever medium they want. I think propagandizing piracy has had a lot more to do with its decline than ease of use. Try using popcorn time. It is incredibly easy.
- dpkonofa 9y ago
  I don't even know that this is true. In my personal experience (so completely anecdotal), pirated content is always much easier to ingest than paid, DRM'd content. There hasn't ever been a single DRM system that actually made piracy more difficult. If anything, it just made usage for legitimate users difficult. The only exception that I can think of were the DRM systems for video games that existed (and some still do) where it takes them a week or 2 to crack the DRM. Even then, the people that weren't going to pay for those games just wait until the DRM is cracked. It didn't actually make pirating the games harder, it just made it inconvenient for a little while longer but that's never been shown to equate to more paying customers.
- ZoomZoomZoom 9y ago
  Easy piracy destroyed the music industry. While not exactly false, this statement bears too much of a negative connotation. I'd rephrased it as "Easy sharing of digitized content forced the restructuring of content-distribution industries" or something like that.

JadeNB 9y ago

> DRM-free content and ad blocker While I agree with the rest of your post, I think that comparing these two is not quite accurate. DRM-free content should, I think, be compared to ad-free content; and blocking ads should probably be compared to stripping DRM. (For the record, I'm not making any moral judgement here; I do the first two as much as possible, and the last two all the time.) My point is that the consumption of DRM-free content shows the seller that you approve of it, and encourages the production of more; whereas the use of an ad blocker doesn't (or at least doesn't seem to, in any direct way) discourage the use of ads.

0xcde4c3db 9y ago

They also have a problem of delivering more than was traditionally available, normalizing greater intrusiveness. Ad tech allows a staggering amount of control and analysis that never existed with traditional media advertising. DRM lets you not only prevent user copying like old-school "copy protection", it lets you enforce any arbitrary scheme of "rights" that you can code into the DRM system (e.g. you could make viewing video on high-end displays exclusive to a "premium" option). Advertisers and publishers are now accustomed to these and will fight any attempt to take them away.

problems 9y ago

Ads I can see as they pay for content, DRM, not so much as the content has already been paid for.

the8472 9y ago

Well-done DRM is even worse, because it normalizes usurping control from your machine in the name of protecting the interests of a 3rd party.

audi100quattro 9y ago

As others have mentioned, music is almost copyright free. Book publishers like springer will sell you watermarked ebooks, and you can find almost any game actually worth your time on gog.com. If producers and consumers wanted, the same could happen for movies. If creators and consumers wanted, copyright and patents could be reformed to stop the gouging of culture, creativity, and entrepreneurship for short-term profit.

audi100quattro 9y ago
*music is almost DRM free.