6 ms·

Well, surely DRM prevents enough users from copying the product to make it worthwhile? It does not need to be perfect to achieve that. Many people will never

Well, surely DRM prevents enough users from copying the product to make it worthwhile? It does not need to be perfect to achieve that. Many people will never go looking for tools to break the DRM or DRM-free copies from torrent sites and the like. But if anyone could just copy what they see on e.g. Netflix with the click of a button, then many more probably would.

icebraining 9y ago
If it's just to prevent that, you could just have a "copy=false" attribute on the tag, which browsers would respect. No need for proprietary encryption nonsense.
- Mindwipe 9y ago
  Browsers didn't respect Do Not Track.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    I don't understand what you mean. DNT is a flag supposed to be respected by web services, not by browsers.
    - logfromblammo 9y ago
      Some versions of some browsers turned DNT on by default. Respecting DNT in this instance would have always made this flag a choice by the user. There is still room to argue that the user's choice was to install a browser that made DNT the default option. But it's a moot point, since the sort of web services that were in mind when DNT was proposed largely ignored it. They never set the evil bit in their responses, either.
belorn 9y ago
No, the cost of DRM do not repay itself by preventing enough users. There have been tests cases, studies, and the repeated conclusion I keep seeing is that DRM has no correlation to the revenue from individual music, games and films. It has however a correlation to platform and user retention, which is what this article continuously refers to. To take a few examples, remember when the European Commission hired researches to do a study on the effect of piracy? What about the revenue from itunes after it went DRM free? Sale of music that is available on youtube after it went HTML5? Revenue from music, film, and games on the longer term after aggressive blocking of torrent sites? What about the long term effect from anti-piracy/DRM laws? The whole EFF article ends on the conclusion that DRM will not exist if their only purpose is to prevents enough users from copying the product. That effect won't be worthwhile enough to pay the cost of DRM. Only a sticky platform that prevent competition will bring the revenue to validate investing into DRM.
- Mindwipe 9y ago
  The European commission study you're referring to a) said that piracy did make a difference on Hollywood films (it said it didn't make much difference in other sectors, but for major films it did) and b) had such enormous margins of error it was essentially worthless. You're not helping your case by bringing up evidence you don't site except for one example where it showed the opposite to your claims
  - belorn 9y ago
    The report states: "In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements. That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect. An exception is the displacement of recent top films." The difference is not for all Hollywood films, a finding that I recall other studies have found before the EU one when they looked at movies that got leaked before a cinema release. But comparing Cinema DRM to EME is like Apples to oranges, they are not the same thing. Cinema DRM is not intended for end users.
    - tinus_hn 9y ago
      So in general it doesn’t show anything, except for top movies.
thinkMOAR 9y ago
As long as there is a moment where you properly show content to a user, there is a moment he can copy what he sees perfectly too, therefor DRM will never work.
JulianMorrison 9y ago
People don't go to Netflix because they can't get it anywhere else. Bittorrent is still a thing. People go to Netflix because you pay once and then you can just watch stuff. So they don't really need any sort of protection to stop piracy. They need it to corner and control the legal market.
imtringued 9y ago
It does need to be perfect to achieve that. If only one pirate can bypass the protection then everyone can just go to a streaming site and watch the movies without DRM. Controlling illegitimate users is impossible. Therefore the purpose of DRM is control over legitimate users to the point where they can harm legitimate competitors.
- gmueckl 9y ago
  This argument is deeply flawed. It is never about the few people who have the technical skills to circumvent copy protection schemes. Copy protection needs only to be economic. It works as soon as accepting the copy protection is convenient enough that enough customers prefer it to hunting down an illegal copy with good enough quality and without protection.
  - revelation 9y ago
    That makes absolutely no sense. You need to pay to access Netflix. What then does DRM on Netflix achieve in making the "customer accept the copy protection"? The customer already fricking paid! Everything that is on Netflix you can already get on TPB (since the DRM is ineffective to those with technical skills), so how could the existence of DRM possibly have influenced the customers decision to pay vs. pirate?
    - Mindwipe 9y ago
      The Pirate Bay is a much higher technical bar for general non-technical users than the average Hacker News poster seems to understand. There are lots of people who can right click save as who will never, ever, ever torrent.
      - pavelludiq 9y ago
        Considering torrenting is the preferred method to view online content at least here in Bulgaria, and I assume in most of the rest of the non-western world, I would advise against underestimating the technical abilities of most internet users.
simias 9y ago
> Well, surely DRM prevents enough users from copying the product to make it worthwhile? What I don't understand is that it's not how it works, all it takes is for one single user to make a copy and upload it on newsgroups/bittorrent/... and it's available for everybody. That means that in order for DRM to work you need a 100% success rate at preventing unprotected copies. This seems absolutely implausible. Since I'm unhappy with the selection and compatibility of the current streaming services offering I keep pirating all the TV shows and movies I watch and they're always available for download mere hours after their official/legal counterparts. It's not like videogames where intricate anti-piracy measures can take weeks or even sometimes months to break, here it's mostly about the time for the pirated copy to disseminate on the network. I wonder by which metric video DRM can be said to work. It's a pain for legit users because they can't view their movies and shows on all of their devices easily and it's a complete non-issue for pirates.
mtgx 9y ago
No, not really. You're thinking that every user has to copy a movie from the browser. But only a very tiny percentage of the people wanting to see the latest Game of Thrones episode need to steal it so that everyone else who intended to pirate it can watch it as well. Whether or not DRM exists for those other 99.99% of the people is completely irrelevant. The show is already on torrents put there by those who could bypass the technical protection of DRM. So now those 99.99% of users can watch it for free, too, without having to know how to bypass DRM themselves.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  The more difficult it is to strip DRM, the fewer pirate captains there are. You don't need to take out every pirate to end piracy; you just need to take out every captain. So if only Paisleybeard and VikingVik can crack the GoT DRM, you maybe only need to get cooperation from the Croatian and Swedish police for a few weeks, and then you get some amount of time when pirated shows are no longer available. But then Swashbuggerer and NotSoJollyRoger and Plaidbeard step up, and the pirate crews flock to their standards. But for a time, some people who might have otherwise pirated may have paid. But then you're back to talking to the American and Filipino and Scottish police. And if one of your captains is in a non-extradition country, you may have to talk to Pinkertons or ex-military contractors. If it is trivial to crack the DRM, everyone can be a pirate captain if necessary, with a crew of only themselves. You will never, ever stop piracy for longer than a few minutes in any pirate-friendly household with that kind of DRM. That's like the difference between posting your property and putting up an actual fence or wall. It is just a virtual boundary that has legal consequences in the out-of-band enforcement system. And don't forget that when pirate captains voluntarily retire, or are forcibly retired, they can still publish "how to be a pirate captain" guides for the media-seas they once sailed. They can distribute models for 3D-printing your very own pirate ship. So the DRM-makers have to put constant effort into changing tactics and updating technical countermeasures to fight that kind of fight. It gets to be expensive, because the defense has to be perfect, while the offense can breach it through any ant-sized hole. Furthermore, the analog hole will always be there, and every paying customer has the keys to your fortress gate.
  - 9y ago
shmerl 9y ago
> Well, surely DRM prevents enough users from copying the product to make it worthwhile? It surely does not. DRM is broken (by any skilled pirate), and the rest of pirating users can get it without said DRM after that. So let's make it clear. Usage of DRM has nothing to do with piracy.

icebraining 9y ago

If it's just to prevent that, you could just have a "copy=false" attribute on the tag, which browsers would respect. No need for proprietary encryption nonsense.

Mindwipe 9y ago
Browsers didn't respect Do Not Track.
- icebraining 9y ago
  I don't understand what you mean. DNT is a flag supposed to be respected by web services, not by browsers.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    Some versions of some browsers turned DNT on by default. Respecting DNT in this instance would have always made this flag a choice by the user. There is still room to argue that the user's choice was to install a browser that made DNT the default option. But it's a moot point, since the sort of web services that were in mind when DNT was proposed largely ignored it. They never set the evil bit in their responses, either.

belorn 9y ago

No, the cost of DRM do not repay itself by preventing enough users. There have been tests cases, studies, and the repeated conclusion I keep seeing is that DRM has no correlation to the revenue from individual music, games and films. It has however a correlation to platform and user retention, which is what this article continuously refers to. To take a few examples, remember when the European Commission hired researches to do a study on the effect of piracy? What about the revenue from itunes after it went DRM free? Sale of music that is available on youtube after it went HTML5? Revenue from music, film, and games on the longer term after aggressive blocking of torrent sites? What about the long term effect from anti-piracy/DRM laws? The whole EFF article ends on the conclusion that DRM will not exist if their only purpose is to prevents enough users from copying the product. That effect won't be worthwhile enough to pay the cost of DRM. Only a sticky platform that prevent competition will bring the revenue to validate investing into DRM.

Mindwipe 9y ago
The European commission study you're referring to a) said that piracy did make a difference on Hollywood films (it said it didn't make much difference in other sectors, but for major films it did) and b) had such enormous margins of error it was essentially worthless. You're not helping your case by bringing up evidence you don't site except for one example where it showed the opposite to your claims
- belorn 9y ago
  The report states: "In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements. That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect. An exception is the displacement of recent top films." The difference is not for all Hollywood films, a finding that I recall other studies have found before the EU one when they looked at movies that got leaked before a cinema release. But comparing Cinema DRM to EME is like Apples to oranges, they are not the same thing. Cinema DRM is not intended for end users.
  - tinus_hn 9y ago
    So in general it doesn’t show anything, except for top movies.

thinkMOAR 9y ago

As long as there is a moment where you properly show content to a user, there is a moment he can copy what he sees perfectly too, therefor DRM will never work.

JulianMorrison 9y ago

People don't go to Netflix because they can't get it anywhere else. Bittorrent is still a thing. People go to Netflix because you pay once and then you can just watch stuff. So they don't really need any sort of protection to stop piracy. They need it to corner and control the legal market.

imtringued 9y ago

It does need to be perfect to achieve that. If only one pirate can bypass the protection then everyone can just go to a streaming site and watch the movies without DRM. Controlling illegitimate users is impossible. Therefore the purpose of DRM is control over legitimate users to the point where they can harm legitimate competitors.

gmueckl 9y ago
This argument is deeply flawed. It is never about the few people who have the technical skills to circumvent copy protection schemes. Copy protection needs only to be economic. It works as soon as accepting the copy protection is convenient enough that enough customers prefer it to hunting down an illegal copy with good enough quality and without protection.
- revelation 9y ago
  That makes absolutely no sense. You need to pay to access Netflix. What then does DRM on Netflix achieve in making the "customer accept the copy protection"? The customer already fricking paid! Everything that is on Netflix you can already get on TPB (since the DRM is ineffective to those with technical skills), so how could the existence of DRM possibly have influenced the customers decision to pay vs. pirate?
  - Mindwipe 9y ago
    The Pirate Bay is a much higher technical bar for general non-technical users than the average Hacker News poster seems to understand. There are lots of people who can right click save as who will never, ever, ever torrent.
    - pavelludiq 9y ago
      Considering torrenting is the preferred method to view online content at least here in Bulgaria, and I assume in most of the rest of the non-western world, I would advise against underestimating the technical abilities of most internet users.

simias 9y ago

> Well, surely DRM prevents enough users from copying the product to make it worthwhile? What I don't understand is that it's not how it works, all it takes is for one single user to make a copy and upload it on newsgroups/bittorrent/... and it's available for everybody. That means that in order for DRM to work you need a 100% success rate at preventing unprotected copies. This seems absolutely implausible. Since I'm unhappy with the selection and compatibility of the current streaming services offering I keep pirating all the TV shows and movies I watch and they're always available for download mere hours after their official/legal counterparts. It's not like videogames where intricate anti-piracy measures can take weeks or even sometimes months to break, here it's mostly about the time for the pirated copy to disseminate on the network. I wonder by which metric video DRM can be said to work. It's a pain for legit users because they can't view their movies and shows on all of their devices easily and it's a complete non-issue for pirates.

mtgx 9y ago

No, not really. You're thinking that every user has to copy a movie from the browser. But only a very tiny percentage of the people wanting to see the latest Game of Thrones episode need to steal it so that everyone else who intended to pirate it can watch it as well. Whether or not DRM exists for those other 99.99% of the people is completely irrelevant. The show is already on torrents put there by those who could bypass the technical protection of DRM. So now those 99.99% of users can watch it for free, too, without having to know how to bypass DRM themselves.

logfromblammo 9y ago
The more difficult it is to strip DRM, the fewer pirate captains there are. You don't need to take out every pirate to end piracy; you just need to take out every captain. So if only Paisleybeard and VikingVik can crack the GoT DRM, you maybe only need to get cooperation from the Croatian and Swedish police for a few weeks, and then you get some amount of time when pirated shows are no longer available. But then Swashbuggerer and NotSoJollyRoger and Plaidbeard step up, and the pirate crews flock to their standards. But for a time, some people who might have otherwise pirated may have paid. But then you're back to talking to the American and Filipino and Scottish police. And if one of your captains is in a non-extradition country, you may have to talk to Pinkertons or ex-military contractors. If it is trivial to crack the DRM, everyone can be a pirate captain if necessary, with a crew of only themselves. You will never, ever stop piracy for longer than a few minutes in any pirate-friendly household with that kind of DRM. That's like the difference between posting your property and putting up an actual fence or wall. It is just a virtual boundary that has legal consequences in the out-of-band enforcement system. And don't forget that when pirate captains voluntarily retire, or are forcibly retired, they can still publish "how to be a pirate captain" guides for the media-seas they once sailed. They can distribute models for 3D-printing your very own pirate ship. So the DRM-makers have to put constant effort into changing tactics and updating technical countermeasures to fight that kind of fight. It gets to be expensive, because the defense has to be perfect, while the offense can breach it through any ant-sized hole. Furthermore, the analog hole will always be there, and every paying customer has the keys to your fortress gate.
- 9y ago

shmerl 9y ago

> Well, surely DRM prevents enough users from copying the product to make it worthwhile? It surely does not. DRM is broken (by any skilled pirate), and the rest of pirating users can get it without said DRM after that. So let's make it clear. Usage of DRM has nothing to do with piracy.