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DRM punishes paying customers and does nothing to stop piracy. It reminds me of those "you wouldn't kill" segments at the start of DVD's that you couldn't skip,

DRM punishes paying customers and does nothing to stop piracy. It reminds me of those "you wouldn't kill" segments at the start of DVD's that you couldn't skip, but just moaned at you to not pirate the DVD. But the only people they were telling this to was paying customers who bought the DVD. People who pirated the DVD, just plugged it into their computer, ripped out the content then published.

geofft 7y ago
Sure, but why? Do the rightsholders believe that these mechanisms are effective at making them money somehow? How correct are they - are these mechanisms effective at stopping some amount of casual piracy and converting that into purchases?
- jaimex2 7y ago
  It's pretty simple: They pay a hot shot company to try and stop piracy and thats the best they can come up with. Piracy can't be stopped but thats not what they want to hear. Piracy can be greatly reduced by distributing the content via Netflix but thats not what they want to hear.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    >And yet 4K webrips of recent Netflix shows are readily available on torrent sites. and: >Piracy can be greatly reduced by distributing the content via Netflix Aren't you guys saying different things? One is saying people already pirate on netflix, and the other is saying netflix removes the need for piracy. If you're saying the same thing, I would interpret it to mean that piracy is greatly reduced on netflix, but not entirely eliminated. But if that be the case, would that not be evidence of netflix' anti-piracy measures working?
    - diamondlovesyou 7y ago
      Those two sides aren't mutually exclusive. Demand for content creates both.
    - gbear605 7y ago
      My interpretation of the quotes is that if a show is on Netflix, its pirating rates go down drastically, but some shows on Netflix are still pirated. That’s because there is a significant population who pirates only when it is easier than streaming, and Netflix makes streaming really painless, in comparison with other streaming sites like Hulu or CBS All Access. However, some people still won’t pay for Netflix (or for any other streaming service), and they’re the ones that the first quote is talking about.
    - catalogia 7y ago
      DRM doesn't inconvenience pirates, but piracy inconveniences consumers. It's inconvenient to free up 50 GB of hard disk space to torrent of a 4k netflix rip you found off some shady torrent site. It's much more convenient to just give netflix a few bucks a month. That inconvenience comes from law enforcement action against pirate sites and many users having trouble managing their hard drive space. Not from DRM.
      - noodlesUK 7y ago
        It may be inconvenient to free up some disk space (citation needed, anyone on HN has probably got terabytes of free space somewhere), but the inconvenience of certain streaming platforms, or even the total hostility to watching anything ad-free (even paid users) will knock people into the piracy camp. There is no source where I can watch AAA movies that I buy on my laptop legally in 4K as it is illegal to break Blu-ray encryption (and I run Linux). I buy or rent movies I want to watch on my Apple TV in 4K, but what am I supposed to do if I want to watch something on a plane for instance? Anything that is on Netflix I watch. I can’t watch amazon prime on my Apple TV because their region system is broken (yes, if an amazon employee is reading this, please fix having prime in multiple countries) so battlestar galactica and other shows in their catalogue aren’t available come from other sources.
        catalogia 7y ago
        I'm talking about the typical consumer, not a HN user. Most people aren't running linux, have legal streaming options available to them, don't have terabytes available to them at any particular moment (maybe they have a few terabytes of portable harddrive in a closet somewhere, but not mounted and ready to roll.) Are there scenarios where typical consumers turn to piracy? Sure, aboslutely. They generally do that when a convenient legal way isn't an option (e.g. region locks screwing them over.)
        noodlesUK 7y ago
        You’re probably right, but I know plenty of people who are happy to use putlocker etc who aren’t technically competent at all (and yeah, they sure get malware...)
    - Spivak 7y ago
      Statement 1: Piracy is inevitable in all platforms and at scale every media property will be pirated by someone. Statement 2: If your content is available on a reasonably priced and performant streaming platform or is otherwise “low friction” the number of people who will choose to consume the pirated content instead of paying drops off dramatically. The problem for publishers is that there’s so many different knobs that finding what brings in the most revenue is pretty much a crapshoot.
      - jaimex2 7y ago
        Exactly what I was trying to get at, thanks.
    - Erudite_Genius 7y ago
      Content piracy has long been about the exorbitant cost of acquiring content. If you look at the cost of downloading a full, original quality Blu-Ray rip, then burning that to a dual-layer BD-R disc, you're looking at an hour to torrent plus up to $10 for a dual-layer recordable disc. Compare that to a store-bought copy that's $7.88 and comes with both Blu-Ray and DVD copies, and it's no contest. Make that store-bought copy $49.95 (thanks, Marvel) and it makes piracy attractive. Add terrible DRM on top and you GUARANTEE piracy, because you're being hostile to people that have actually bought your movie. If DRM had never been invented, piracy would only be about 5% worse, and your paying customers wouldn't be cursing your existence... but the media companies are too stupid to realize that.
      - pferde 7y ago
        > If DRM had never been invented, piracy would only be about 5% worse, and your paying customers wouldn't be cursing your existence... but the media companies are too stupid to realize that. The media companies do not care whether their paying customers love them or hate them. What they do care about, though, is when there is 5% less of them. Remember, big corporations do not just want money - they want all the money (and more).
    - marcosdumay 7y ago
      > But if that be the case, would that not be evidence of netflix' anti-piracy measures working? No. It's evidence that just having the content available on Netflix will reduce piracy. It is a bit less effective than it could be because Netflix doesn't run on literally everything, mostly because of anti-piracy protections, but it does run on nearly everything, so it's effective.
    - matheusmoreira 7y ago
      Removing the reasons to infringe copyright is completely different from making it impossible to infringe someone's copyright. Netflix is a convenient enough service that makes it easy for people to watch what they want to watch. Most people will just pay for it without thinking twice. It's easy enough that most people won't even consider infringing. Netflix's value isn't just in the content it serves, it's also in the fact it frees people from the non-trivial effort required to "pirate". Private torrent trackers have an economy of their own. Making it impossible to infringe is extremely difficult. Movies and music are really just information. Extremely big numbers. It's trivial to make copies of this stuff and send those copies over the network. In previous centuries, you needed to be a major industry player and own big machines like printing presses in order to infringe on someone's copyright at scale. In the 21st century it's as easy as copy paste or forgetting to close the torrent client. People might not even realize they are doing it. This is why a fragmented streaming market will push people towards copyright infringement. Instead of pooling their intellectual property and creating one single perfect streaming service with all the content, they are making it difficult and expensive for the consumer by competing with each other. At some point, people are going to wonder if there's a better way. That's when they'll find "piracy".
  - geofft 7y ago
    It's been decades and literally everyone in multiple industries is still refusing to admit they're throwing money after a lost cause? I won't say that's impossible, but the entire idea behind capitalism is that this happens rarely. Eventually someone will realize they can make more profit by not paying for anti-piracy, right?
    - arvinsim 7y ago
      I think some companies are just looking for the appearance of fighting and succeeding against piracy.
    - neltnerb 7y ago
      They cannot possibly actually think DRM stops anything. Maybe they don't get that it's convenience that drives sales rather than the content itself. I just rented Spiderman on Amazon streaming for like $6, about the same as I remember video rental used to be. I'm certain I could have pirated it if Amazon streaming had not worked on Linux. It was slightly easier and slightly more ethical feeling to rent it from Amazon, so I did. I have seen a bit of a pattern where content distributors start out by cranking the DRM to 11 and then year over year get less and less worried about it. I guess they realize over time that the DRM isn't stopping anything, who knows, maybe they're using it to provide a PR argument that they're trying their best to push some other agenda. But I think they know that it's the distribution method rather than the encryption that influences buying decisions unless they magically stop all casual piracy. Be at least as easy as casual piracy?
    - tjalfi 7y ago
      Baen Books[0] and Tor[1] don't use DRM. [0] https://www.baen.com/t-drm https://www.baen.com/t-drm [1] https://www.tor.com/2013/04/29/tor-books-uk-drm-free-one-year-later/ https://www.tor.com/2013/04/29/tor-books-uk-drm-free-one-yea...
      - Freak_NL 7y ago
        Baen Books is one publisher who gets it, and makes a profit doing so. Some of their back-catalogue is available for free on-line, such as David Weber's Empire from the Ashes. Complete trilogy: http://www.baencd.freedoors.org/Books/Empire%20From%20the%20Ashes/Empire_From_the_Ashes.htm http://www.baencd.freedoors.org/Books/Empire%20From%20the%20... (hard sci-fi)
  - matheusmoreira 7y ago
    > Piracy can't be stopped but thats not what they want to hear. It can be stopped. All they have to do is destroy the computing and internet freedom we all enjoy today. Can't do subversive things like copy a file if they don't let us run our software. Governments around the world are also trying to erode these same freedoms by pushing encryption regulation.
    - Supermancho 7y ago
      > It can be stopped. In the context of visual/audio (re: the topic), no. Even disallowing encryption will not save companies from simple steganography.
    - jaimex2 7y ago
      Even then, lets say the successfully broke all encryption and all communication - people would just go back to recording from a DVR and selling DVDs on the streets.
    - shakna 7y ago
      > All they have to do is destroy the computing and internet freedom we all enjoy today. That's one of those "good luck" scenarios. Building your own homebrew computer, or your own OS is a hobby for many. If you push the people behind them, and make a market for them, you'll make them popular. The internet itself is complex, but not so complex that determined actors cannot build their own mesh networks. And whilst governments are trying to erode encryption everywhere, it won't work in the end. They may be able to take secure encryption out of the hands of civilians, maybe. But they can't take it from the pirates. And as for the incoming "no one would be that determined" argument, cracking chips to let consoles play pirated games have existed for a long time, and the average person did actually seek them out... And found them everywhere. If you make people build the infrastructure... They will.
    - Freak_NL 7y ago
      It seems to me that the approach Netflix and Disney et al are taking is accomplishing just that. DRM in the browser was step one. No Widevine, or whatever crapware is needed, no Netflix. Next came the limit on higher resolutions. You want Full HD? Stop using a free operating system. You want 4k? Get Internet Explorer, or better yet, get our app on one of the approved operating systems. The next step is probably to diminish the browser experience even further until enough users have switched to the 'app'. The only reason is control. It won't drive us away from a personal computer running whatever modern OS we want, but it is slowly creating a majority of people for whom computing exclusively means a managed device with a pre-approved operating system running vetted proprietary applications.
- sushid 7y ago
  It could also be an attempt to sway the public and their views on piracy.
- matheusmoreira 7y ago
  They just refuse to license their intellectual property to streaming companies that haven't developed "adequate" protection against "piracy". It's all about making a billion dollar investment look less risky in the eyes of executives. I seriously doubt it's helping them make more money. Any victory against copyright infringement will come from competing directly against it. The copyright holders are too busy competing with each other and fragmenting the market instead of building something that's actually equal to or better than "piracy". It's pretty sad how a bunch of "pirates" manage to provide a better product than corporations valued at tens of billions of dollars.
- yuushi 7y ago
  I remember this being in the context of video games, and from some time ago (so things may have changed with Steam sales and the like), but it said that something like 85% of sales occur in the first two weeks. Thus the DRM was there to (hopefully) hold out for as much of that initial time as possible. Anyway, anecdotal story, take with (many) grains of salt.
- Silhouette 7y ago
  How correct are they - are these mechanisms effective at stopping some amount of casual piracy and converting that into purchases? Yes. Contrary to popular opinion among the geek crowd who tend to be very hostile to DRM, the people using it are not in fact completely ignorant and stupid. I write this as someone who used to believe similar things myself in my younger days, but who has now seen both sides of the coin and has moderated some of those views in light of that experience. One thing that a lot of people don't seem to realise is that piracy often isn't about the price, but rather the convenience. If it's easier to find a ripped copy of something online, for example because it's not available in a certain region from legal sources, then people who want that content will go looking and they'll find the illegal sources. If it is available from legal sources, then to some extent DRM doesn't have to stop someone from being able to find a pirate copy, it just has to make it more inconvenient than finding a legitimate one. Given that any pirate content found online comes with a certain degree of risk, from malicious payloads pretending to be something else, poor quality or incomplete content that frustrates the person who gets it, and in some cases from honey traps that can result in legal action, this isn't entirely unrealistic. One specific but very important instance of this, briefly mentioned already elsewhere in this discussion, is that if DRM can delay the widespread availability of some popular new work via pirate channels for a few weeks or even just a few days, that can make a huge difference to profitability. There have been AAA games where the DRM has been cracked but not for several months, and that might have saved the developers and legitimate distributors many millions of dollars. At the other end of the spectrum, there is lots of content that is going to be many orders of magnitude less profitable even with a good run, simply because it's aimed at relatively small markets: niche music genres, software for running some specific type of shop or leisure facility, a documentary programme about an obscure interest, and so on. There is much less desire from the kinds of people who would be able to crack substantial DRM schemes to spend time on these things, so even simple measures can be quite effective in preventing that content from being trivially findable online, thus preserving the limited market for these kinds of products. And finally, there is the simple but still relevant issue that some people genuinely don't realise piracy isn't legal or that what they're doing is piracy. "If it's on the Internet, it's free, right?" Even the most basic DRM schemes mean people probably have to do something that is clearly not the intended way of getting hold of the content, and that itself can be a useful deterrent for the "unwillfully ignorant" crowd.
unlinked_dll 7y ago
>DRM punishes paying customers and does nothing to stop piracy. Media companies aren't stupid. They know exactly how much DRM and piracy impact their bottom line. That's why DRM-free distribution is a non-starter for virtually every media company, because it saves them money. Like all things dealing with bad actors, DRM isn't about stopping behavior. It's about slowing it down and making it more cumbersome
- everyone 7y ago
  "Media companies aren't stupid. They know exactly how much DRM and piracy impact their bottom line." Citation needed.
- catalogia 7y ago
  They may not be stupid, but that doesn't mean they're totally rational either (that would be inhuman and I can assure you they're just as human as the rest of us.) Most of these media companies have never even tried no-DRM so a fully rational appraisal of the value of DRM simply isn't possible for them. The music industry largely went no-DRM (and streaming) and they were totally unscathed. A good quality mp3 or flac file is what, tens of megabytes at most? Really easy to pirate. A good quality 4k rip is going to be tens of gigabytes. Pirating something that large is a hassle for me but inconceivable for some of my friends or family members. Pirating movies and TV shows has always been more niche than pirating music. And the formats easiest to pirate (720p, low bitrate, etc) are the formats being given the lightest DRM. I wager there are some very human emotions involved in the decision making, namely pride and possessiveness. "We made this so we get to control it." The effectiveness of the DRM takes a backseat.
  - jowsie 7y ago
    A good quality (for your average media consumer) 4k rip can be as low as 8gb. Sure it's not blu-ray quality but neither is Netflix, and no one cares. At least where I live, you're looking at 5-15 minutes to download a 4k rip on the average home connection. This is also completely ignoring pirate streaming sites, that while not as popular as they used to be, still exist and are lower friction than Netflix half the time. I'd wager I know more people pirating films/tv than I do music.
lifthrasiir 7y ago
> DRM punishes paying customers and does nothing to stop piracy. There is a plot twist here: DRM does help stopping piracy, but only for smaller businesses producing the contents that appeals enough to be copied but not enough to be paid for. I'm pretty fine with Steam DRM for that reason, without that indie games will have much harder time. For Disney+, I cannot understand their reasoning at all.
- hannasanarion 7y ago
  Most games on Steam don't have DRM. Valve's DRM product is called Custom Executable Generation (CEG) and it costs extra for developers to add to their games. Most steam games work fine even if you uninstall Steam and have no internet.
  - lifthrasiir 7y ago
    How exactly many games do (EDIT: typo) have DRM? AFAIK the answer is "many enough", I'm unable to give a concrete number but I do recall many games in my library that doesn't appear in a list of DRM-free games. I don't agree to your premise. (To be clear, I do think DRM---so-called---is very bad in general. I accept DRMs for indie games only because DRMs have been already existed for games.) [1] https://steam.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games https://steam.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games
    - earenndil 7y ago
      That list is community-maintained and almost certainly contains many omissions.
giancarlostoro 7y ago
What makes matters worse is they inform the consumer that yes you can just steal the film. I was involved in the Private Server scene in my younger days and a game had a campaign against private servers. Ever since like 90% of the people in that private scene have told me they only knew about it cause of the campaign. You spark the human curiosity and screw yourself.
- matheusmoreira 7y ago
  It's the Streisand effect in action.
  - ojilles 7y ago
    We really should remove all definition and references to the Streisand effect. Then everyone will know about it!
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Medieval moralists discovered that they could not express in too much detail proscribed sins for the obvious reasons. The DRM industry has yet to learn this lesson. Thankfully.
AlexDragusin 7y ago
The info is there not to stop piracy but as a legal matter in case the customer says "I didn't knew, I wasn't informed".
- omegabravo 7y ago
  I'm not sure the "you wouldn't download a car" is legally binding
  - Izkata 7y ago
    That one was just confusing anyway, the general response was "if it existed, yeah I would".
hombre_fatal 7y ago
> DRM punishes paying customers and does nothing to stop piracy. I would think DRM stops trivial tools like a Chrome extension that adds a "Download" button on anything you're watching on Netflix.com. Which is good enough. Because piracy is confusing to most people. Piracy sites are scummy and require tech-savyness just to navigate them and download the right thing. For example, my girlfriend knows "The Pirate Bay" by name though a torrent client is still confusing to her. First google result for that is https://thepiratebays3.com https://thepiratebays3.com. It has a scary and scummy banner at the top: "Official The Pirate Bay Warning. Do NOT download torrent files without hiding your IP! With a VPN you can Hide your IP & stay anonymous, avoid fines and lawsuits, especially in USA. <Link to NordVPN affiliate link>". And searching anything doesn't work for me. So, I think the war against piracy is more or less won due to how relegated it is to a tiny part of the population that's capable of navigating it.
- kuon 7y ago
  I know some not very technical people that bought some HDMI network restreamer on ebay, it's basically an HDMI splitter with an ethernet port that will act as a (I think rtmp) server. I didn't check the technicals details, and he uses VLC on his desktop computer to record movies he wants to keep. He does it at night with TV luminosity and volume at near 0. Of course you have to play the movie/serie in mirror on the TV, but he can record HD (not sure about 4k) movies of whatever plays on the TV. The cherry on top is that he bought 3 IR mirrors (well, it was just aluminum sheets) that he placed strategically to be able to control the IR stuff of the TV from his bedroom. He was a but uneasy when he showed that to me, but I didn't mock him, I was genuinely fascinated by that setup. For someone who has near zero technical knowledge, this was very good. I don't really have a point, I just thought of it when you mentioned your girlfriend fear of the pirate bay.
  - P_I_Staker 7y ago
    It's not even really about stopping your friend, although I'm sure they'd like to do that too. They want to prevent there from being a zero effort "download button". That's the only advantage of DRM (same with DVD/digital delivery). Even the act of having to insert a DVD, or hit play and manually record is enough to stop people. If they went entirely DRMless, you'd just be able to copy the content to a thumb drive, and share with friends. Instead, you have to mess around with other software (or in your friends case hardware), that does sometimes "breaks", or is otherwise inconvenient. It's the same as DRMless games; people absolutely go crazy making copies (even back in floppy disk days). As much as the pirate community likes to pretend they're in it for moral reasons, some of the DRMless games by smaller developers became the most pirated games out there. It is a very minor deterrent, for people that are too lazy. That's one area where streaming has prevailed over pirating. People can be extremely lazy, and having a convient streaming platform with decent content, is enough for some people not to bother.
ehsankia 7y ago
> DRM punishes paying customers and does nothing to stop piracy. That's not necessarily true. I agree with the DVD example, but for example, I've almost never had any issues with Netflix's DRM. I can even pre-load videos on phone/tablet, and for the most part it works as expected. Same thing with Steam, it's fairly transparent to the user. Yes there are bad DRMs out there, but there can be a balance when done right where it doesn't hurt the customer and provides more value than pirating (like Steam).
throw0101a 7y ago
> It reminds me of those "you wouldn't kill" segments at the start of DVD's that you couldn't skip ... Obligatory IT Crowd reference: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg

geofft 7y ago

Sure, but why? Do the rightsholders believe that these mechanisms are effective at making them money somehow? How correct are they - are these mechanisms effective at stopping some amount of casual piracy and converting that into purchases?

jaimex2 7y ago
It's pretty simple: They pay a hot shot company to try and stop piracy and thats the best they can come up with. Piracy can't be stopped but thats not what they want to hear. Piracy can be greatly reduced by distributing the content via Netflix but thats not what they want to hear.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  >And yet 4K webrips of recent Netflix shows are readily available on torrent sites. and: >Piracy can be greatly reduced by distributing the content via Netflix Aren't you guys saying different things? One is saying people already pirate on netflix, and the other is saying netflix removes the need for piracy. If you're saying the same thing, I would interpret it to mean that piracy is greatly reduced on netflix, but not entirely eliminated. But if that be the case, would that not be evidence of netflix' anti-piracy measures working?
  - diamondlovesyou 7y ago
    Those two sides aren't mutually exclusive. Demand for content creates both.
  - gbear605 7y ago
    My interpretation of the quotes is that if a show is on Netflix, its pirating rates go down drastically, but some shows on Netflix are still pirated. That’s because there is a significant population who pirates only when it is easier than streaming, and Netflix makes streaming really painless, in comparison with other streaming sites like Hulu or CBS All Access. However, some people still won’t pay for Netflix (or for any other streaming service), and they’re the ones that the first quote is talking about.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    DRM doesn't inconvenience pirates, but piracy inconveniences consumers. It's inconvenient to free up 50 GB of hard disk space to torrent of a 4k netflix rip you found off some shady torrent site. It's much more convenient to just give netflix a few bucks a month. That inconvenience comes from law enforcement action against pirate sites and many users having trouble managing their hard drive space. Not from DRM.
    - noodlesUK 7y ago
      It may be inconvenient to free up some disk space (citation needed, anyone on HN has probably got terabytes of free space somewhere), but the inconvenience of certain streaming platforms, or even the total hostility to watching anything ad-free (even paid users) will knock people into the piracy camp. There is no source where I can watch AAA movies that I buy on my laptop legally in 4K as it is illegal to break Blu-ray encryption (and I run Linux). I buy or rent movies I want to watch on my Apple TV in 4K, but what am I supposed to do if I want to watch something on a plane for instance? Anything that is on Netflix I watch. I can’t watch amazon prime on my Apple TV because their region system is broken (yes, if an amazon employee is reading this, please fix having prime in multiple countries) so battlestar galactica and other shows in their catalogue aren’t available come from other sources.
      - catalogia 7y ago
        I'm talking about the typical consumer, not a HN user. Most people aren't running linux, have legal streaming options available to them, don't have terabytes available to them at any particular moment (maybe they have a few terabytes of portable harddrive in a closet somewhere, but not mounted and ready to roll.) Are there scenarios where typical consumers turn to piracy? Sure, aboslutely. They generally do that when a convenient legal way isn't an option (e.g. region locks screwing them over.)
        noodlesUK 7y ago
        You’re probably right, but I know plenty of people who are happy to use putlocker etc who aren’t technically competent at all (and yeah, they sure get malware...)
  - Spivak 7y ago
    Statement 1: Piracy is inevitable in all platforms and at scale every media property will be pirated by someone. Statement 2: If your content is available on a reasonably priced and performant streaming platform or is otherwise “low friction” the number of people who will choose to consume the pirated content instead of paying drops off dramatically. The problem for publishers is that there’s so many different knobs that finding what brings in the most revenue is pretty much a crapshoot.
    - jaimex2 7y ago
      Exactly what I was trying to get at, thanks.
  - Erudite_Genius 7y ago
    Content piracy has long been about the exorbitant cost of acquiring content. If you look at the cost of downloading a full, original quality Blu-Ray rip, then burning that to a dual-layer BD-R disc, you're looking at an hour to torrent plus up to $10 for a dual-layer recordable disc. Compare that to a store-bought copy that's $7.88 and comes with both Blu-Ray and DVD copies, and it's no contest. Make that store-bought copy $49.95 (thanks, Marvel) and it makes piracy attractive. Add terrible DRM on top and you GUARANTEE piracy, because you're being hostile to people that have actually bought your movie. If DRM had never been invented, piracy would only be about 5% worse, and your paying customers wouldn't be cursing your existence... but the media companies are too stupid to realize that.
    - pferde 7y ago
      > If DRM had never been invented, piracy would only be about 5% worse, and your paying customers wouldn't be cursing your existence... but the media companies are too stupid to realize that. The media companies do not care whether their paying customers love them or hate them. What they do care about, though, is when there is 5% less of them. Remember, big corporations do not just want money - they want all the money (and more).
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    > But if that be the case, would that not be evidence of netflix' anti-piracy measures working? No. It's evidence that just having the content available on Netflix will reduce piracy. It is a bit less effective than it could be because Netflix doesn't run on literally everything, mostly because of anti-piracy protections, but it does run on nearly everything, so it's effective.
  - matheusmoreira 7y ago
    Removing the reasons to infringe copyright is completely different from making it impossible to infringe someone's copyright. Netflix is a convenient enough service that makes it easy for people to watch what they want to watch. Most people will just pay for it without thinking twice. It's easy enough that most people won't even consider infringing. Netflix's value isn't just in the content it serves, it's also in the fact it frees people from the non-trivial effort required to "pirate". Private torrent trackers have an economy of their own. Making it impossible to infringe is extremely difficult. Movies and music are really just information. Extremely big numbers. It's trivial to make copies of this stuff and send those copies over the network. In previous centuries, you needed to be a major industry player and own big machines like printing presses in order to infringe on someone's copyright at scale. In the 21st century it's as easy as copy paste or forgetting to close the torrent client. People might not even realize they are doing it. This is why a fragmented streaming market will push people towards copyright infringement. Instead of pooling their intellectual property and creating one single perfect streaming service with all the content, they are making it difficult and expensive for the consumer by competing with each other. At some point, people are going to wonder if there's a better way. That's when they'll find "piracy".
- geofft 7y ago
  It's been decades and literally everyone in multiple industries is still refusing to admit they're throwing money after a lost cause? I won't say that's impossible, but the entire idea behind capitalism is that this happens rarely. Eventually someone will realize they can make more profit by not paying for anti-piracy, right?
  - arvinsim 7y ago
    I think some companies are just looking for the appearance of fighting and succeeding against piracy.
  - neltnerb 7y ago
    They cannot possibly actually think DRM stops anything. Maybe they don't get that it's convenience that drives sales rather than the content itself. I just rented Spiderman on Amazon streaming for like $6, about the same as I remember video rental used to be. I'm certain I could have pirated it if Amazon streaming had not worked on Linux. It was slightly easier and slightly more ethical feeling to rent it from Amazon, so I did. I have seen a bit of a pattern where content distributors start out by cranking the DRM to 11 and then year over year get less and less worried about it. I guess they realize over time that the DRM isn't stopping anything, who knows, maybe they're using it to provide a PR argument that they're trying their best to push some other agenda. But I think they know that it's the distribution method rather than the encryption that influences buying decisions unless they magically stop all casual piracy. Be at least as easy as casual piracy?
  - tjalfi 7y ago
    Baen Books[0] and Tor[1] don't use DRM. [0] https://www.baen.com/t-drm https://www.baen.com/t-drm [1] https://www.tor.com/2013/04/29/tor-books-uk-drm-free-one-year-later/ https://www.tor.com/2013/04/29/tor-books-uk-drm-free-one-yea...
    - Freak_NL 7y ago
      Baen Books is one publisher who gets it, and makes a profit doing so. Some of their back-catalogue is available for free on-line, such as David Weber's Empire from the Ashes. Complete trilogy: http://www.baencd.freedoors.org/Books/Empire%20From%20the%20Ashes/Empire_From_the_Ashes.htm http://www.baencd.freedoors.org/Books/Empire%20From%20the%20... (hard sci-fi)
- matheusmoreira 7y ago
  > Piracy can't be stopped but thats not what they want to hear. It can be stopped. All they have to do is destroy the computing and internet freedom we all enjoy today. Can't do subversive things like copy a file if they don't let us run our software. Governments around the world are also trying to erode these same freedoms by pushing encryption regulation.
  - Supermancho 7y ago
    > It can be stopped. In the context of visual/audio (re: the topic), no. Even disallowing encryption will not save companies from simple steganography.
  - jaimex2 7y ago
    Even then, lets say the successfully broke all encryption and all communication - people would just go back to recording from a DVR and selling DVDs on the streets.
  - shakna 7y ago
    > All they have to do is destroy the computing and internet freedom we all enjoy today. That's one of those "good luck" scenarios. Building your own homebrew computer, or your own OS is a hobby for many. If you push the people behind them, and make a market for them, you'll make them popular. The internet itself is complex, but not so complex that determined actors cannot build their own mesh networks. And whilst governments are trying to erode encryption everywhere, it won't work in the end. They may be able to take secure encryption out of the hands of civilians, maybe. But they can't take it from the pirates. And as for the incoming "no one would be that determined" argument, cracking chips to let consoles play pirated games have existed for a long time, and the average person did actually seek them out... And found them everywhere. If you make people build the infrastructure... They will.
  - Freak_NL 7y ago
    It seems to me that the approach Netflix and Disney et al are taking is accomplishing just that. DRM in the browser was step one. No Widevine, or whatever crapware is needed, no Netflix. Next came the limit on higher resolutions. You want Full HD? Stop using a free operating system. You want 4k? Get Internet Explorer, or better yet, get our app on one of the approved operating systems. The next step is probably to diminish the browser experience even further until enough users have switched to the 'app'. The only reason is control. It won't drive us away from a personal computer running whatever modern OS we want, but it is slowly creating a majority of people for whom computing exclusively means a managed device with a pre-approved operating system running vetted proprietary applications.
sushid 7y ago
It could also be an attempt to sway the public and their views on piracy.
matheusmoreira 7y ago
They just refuse to license their intellectual property to streaming companies that haven't developed "adequate" protection against "piracy". It's all about making a billion dollar investment look less risky in the eyes of executives. I seriously doubt it's helping them make more money. Any victory against copyright infringement will come from competing directly against it. The copyright holders are too busy competing with each other and fragmenting the market instead of building something that's actually equal to or better than "piracy". It's pretty sad how a bunch of "pirates" manage to provide a better product than corporations valued at tens of billions of dollars.
yuushi 7y ago
I remember this being in the context of video games, and from some time ago (so things may have changed with Steam sales and the like), but it said that something like 85% of sales occur in the first two weeks. Thus the DRM was there to (hopefully) hold out for as much of that initial time as possible. Anyway, anecdotal story, take with (many) grains of salt.
Silhouette 7y ago
How correct are they - are these mechanisms effective at stopping some amount of casual piracy and converting that into purchases? Yes. Contrary to popular opinion among the geek crowd who tend to be very hostile to DRM, the people using it are not in fact completely ignorant and stupid. I write this as someone who used to believe similar things myself in my younger days, but who has now seen both sides of the coin and has moderated some of those views in light of that experience. One thing that a lot of people don't seem to realise is that piracy often isn't about the price, but rather the convenience. If it's easier to find a ripped copy of something online, for example because it's not available in a certain region from legal sources, then people who want that content will go looking and they'll find the illegal sources. If it is available from legal sources, then to some extent DRM doesn't have to stop someone from being able to find a pirate copy, it just has to make it more inconvenient than finding a legitimate one. Given that any pirate content found online comes with a certain degree of risk, from malicious payloads pretending to be something else, poor quality or incomplete content that frustrates the person who gets it, and in some cases from honey traps that can result in legal action, this isn't entirely unrealistic. One specific but very important instance of this, briefly mentioned already elsewhere in this discussion, is that if DRM can delay the widespread availability of some popular new work via pirate channels for a few weeks or even just a few days, that can make a huge difference to profitability. There have been AAA games where the DRM has been cracked but not for several months, and that might have saved the developers and legitimate distributors many millions of dollars. At the other end of the spectrum, there is lots of content that is going to be many orders of magnitude less profitable even with a good run, simply because it's aimed at relatively small markets: niche music genres, software for running some specific type of shop or leisure facility, a documentary programme about an obscure interest, and so on. There is much less desire from the kinds of people who would be able to crack substantial DRM schemes to spend time on these things, so even simple measures can be quite effective in preventing that content from being trivially findable online, thus preserving the limited market for these kinds of products. And finally, there is the simple but still relevant issue that some people genuinely don't realise piracy isn't legal or that what they're doing is piracy. "If it's on the Internet, it's free, right?" Even the most basic DRM schemes mean people probably have to do something that is clearly not the intended way of getting hold of the content, and that itself can be a useful deterrent for the "unwillfully ignorant" crowd.

unlinked_dll 7y ago

>DRM punishes paying customers and does nothing to stop piracy. Media companies aren't stupid. They know exactly how much DRM and piracy impact their bottom line. That's why DRM-free distribution is a non-starter for virtually every media company, because it saves them money. Like all things dealing with bad actors, DRM isn't about stopping behavior. It's about slowing it down and making it more cumbersome

everyone 7y ago
"Media companies aren't stupid. They know exactly how much DRM and piracy impact their bottom line." Citation needed.
catalogia 7y ago
They may not be stupid, but that doesn't mean they're totally rational either (that would be inhuman and I can assure you they're just as human as the rest of us.) Most of these media companies have never even tried no-DRM so a fully rational appraisal of the value of DRM simply isn't possible for them. The music industry largely went no-DRM (and streaming) and they were totally unscathed. A good quality mp3 or flac file is what, tens of megabytes at most? Really easy to pirate. A good quality 4k rip is going to be tens of gigabytes. Pirating something that large is a hassle for me but inconceivable for some of my friends or family members. Pirating movies and TV shows has always been more niche than pirating music. And the formats easiest to pirate (720p, low bitrate, etc) are the formats being given the lightest DRM. I wager there are some very human emotions involved in the decision making, namely pride and possessiveness. "We made this so we get to control it." The effectiveness of the DRM takes a backseat.
- jowsie 7y ago
  A good quality (for your average media consumer) 4k rip can be as low as 8gb. Sure it's not blu-ray quality but neither is Netflix, and no one cares. At least where I live, you're looking at 5-15 minutes to download a 4k rip on the average home connection. This is also completely ignoring pirate streaming sites, that while not as popular as they used to be, still exist and are lower friction than Netflix half the time. I'd wager I know more people pirating films/tv than I do music.

lifthrasiir 7y ago

> DRM punishes paying customers and does nothing to stop piracy. There is a plot twist here: DRM does help stopping piracy, but only for smaller businesses producing the contents that appeals enough to be copied but not enough to be paid for. I'm pretty fine with Steam DRM for that reason, without that indie games will have much harder time. For Disney+, I cannot understand their reasoning at all.

hannasanarion 7y ago
Most games on Steam don't have DRM. Valve's DRM product is called Custom Executable Generation (CEG) and it costs extra for developers to add to their games. Most steam games work fine even if you uninstall Steam and have no internet.
- lifthrasiir 7y ago
  How exactly many games do (EDIT: typo) have DRM? AFAIK the answer is "many enough", I'm unable to give a concrete number but I do recall many games in my library that doesn't appear in a list of DRM-free games. I don't agree to your premise. (To be clear, I do think DRM---so-called---is very bad in general. I accept DRMs for indie games only because DRMs have been already existed for games.) [1] https://steam.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games https://steam.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games
  - earenndil 7y ago
    That list is community-maintained and almost certainly contains many omissions.

giancarlostoro 7y ago

What makes matters worse is they inform the consumer that yes you can just steal the film. I was involved in the Private Server scene in my younger days and a game had a campaign against private servers. Ever since like 90% of the people in that private scene have told me they only knew about it cause of the campaign. You spark the human curiosity and screw yourself.

matheusmoreira 7y ago
It's the Streisand effect in action.
- ojilles 7y ago
  We really should remove all definition and references to the Streisand effect. Then everyone will know about it!
dredmorbius 7y ago
Medieval moralists discovered that they could not express in too much detail proscribed sins for the obvious reasons. The DRM industry has yet to learn this lesson. Thankfully.

AlexDragusin 7y ago

The info is there not to stop piracy but as a legal matter in case the customer says "I didn't knew, I wasn't informed".

omegabravo 7y ago
I'm not sure the "you wouldn't download a car" is legally binding
- Izkata 7y ago
  That one was just confusing anyway, the general response was "if it existed, yeah I would".

hombre_fatal 7y ago

> DRM punishes paying customers and does nothing to stop piracy. I would think DRM stops trivial tools like a Chrome extension that adds a "Download" button on anything you're watching on Netflix.com. Which is good enough. Because piracy is confusing to most people. Piracy sites are scummy and require tech-savyness just to navigate them and download the right thing. For example, my girlfriend knows "The Pirate Bay" by name though a torrent client is still confusing to her. First google result for that is https://thepiratebays3.com https://thepiratebays3.com. It has a scary and scummy banner at the top: "Official The Pirate Bay Warning. Do NOT download torrent files without hiding your IP! With a VPN you can Hide your IP & stay anonymous, avoid fines and lawsuits, especially in USA. <Link to NordVPN affiliate link>". And searching anything doesn't work for me. So, I think the war against piracy is more or less won due to how relegated it is to a tiny part of the population that's capable of navigating it.

kuon 7y ago
I know some not very technical people that bought some HDMI network restreamer on ebay, it's basically an HDMI splitter with an ethernet port that will act as a (I think rtmp) server. I didn't check the technicals details, and he uses VLC on his desktop computer to record movies he wants to keep. He does it at night with TV luminosity and volume at near 0. Of course you have to play the movie/serie in mirror on the TV, but he can record HD (not sure about 4k) movies of whatever plays on the TV. The cherry on top is that he bought 3 IR mirrors (well, it was just aluminum sheets) that he placed strategically to be able to control the IR stuff of the TV from his bedroom. He was a but uneasy when he showed that to me, but I didn't mock him, I was genuinely fascinated by that setup. For someone who has near zero technical knowledge, this was very good. I don't really have a point, I just thought of it when you mentioned your girlfriend fear of the pirate bay.
- P_I_Staker 7y ago
  It's not even really about stopping your friend, although I'm sure they'd like to do that too. They want to prevent there from being a zero effort "download button". That's the only advantage of DRM (same with DVD/digital delivery). Even the act of having to insert a DVD, or hit play and manually record is enough to stop people. If they went entirely DRMless, you'd just be able to copy the content to a thumb drive, and share with friends. Instead, you have to mess around with other software (or in your friends case hardware), that does sometimes "breaks", or is otherwise inconvenient. It's the same as DRMless games; people absolutely go crazy making copies (even back in floppy disk days). As much as the pirate community likes to pretend they're in it for moral reasons, some of the DRMless games by smaller developers became the most pirated games out there. It is a very minor deterrent, for people that are too lazy. That's one area where streaming has prevailed over pirating. People can be extremely lazy, and having a convient streaming platform with decent content, is enough for some people not to bother.

ehsankia 7y ago

> DRM punishes paying customers and does nothing to stop piracy. That's not necessarily true. I agree with the DVD example, but for example, I've almost never had any issues with Netflix's DRM. I can even pre-load videos on phone/tablet, and for the most part it works as expected. Same thing with Steam, it's fairly transparent to the user. Yes there are bad DRMs out there, but there can be a balance when done right where it doesn't hurt the customer and provides more value than pirating (like Steam).

throw0101a 7y ago

> It reminds me of those "you wouldn't kill" segments at the start of DVD's that you couldn't skip ... Obligatory IT Crowd reference: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALZZx1xmAzg