8 ms·

Isn't DRM... Completely fucking pointless? I can go on The Pirate Bay and find 4K rips of all movies and shows I want. If DRM can't prevent that, what's the poi

Isn't DRM... Completely fucking pointless? I can go on The Pirate Bay and find 4K rips of all movies and shows I want. If DRM can't prevent that, what's the point? All it does is infringe on our rights to be able to do what we want on our own devices. It's crazy.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Scramblejams 6y ago
Isn’t the point to generate license revenue for the DRM IP holders?
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
Yes movie DRM does seem completely pointless. Game DRM on the other hand does seem to hold up for the first few months which is where most of the sales happen. It would be nice if devs dropped the DRM once it is cracked though.
- zeusk 6y ago
  There is a subreddit which tracks this https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/ieo7u4/crack_watch_games/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/ieo7u4/crack_wa...
  - jaspergilley 6y ago
    Super interesting, thanks for posting
  - hnick 6y ago
    Thanks for that. I found this interesting old discussion on Denuvo too (skim/skip the OP, seems to be BS, but the top comment is interesting). https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackStatus/comments/43dgej/how_denuvo_works_and_why_its_so_hard_to_crack/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackStatus/comments/43dgej/how_den...
gruez 6y ago
Because it doesn't have to be 100% effective to do its job. If your choices are to fork over $20 for a copy, pay $10/month for a streaming service, or pirate it from a shady site, most people would go with the first two options. The main goal is stopping casual piracy, aka. asking your friend to make you a copy.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  That doesn't make any sense. Not only is it not any harder to get it from some website than from your friend, the way people get it from their friend is by sharing the original disc or their Netflix password, which the DRM doesn't prevent in any way.
- woofie11 6y ago
  I find it goes the other way. I pirate things when legal services become too cumbersome, unethical, or dirty. DRM often does that. I won't avoid all DRM, but there's a threshold. The RIAA crossed with youtube-dl. When I was in college, price was an issue, and piracy was there to save the $10/month for most students, but the alternative was not having the music/software/etc., rather than a legal sale. The actual financial loss was close to zero. I think the reason for DRM isn't so much to prevent profit-losing piracy, as control. Movie and record companies want to differentiate pricing by market. They want records of who watch what and where. They want to be able to expire things, explicitly or implicitly (if I go Android<->Apple, my iTunes/Google Play collections become less helpful). That has business value. As for paying customers, when I was a student, they could have milked me for $5. As a professional, I don't really care what it costs, and I don't want to bother with piracy, and I'll do whatever's most ethical. The RIAA just told me what's most ethical is not listening to new music, followed by pirating music, followed by buying music. I got enough music.
  - intricatedetail 6y ago
    RIAA is a cancer that is growing on artists. I don't know any who would like their art to be gatekeeped in this mafia-esque manner. These days most artist understand that legitimate fans will buy their art if it is easy and affordable. Nobody needs RIAA today and these type of organisations who profit off of artists without bringing any value should be made illegal.
deelowe 6y ago
Denuvo has been fairly successful despite what the pirates say. Several extremely popular games have gone many months with no crack. DRM isn't completely pointless, but it does require securing everything for it to work. Denuvo would be pointless if it weren't for the various secure virtualization features which are built into the CPU itself.
- mmis1000 6y ago
  Denuvo actually didn't promise that it won't be cracked forever. It promise the consumer it won't be cracked in N day after the release. Primary purpose is to stop the day 1 pirate from hurting the selling count hard. The movie industry doesn't seems like use it in the same way. It's kind of silly that normal user was prevented from watch the video normally while pirates do whatever they want becuase the 4k hdmi hdcp can be easily removed by just a dongle.
  - est31 6y ago
    DRM in the movie industry is mainly targeted at device vendors instead of customers. They want control over the playback experience and have a say which features the playback devices offer to users. Something that allows recording parts or skipping of the ads? Not great! That's also why there is a Widevine device revocation database for playback devices, while I'm not aware of something like that existing for Denuvo.
  - SXX 6y ago
    There are suspicions that some publishers just pay money to the scene groups who able to circumvent it successfully.
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    Sadly, if they actually cared about the consumer, then they would remove DRM after those N days. Since they don't, I just don't buy these games (Sonic Mania damnit!) , and I'm probably not alone..
shmerl 6y ago
Not just pointless. It's unethical and crooked.
biryani_chicken 6y ago
From the removed repo: > This PoC was done to further show that code obfuscation, anti-debugging tricks, whitebox cryptography algorithms and other methods of security-by-obscurity will eventually by defeated anyway, and are, in a way, pointless.
pfortuny 6y ago
Not necessarily. It can be good in a different setting: guaranteeing that medical software is at least signed by the developer and untampered.
- foepys 6y ago
  That's what cryptographic signatures are for. No need for DRM.
rbecker 6y ago
The point isn't to protect content, but to need permission from the DRM makers to make a viable browser (or TV, or music player, or ebook reader, or...) Without their blessing, it won't work with locked content, and your users will go to a competitor favored by the DRM owners.
formerly_proven 6y ago
DRM is mostly legal instrument. If you want to be able to sue people based on circumventing protections, courts need to consider your "content protection" "effective", which essentially means that it takes more than five minutes to circumvent. It also means that, since we're now talking about DRM that'll be protected by patents, copyright and obscurity/NDAs, that these DRM mechanisms centralize power to the owners of the DRM. This can then be easily leveraged to control and restrict e.g. the features playback devices may have.
- intricatedetail 6y ago
  Clearly this is not well thought out, but nobody is going to admit it. Any law that is trying to control human nature is pointless.
  - necovek 6y ago
    Like the law that you are not allowed to punch someone in the face because they annoy you? I don't think it's the best tool to teach people not to punch each other in the face, but I wouldn't go so far to call it pointless either.
  - justinclift 6y ago
    > Any law that is trying to control human nature is pointless. Yet religions still seem be around and getting humans to do dumb things? ;)
- thelastname 6y ago
  Recent events have shown that even simple google cypher may be effective. Even more effective is modifying your product to fit customers by NOT region locking your content, by not splitting it over multiple platforms. Using law to pretend that the global network does not exist is simply dumb and leads to piracy. DRM won't save backwards digital rights owners.
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    Region unlocking is unlikely to help to curb piracy, as the poorest regions won't be able to afford to buy the digital 'goods' at 'worldwide' prices.
hnick 6y ago
Like others said, for non-interactive media it is mostly pointless, but for executable code (especially stuff that's online or will update a lot, like games) it does some work.
rvz 6y ago
> Isn't DRM... Completely fucking pointless? Yes. It just slows down the less skilled from breaking the protection. There will always be one or a team of more highly skilled hackers that eventually defeats it. It always only a matter of time when it gets broken. But again, there's always the analogue hole. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
dzhiurgis 6y ago
> The Pirate Bay and find 4K rips of all movies and shows I want. What? There's almost no 4K rips for shows or movies. To me it seems it's working pretty well.
- knuthsat 6y ago
  Private torrent trackers have them all. I’ve contacted multiple members and asked them for their secrets and none replied. I’ve requested several Amazon and Netflix shows and got the pure, not reencoded, unencrypted files.
- yuvadam 6y ago
  You're clearly not looking in the right places :)
- muldvarp 6y ago
  RARBG has 4K rips of the newest Mandalorian episode, which was released today. DRM doesn't work.
- gsich 6y ago
  For shows 4k is not the norm.
std_badalloc 6y ago
> Isn't DRM... Completely fucking pointless? > All it does is infringe on our rights to be able to do what we want on our own devices. No, but this is exactly the point of DRM and the legal protections around circumventing it. It never was about copyright protection. Copyright infringement was already illegal before the DMCA, and the introduction of DRM didn't make a dent in the amount of copyright infringement. The point of making DRM circumvention illegal is for me to be able to sell you a bunch of bits, but ensure that I don't have any commercial competition in regards to how you use those bits. You can't legally make a device that plays DVDs without the blessing of a cartel known as DVD FLLC. You can't legally make a device that plays music from iTunes without the blessing of Apple. Etc. It's about retaining monopolistic control over media distribution and use, by forbidding certain forms of competition in the market. Getting a law passed that forbids market competition (in many countries! not just the US) under the guise of being about copyright protection, is one of the greatest cons I've ever heard of, but that is what has happened.
patrec 6y ago
> Isn't DRM... Completely fucking pointless? It never ceases to amaze me how easy it is to boil frogs, even if the frogs in question are high-IQ, technically sophisticated HN readers. Right now, you can still circumvent DRM, because you can still buy something that's approximately a general purpose computer (even if it will invariably already come with some remote-acessible hardware level spyware outside your control). But if current trends continue, this will not be the case by the end of the decade. Also, preventing private individuals from receiving and distributing unauthorized copies is only one way in which DRM is useful to companies.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  In "socialist" France, frog boils you ! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25081583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25081583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083782
  - patrec 6y ago
    La France se libère, part deux?
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
DRM is an extra fee imposed on the parties that follow the letter of the law. It's like building permits but the transfer of wealth is to a private entity instead of the state (which has its pros and cons).
533474 6y ago
We just stop consuming stupid DRM shows and music. There r tons of other media available and music from unknown talented composers/artists.
neop1x 6y ago
You can record data coming to the LCD panel or record the TV screen by a camera. With just degraded quality. On the other hand, I can't even take a screenshot of DRM-protected content on Android which can be very annoying sometimes.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Scramblejams 6y ago

Isn’t the point to generate license revenue for the DRM IP holders?

Polylactic_acid 6y ago

Yes movie DRM does seem completely pointless. Game DRM on the other hand does seem to hold up for the first few months which is where most of the sales happen. It would be nice if devs dropped the DRM once it is cracked though.

zeusk 6y ago
There is a subreddit which tracks this https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/ieo7u4/crack_watch_games/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/ieo7u4/crack_wa...
- jaspergilley 6y ago
  Super interesting, thanks for posting
- hnick 6y ago
  Thanks for that. I found this interesting old discussion on Denuvo too (skim/skip the OP, seems to be BS, but the top comment is interesting). https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackStatus/comments/43dgej/how_denuvo_works_and_why_its_so_hard_to_crack/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackStatus/comments/43dgej/how_den...

gruez 6y ago

Because it doesn't have to be 100% effective to do its job. If your choices are to fork over $20 for a copy, pay $10/month for a streaming service, or pirate it from a shady site, most people would go with the first two options. The main goal is stopping casual piracy, aka. asking your friend to make you a copy.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
That doesn't make any sense. Not only is it not any harder to get it from some website than from your friend, the way people get it from their friend is by sharing the original disc or their Netflix password, which the DRM doesn't prevent in any way.
woofie11 6y ago
I find it goes the other way. I pirate things when legal services become too cumbersome, unethical, or dirty. DRM often does that. I won't avoid all DRM, but there's a threshold. The RIAA crossed with youtube-dl. When I was in college, price was an issue, and piracy was there to save the $10/month for most students, but the alternative was not having the music/software/etc., rather than a legal sale. The actual financial loss was close to zero. I think the reason for DRM isn't so much to prevent profit-losing piracy, as control. Movie and record companies want to differentiate pricing by market. They want records of who watch what and where. They want to be able to expire things, explicitly or implicitly (if I go Android<->Apple, my iTunes/Google Play collections become less helpful). That has business value. As for paying customers, when I was a student, they could have milked me for $5. As a professional, I don't really care what it costs, and I don't want to bother with piracy, and I'll do whatever's most ethical. The RIAA just told me what's most ethical is not listening to new music, followed by pirating music, followed by buying music. I got enough music.
- intricatedetail 6y ago
  RIAA is a cancer that is growing on artists. I don't know any who would like their art to be gatekeeped in this mafia-esque manner. These days most artist understand that legitimate fans will buy their art if it is easy and affordable. Nobody needs RIAA today and these type of organisations who profit off of artists without bringing any value should be made illegal.

deelowe 6y ago

Denuvo has been fairly successful despite what the pirates say. Several extremely popular games have gone many months with no crack. DRM isn't completely pointless, but it does require securing everything for it to work. Denuvo would be pointless if it weren't for the various secure virtualization features which are built into the CPU itself.

mmis1000 6y ago
Denuvo actually didn't promise that it won't be cracked forever. It promise the consumer it won't be cracked in N day after the release. Primary purpose is to stop the day 1 pirate from hurting the selling count hard. The movie industry doesn't seems like use it in the same way. It's kind of silly that normal user was prevented from watch the video normally while pirates do whatever they want becuase the 4k hdmi hdcp can be easily removed by just a dongle.
- est31 6y ago
  DRM in the movie industry is mainly targeted at device vendors instead of customers. They want control over the playback experience and have a say which features the playback devices offer to users. Something that allows recording parts or skipping of the ads? Not great! That's also why there is a Widevine device revocation database for playback devices, while I'm not aware of something like that existing for Denuvo.
- SXX 6y ago
  There are suspicions that some publishers just pay money to the scene groups who able to circumvent it successfully.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Sadly, if they actually cared about the consumer, then they would remove DRM after those N days. Since they don't, I just don't buy these games (Sonic Mania damnit!) , and I'm probably not alone..

shmerl 6y ago

Not just pointless. It's unethical and crooked.

biryani_chicken 6y ago

From the removed repo: > This PoC was done to further show that code obfuscation, anti-debugging tricks, whitebox cryptography algorithms and other methods of security-by-obscurity will eventually by defeated anyway, and are, in a way, pointless.

pfortuny 6y ago

Not necessarily. It can be good in a different setting: guaranteeing that medical software is at least signed by the developer and untampered.

foepys 6y ago
That's what cryptographic signatures are for. No need for DRM.

rbecker 6y ago

The point isn't to protect content, but to need permission from the DRM makers to make a viable browser (or TV, or music player, or ebook reader, or...) Without their blessing, it won't work with locked content, and your users will go to a competitor favored by the DRM owners.

formerly_proven 6y ago

DRM is mostly legal instrument. If you want to be able to sue people based on circumventing protections, courts need to consider your "content protection" "effective", which essentially means that it takes more than five minutes to circumvent. It also means that, since we're now talking about DRM that'll be protected by patents, copyright and obscurity/NDAs, that these DRM mechanisms centralize power to the owners of the DRM. This can then be easily leveraged to control and restrict e.g. the features playback devices may have.

intricatedetail 6y ago
Clearly this is not well thought out, but nobody is going to admit it. Any law that is trying to control human nature is pointless.
- necovek 6y ago
  Like the law that you are not allowed to punch someone in the face because they annoy you? I don't think it's the best tool to teach people not to punch each other in the face, but I wouldn't go so far to call it pointless either.
- justinclift 6y ago
  > Any law that is trying to control human nature is pointless. Yet religions still seem be around and getting humans to do dumb things? ;)
thelastname 6y ago
Recent events have shown that even simple google cypher may be effective. Even more effective is modifying your product to fit customers by NOT region locking your content, by not splitting it over multiple platforms. Using law to pretend that the global network does not exist is simply dumb and leads to piracy. DRM won't save backwards digital rights owners.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Region unlocking is unlikely to help to curb piracy, as the poorest regions won't be able to afford to buy the digital 'goods' at 'worldwide' prices.

hnick 6y ago

Like others said, for non-interactive media it is mostly pointless, but for executable code (especially stuff that's online or will update a lot, like games) it does some work.

rvz 6y ago

> Isn't DRM... Completely fucking pointless? Yes. It just slows down the less skilled from breaking the protection. There will always be one or a team of more highly skilled hackers that eventually defeats it. It always only a matter of time when it gets broken. But again, there's always the analogue hole. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

dzhiurgis 6y ago

> The Pirate Bay and find 4K rips of all movies and shows I want. What? There's almost no 4K rips for shows or movies. To me it seems it's working pretty well.

knuthsat 6y ago
Private torrent trackers have them all. I’ve contacted multiple members and asked them for their secrets and none replied. I’ve requested several Amazon and Netflix shows and got the pure, not reencoded, unencrypted files.
yuvadam 6y ago
You're clearly not looking in the right places :)
muldvarp 6y ago
RARBG has 4K rips of the newest Mandalorian episode, which was released today. DRM doesn't work.
gsich 6y ago
For shows 4k is not the norm.

std_badalloc 6y ago

> Isn't DRM... Completely fucking pointless? > All it does is infringe on our rights to be able to do what we want on our own devices. No, but this is exactly the point of DRM and the legal protections around circumventing it. It never was about copyright protection. Copyright infringement was already illegal before the DMCA, and the introduction of DRM didn't make a dent in the amount of copyright infringement. The point of making DRM circumvention illegal is for me to be able to sell you a bunch of bits, but ensure that I don't have any commercial competition in regards to how you use those bits. You can't legally make a device that plays DVDs without the blessing of a cartel known as DVD FLLC. You can't legally make a device that plays music from iTunes without the blessing of Apple. Etc. It's about retaining monopolistic control over media distribution and use, by forbidding certain forms of competition in the market. Getting a law passed that forbids market competition (in many countries! not just the US) under the guise of being about copyright protection, is one of the greatest cons I've ever heard of, but that is what has happened.

patrec 6y ago

> Isn't DRM... Completely fucking pointless? It never ceases to amaze me how easy it is to boil frogs, even if the frogs in question are high-IQ, technically sophisticated HN readers. Right now, you can still circumvent DRM, because you can still buy something that's approximately a general purpose computer (even if it will invariably already come with some remote-acessible hardware level spyware outside your control). But if current trends continue, this will not be the case by the end of the decade. Also, preventing private individuals from receiving and distributing unauthorized copies is only one way in which DRM is useful to companies.

BlueTemplar 6y ago
In "socialist" France, frog boils you ! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25081583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25081583 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083782 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25083782
- patrec 6y ago
  La France se libère, part deux?

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

DRM is an extra fee imposed on the parties that follow the letter of the law. It's like building permits but the transfer of wealth is to a private entity instead of the state (which has its pros and cons).

533474 6y ago

We just stop consuming stupid DRM shows and music. There r tons of other media available and music from unknown talented composers/artists.

neop1x 6y ago

You can record data coming to the LCD panel or record the TV screen by a camera. With just degraded quality. On the other hand, I can't even take a screenshot of DRM-protected content on Android which can be very annoying sometimes.