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>> The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices. This is a good spot to place the pin. The "theological" view
by netcan 5y ago
>> The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices.
This is a good spot to place the pin.
The "theological" view is that (1) copyright is a moral right. (2) The Law just protects right against wrong, and(3) economic side effects of laws are incidental.
Real life is a lot less naive, so to speak. The commercial intellectual property concerns at stake are are record labels, apps, stores/distributors, large music & film portfolios and such. These exist, don't exist, have huge potential or not depending largely on the IP/DRM legislation and enforcement environment.
DRM is, IMO, an industrial policy. It gives shape and dimension to the music & film industry. Negotiating the leverage party type X has over Y is always a key feature of such policies.
- fxtentacle 5y agoMy take: "The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices and their own consumers." How have I regretted purchasing Blu-Rays in the past. They require an update to the drive firmware, they require their own GPU driver version, they require an update to the player software, and they try to sneak spyware onto my PC anyway. It is almost impossible to legally watch an authentic blu-ray on a Windows PC. Similarly, how have I regretted allowing my TV to connect to the internet. The first thing that happened was that it started shoving ads into my face. So I did a factory reset and disconnected it. Now, Netflix and Prime TV are unusable. Plus the YouTube app never managed to play back 4K videos on a 4K TV without crashing. I don't quite know why they hate me so much, but whenever I try to be nice to movie companies and purchase their stuff, they treat me like shit. And DRM is their legal whip to fuck me over. Blu-Ray? doesn't work. DRM. Offline iTunes? doesn't work in 4K. DRM. Prime TV? mandatory internet for DRM. Then ads. Netflix? mandatory internet for DRM. Then ads. On the other hand, an mkv file on a USB stick "just works", has exceptional audio and video quality, doesn't buffer, and I can skip all the ads.
- krylon 5y agoIt has been like that for a long time. The non-skippable intro screen warning viewers of the evils of unlicensed copying was only ever seen by people not watching an unlicensed copy. FWIW, I think movies need to take the same route music did. Ever since I found out I could just buy DRM-free high-quality audio at a reasonable price, I have happily paid for the music I like, because it was so very convenient. If it was as convenient to legally buy copies of movies / TV shows, I'd be happy to spend some money for that.
- stilisstuk 5y agoWhere do you buy audio? I don't use apple (itunes) and only some stuff is on bandcamp...
- netcan 5y agoNetflix & Spotify are currently worth $275bn & $45bn. I think it's quite unlikely that such results would be achieved with a pay-x-get-y store model. Even Disney & Universal, themselves enormously valuable companies, are greedily eying the platform model. It has everything they want. Recurring revenues. Content pushing abilities, which is usually the most strategically important asset. Platform monopoly potential, where most artists/studios take your take-it-or-leave-it terms. They don't hate you. They just do whatever is most valuable to them. They don't care about you. They may or may not value your custom, but that's about it.
- ipaddr 5y ago275 billion? Seems overvalued as we enter a new cycle of more services going online.
- outside1234 5y agoYou are probably right, but remember that Netflix is essentially a worldwide leader in producing and distributing movies - something we really haven’t seen before.
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- gambiting 5y agoI mean, it might not be legal where you live(definitely not illegal here) but MakeMKV takes about 20 minutes per disc and you can just watch the movie in VLC, works 100% of the time. Why bother with any special players.
- fxtentacle 5y agoI believe it's a legal gray area where I live, but I have also done that many times. Purchase the blu-ray, rip it myself. That way I feel like I did the morally correct thing by supporting the people who made the movie. But it might still be technically illegal because I circumvented the DRM.
- jevoten 5y ago> I don't quite know why they hate me so much, but whenever I try to be nice to movie companies and purchase their stuff, they treat me like shit. It's called "paying the Danegeld".
- fxtentacle 5y agoThat's a great Wikipedia rabbit hole. And I like this quote with s/dane/DRM/. "if once you have paid him the DRM-geld, you never get rid of the DRM".
- mysterydip 5y agoMy personal favorite example right now, having three smaller children, is amazon's "expiration" of videos installed on their kindles, that we don't find out about until we're on a trip somewhere. How do I explain to a kid that they can't watch their favorite movie that worked fine last time, or that they can't download any more episodes of their favorite show because someone decided they could only have 20 videos regardless of storage capacity?
- _0ffh 5y agoYes, though I prefer an alternative "theological" view: (1) Property rights exist to peacefully resolve conflicts over naturally scarce resources (2) Information resources are not naturally scarce
- pmontra 5y agoI try to be the Devil's advocate. The scarse resource is not that song or that movie. It's the time of the people that created that song and that movie. That's is part of the cost of production. This is similar to there are millions of houses but only a few in the most scenic places. Want one of them, pay more. It could be the same for the most popular songs and movies. The time of their creators is more valuable than mine. When writing software probably the other way around. Of course they don't sell songs and movies like that and creators sometimes only get peanuts. I'm not a very good Devil's advocate.
- contravariant 5y agoYeah reality is weird. I often find myself thinking copyright and DRM should obviously be advantageous to the authors only to subsequently recall that before the printing press predictably made copyright a thing there was a much greater demand for new manuscripts as they would quickly lose their value once in circulation [1]. [1]: https://virginica.substack.com/p/the-printing-press-nfts-and-the-end https://virginica.substack.com/p/the-printing-press-nfts-and... (it also talks about NFTs but that part is not relevant for this discussion)
- Gormo 5y ago> The scarse resource is not that song or that movie. It's the time of the people that created that song and that movie. That's is part of the cost of production. That's not really valid, though. Time is not the thing being exchanged -- it's impossible to do that -- so isn't a resource, scarce or otherwise, in the sense we mean. On top of that, the previous commenter made an error -- property rights aren't a solution to disputes over scarce resources, they're a solution to disputes over rival resources, regardless of how scarce they are. Since time is not transferable, it's not rival. More to your point, though, the consumption of time engaged in a productive activity is a capital expenditure, with the risk borne by those expending it, as with any other capital expenditure -- your investment lets you bring a product to market, but no one is obligated to do business with you, and whether people compensate you enough to generate a sufficient return is up to them.
- sandworm101 5y ago>> (3) economic side effects of laws are incidental. Not with intellectual property. This isn't ten-commandments stuff, protections against evil. Intellectual property law is an openly commercial law meant to increase the profitability of innovations. I remember an article from way back about what the Bible would think of copyright "piracy". It is such modern set of laws that anyone mentioned in the bible would probably stare in bewilderment at the concept. It would be like asking about the morality of air traffic control regulations.
- quietbritishjim 5y agoI agree that the purpose of copyright is not moral rights, even in theory. But I disagree that the theoretical purpose is profit (i.e. economic benefit to the creator). The idea (again, this is just in theory) is economic benefit to society overall. The idea is that if there's no copyright then creators would have no economic incentive to create anything, so they wouldn't bother. Profit to copyright owners is just a mechanism to incentivise them to create benefit to society. Actually, that's the theoretical reason for all profit, not just for copyright. A consequence of this is that there shouldn't be any increase to copyright term that only increases profits but doesn't increase benefit to society. But obviously political lobbyists don't follow that theory.
- coldpie 5y ago> The idea is that if there's no copyright then creators would have no economic incentive to create anything, so they wouldn't bother. And yet, we've had creative works from all of human history, despite copyright being barely a hundred or two years old, and our modern effectively-infinite conception of copyright is only now reaching 50 years old. This theory doesn't hold up to even a couple seconds of scrutiny.
- ryandrake 5y agoNot only historically, but today too. If there is one thing in the world that requires no external incentive to motivate, it’s art and creative work. The entire internet is stuffed full of people making and posting creative work, 99% of the time with no expectation of economic benefit. It would all exist anyway, without copyright “nudging it along”. Every garage band in existence would also exist without copyright. Every performer on the street corner would still perform without copyright. Every fanfic site would still have heaps of content without copyright. This idea that “oh, nobody would ever make art if we didn’t give them a near-infinite monopoly on distribution rights” is totally absurd. The only “art creation” scenario copyright seems to promote is “Corporation hires army of workers to make $100M 17th Spider-Man Sequel”. No, those specific kinds of work probably would not exist without government-mandated monopoly, but to say it promotes art in general is kind of exaggerating.
- 0xcde4c3db 5y ago>> The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices. I think it's noteworthy that game consoles do this in the opposite direction: give creators of playback devices leverage over content providers. This was basically why console DRM evolved in the first place (in the early forms of the 10NES lockout chip and the Atari 7800 signature scheme). Accordingly, console DRM schemes are typically stronger against unauthorized publishing of novel works than they are against unauthorized copying of already-published works (the latter being encrypted and signed in the expected way, thus only requiring subversion of a weaker "authentic disc" check). Apart from norms differing by industry, I would guess that the key to the directionality is which side thinks they can control access to a greater number of customers.
- criddell 5y agoI think this is true in ebooks and ereaders as well. There's a whole generation of readers that have bought a lot of ebooks from a single vendor. It has the effect of locking them to that vendor or possibly losing their collection.
- kmeisthax 5y agoGames have (and more generally, all software has) a unique weakness that doesn't apply to other forms of media: they are entirely at the mercy of their playback technologies to exist. So, just as an example... let's talk about the last major physical media format war: HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. The thing that killed HD-DVD was that Blu-Ray had better DRM. Switching between the two formats was as simple as copying a file from one encoder to another; so the movie studios picked the one that gave them the most control. Switching between game consoles is like telling the director of a movie to change from shooting in 16:9 to 21:9. It's possible, but you're going to be spending a lot of extra time and effort to switch aspect ratios. Now, granted, people have gotten really good at porting games to new systems, but it still requires time and effort to do, especially when it comes to testing and certification. A game developer porting a game to a system is, ultimately, a vote of confidence that the system will have a viable commercial software market 1-2 years down the line. Developers are at the mercy of console manufacturers, and thus they're very conservative with what platforms to develop on. So companies trying to enter the console business basically need to do half a decade's worth of business development and funding just to get a foot in the door. Which makes the few platforms that are successful that much more powerful. Another interesting quirk of the games industry is that consoles are often manufactured by companies that also fund or develop games, and those companies specifically withhold their games from other platforms to make their own consoles better. There's no need for Nintendo to demand that they pay themselves a 30% platform royalty to publish games on their own platform; and they aren't going to start paying Sony 30% so that people can buy Mario on PlayStation. Very, very early on in the history of American cinema, the US government made an antitrust case against movie studios that more or less banned them from owning the theaters that displayed their content. Since then, it's been the case that production and distribution were two separate specialties, with copyright law existing to ensure the latter can't screw over the former. Hence where we get "DRM exists to control player manufacturers". Games came along much later and their business models more or less never attracted antitrust scrutiny[0] until very recently when Epic decided to make a federal lawsuit out of it. My gut feeling is that it doesn't actually make a whole lot of business sense as a publisher or developer to outsource distribution to a third party. That's why you've seen Netflix go from "everything streaming instantly for cheap" to original productions; and why every other publisher made their own streaming platform to cut out the Netflix middleman. The only remaining link in the chain from publishers to you are device manufacturers: Apple, Google, Samsung, Roku, etc. This business looks a lot more like game consoles than player manufacturing, which shifts the balance of market power to the companies making the players. [0] Yes, the FTC sued Nintendo but that was more about the price of games and consoles, not the software lockout that prohibited you from otherwise lawfully making and selling your own Nintendo cartridges.
- dahart 5y ago> DRM is, IMO, and industrial policy […] Negotiating the leverage party type X has over Y is always a key feature of such policies. I like this take from a high level because it’s true. But, DRM is also an industrial technical attempt to enforce copyrights, not primarily against an industrial party, but primarily against consumers. Copyright law itself is a ‘rights management’ system, it just isn’t targeted at digital assets, and the truth is that copyright law doesn’t come with built-in or automatic enforcement, and a large number of consumers and businesses are perfectly content to ignore the law and consume/copy/distribute without permission or payment. Let’s momentarily ignore the fact that a: many DRM implementations overstep copyright and prevent some kinds of consumption that are legal under copyright law, and b: many DRM implementations are technically bad and make some kinds of legal and legitimate consumption difficult, annoying or inconvenient. It doesn’t seem like the author’s claim is correct or justified that DRM gives content creators leverage over playback device manufacturers. Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but it seems like the claim is backwards and inside-out. DRM is a symptom of the existing leverage, it isn’t the cause. DVD player makers reluctantly put DRM in because they’ve been asked/forced to, because the MPAA and licensing groups already have leverage, not because DRM itself is bestowing more leverage. The very control and leverage that content makers want over playback manufacturers is the ability to force them to implement DRM!
- _8j50 5y agoExcuse me but what sort of theology mentions copyrights or how did you induce that? Quite the contrary, sharing what you have with others is an obligation in most belief systems, an argument can even be made that Copyrights infringe on the obligation one has to share posessions and content.