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> Well, yeah. Streaming services wouldn't exist without DRM. Why? Libraries loan you books and paper does not have any DRM. Works fine. The only difference is

> Well, yeah. Streaming services wouldn't exist without DRM. Why? Libraries loan you books and paper does not have any DRM. Works fine. The only difference is you might get some rate limit, e.g. 30 movies per month, or more watermarks instead of digital restrictions. On the flip side getting Netflix in high quality has annoying hoops because of DRM (No, nobody wants to use Edge, thank you very much). > If we deleted DRM, streaming services would cease to exist overnight — all their license grants being revoked, leaving them with nothing to serve No, only if single stores do that. If lots of stores do that, you simply get the same content but without DRM. That literally happened for music, so you would at least need to argue why not here as well.

Zababa 4y ago
> Why? Libraries loan you books and paper does not have any DRM. Works fine. Because books are physical objects, copying them is expensive. Digital data doesn't have that problem.
- josefx 4y ago
  Anyone with a scanner and a day of time can produce infinite digital copies of a book. You don't have to throw money at it like Google and do some crazy AI driven OCR, a boring afternoon in front of a scanner, flipping through pages is more than enough. Source: I wasted way too much time to scan the notes I took as student just so I could throw the hard copies out.
  - Zababa 4y ago
    I should have said "expensive compared to digital stuff", you're right that it doesn't cost an individual millions to copy a book. But compared to copying a mp3, it takes a lot of time.
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    If you are not sentimental you can cut the book and just feed it. Many libraries have those fancy copying machines. I have never tried it my self for anything other than A4 compendia books though.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    > I wasted way too much time to scan the notes I took you answered yourself why the scan approach is impractical.
    - josefx 4y ago
      There are many groups dedicated to the translation and typesetting of manga that have no official english release. This also counts as piracy and the amount of effort that goes into it dwarfs copying pages one by one significantly. Impracticality doesn't matter as long as you have a hand full of people willing to do it.
derefr 4y ago
Have you never used a digital library to check out an e-book? They use DRM. And even then, libraries have a different rights model, involving the fact that they legally own each copy they lend out as a distinct purchase of an IP license, placing a distribution concurrency limit on each work of “however many copies they’ve purchased”. They aren’t legally allowed to just make more copies to serve more users; they have to buy those additional copies. And yes, this applies to both physical books and e-books lent out by libraries. (It also applied to the DVDs Netflix used to be about loaning out.)

Zababa 4y ago

> Why? Libraries loan you books and paper does not have any DRM. Works fine. Because books are physical objects, copying them is expensive. Digital data doesn't have that problem.

josefx 4y ago
Anyone with a scanner and a day of time can produce infinite digital copies of a book. You don't have to throw money at it like Google and do some crazy AI driven OCR, a boring afternoon in front of a scanner, flipping through pages is more than enough. Source: I wasted way too much time to scan the notes I took as student just so I could throw the hard copies out.
- Zababa 4y ago
  I should have said "expensive compared to digital stuff", you're right that it doesn't cost an individual millions to copy a book. But compared to copying a mp3, it takes a lot of time.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  If you are not sentimental you can cut the book and just feed it. Many libraries have those fancy copying machines. I have never tried it my self for anything other than A4 compendia books though.
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > I wasted way too much time to scan the notes I took you answered yourself why the scan approach is impractical.
  - josefx 4y ago
    There are many groups dedicated to the translation and typesetting of manga that have no official english release. This also counts as piracy and the amount of effort that goes into it dwarfs copying pages one by one significantly. Impracticality doesn't matter as long as you have a hand full of people willing to do it.

derefr 4y ago

Have you never used a digital library to check out an e-book? They use DRM. And even then, libraries have a different rights model, involving the fact that they legally own each copy they lend out as a distinct purchase of an IP license, placing a distribution concurrency limit on each work of “however many copies they’ve purchased”. They aren’t legally allowed to just make more copies to serve more users; they have to buy those additional copies. And yes, this applies to both physical books and e-books lent out by libraries. (It also applied to the DVDs Netflix used to be about loaning out.)