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1. Literally giving away your content has nothing to do with DRM, but rather, your business model. If you elect to give away your content for free, that's your

1. Literally giving away your content has nothing to do with DRM, but rather, your business model. If you elect to give away your content for free, that's your choice. Others have already proven that giving away DRM-free content can lead to making a tidy profit. See the humble-bundles and Louis CK's recent experiment as demonstrations. Look at Bandcamp.com, and the countless artists selling DRM free content. I've spent more money there the past year then anything the labels have produced. 2. Less likely to be cracked? That's wishful thinking at best. It's already been shown countless times that smaller companies content will be cracked just as readily as larger companies. It's not as if they are using some other form of DRM. 3. Which bugs afflict you in the video playing department? I've found that playing videos without Flash is fairly simple. Granted, you need to provide 2 videos, but you'll what you need. Are you referring to lack of DRM support in these browsers? In fact, I'm not really sure what you are referring to here. 4. That's not true. Rather, content that includes extras like DRM will provide an inferior user experience. I'm sorry, but even Valve, who I love, doesn't have as great an experience as I can get if they'd remove the DRM. And it's because of the DRM they use. If you attach DRM to your content, you are degrading the UX. There is no argument against that. It's simply the way it is. Even if you simply put your content in a membership area, I have to log in rather than simply see that content. If I have to install some 3rd party software to read that content, it's a degraded experience. I'm sorry, but it's the content providers that choose to degrade the experience. At least man up and take ownership. Finally, you claim people like me need a far stronger argument. I guess that's fair. We could all use stronger arguments. But at the same time, the arguments for DRM aren't strong either. The only argument in favor of DRM that I can get behind is: "It's my content, I can do what I want with it." Yes, you can, and I support that. Beyond that, not much more can be said.

Chris_Newton 15y ago
1. Please note that I'm not suggesting that serving DRM-free content can't make a decent profit. Personally, I really hope it would for us as well and that we will be able to do exactly that. But I have to separate my desire to run that kind of company from the commercial reality that in contrast to the humble bundles and Louis CK, we are highly unlikely to wind up with vast amounts of Internet coverage on high volume web sites that reach a lot of our target audience who are likely to look upon us favourably precisely because we are making a point of not using DRM. 2. If you've got any serious data to share on this point, I'd appreciate links. I've been researching the real effects of copyright, infringement, DRM, etc. for a long time, and I've found few studies with anything resembling a sound methodology and unbiased reporting, and even fewer that consider anything but mass-market Big Media operations. 3. I'm not sure this is a good place to enumerate every likely browser bug we're currently tracking, but I'll give a few examples: - Some browsers are not detecting the end of a video properly (no JS event fires/can't replay -- not really much doubt that this is a bug). - Some smartphones play videos fullscreen whether you like it or not (unhelpful if there are other controls beyond the universal video ones that users should be able to reach with one touch -- this is an active choice, but limits the quality of the experience we can offer to users). - Several mobile devices reportedly support H.264 at a certain profile and level, but in practice seem to require more specific settings (which don't always seem to be clearly documented in the guidelines published by the browser/OS developers -- this may or may not be down to bugs, but without clear specs and completely standardised formats it's in any case a significant drain on resources just investigating and testing across a wide field of devices). I'm not referring to DRM at all here, just the problems of using HTML5 technology that isn't sufficiently standardised yet relative to the one-size-fits-all-except-iOS of Flash. 4. In our tests, H.264 in an MP4 file (using the features that are supported in browsers) gets modestly better quality at a given bit rate than a WebM stack and completely outclasses Ogg/Theora/Vorbis. If you have a browser like Firefox that for cultural/legal/whatever reasons won't support H.264, then the best result is that Firefox users will see lower-quality video or need more bandwidth to see the same quality. There's not really anything ambiguous about this. As for DRM, if it ever interferes noticeably with legitimate users, that's obviously a bad thing. Again, my personal line is that any technology we do decide to use to protect our content in any way should be transparent to someone using our service legitimately. But if we're talking about someone visiting a web page to watch a video, why does the user care what technology is being used to achieve that as long as it looks and sounds as it should? If in some alternate reality I could use a plug-in on iOS smartphones to provide a better user interface instead of relying on Apple's compulsory full-screen presentation, or if we decided to produce an iPhone app for the same reason, would you still object to requiring 3rd party software so a customer could use our service more easily? > But at the same time, the arguments for DRM aren't strong either. The argument for some form of transparent DRM in our internal discussions is simple and compelling: either it works and we potentially make more sales to legal customers at the expense of pirates, or it doesn't work and we're probably no worse off than we would have been anyway. Unless either the implementation costs are high or we're at risk of losing significant numbers of legitimate customers for some reason, it's essentially a plan with no drawbacks other than the bad taste it leaves in the mouth. Once again, I feel I should stress that I'm writing personally here and not in any official capacity. I should also be clear that I am playing devil's advocate to some extent, as are other people when we debate this in-house. No-one is evangelising DRM here, we're just not buying the anti-DRM arguments without reading the full brochure either. > The only argument in favor of DRM that I can get behind is: "It's my content, I can do what I want with it." Well, yes, and to the extent that "I can do what I want with it" means "I can run a viable business that helps my paying customers" and "People who don't pay us for it don't get to have it" I don't think anyone here has much of a problem with that. If genuine users have even the slightest problem because of any technological content protection measures, that's a serious issue for me. If it costs us a lot of time and/or money to implement those measures and they don't generate a worthwhile return, that's also a serious issue. However, being nice to people who are blatantly trying to rip us off rather than paying a price that, frankly, almost anyone in our target market can easily afford is... not a priority, let's say.

Chris_Newton 15y ago

1. Please note that I'm not suggesting that serving DRM-free content can't make a decent profit. Personally, I really hope it would for us as well and that we will be able to do exactly that. But I have to separate my desire to run that kind of company from the commercial reality that in contrast to the humble bundles and Louis CK, we are highly unlikely to wind up with vast amounts of Internet coverage on high volume web sites that reach a lot of our target audience who are likely to look upon us favourably precisely because we are making a point of not using DRM. 2. If you've got any serious data to share on this point, I'd appreciate links. I've been researching the real effects of copyright, infringement, DRM, etc. for a long time, and I've found few studies with anything resembling a sound methodology and unbiased reporting, and even fewer that consider anything but mass-market Big Media operations. 3. I'm not sure this is a good place to enumerate every likely browser bug we're currently tracking, but I'll give a few examples: - Some browsers are not detecting the end of a video properly (no JS event fires/can't replay -- not really much doubt that this is a bug). - Some smartphones play videos fullscreen whether you like it or not (unhelpful if there are other controls beyond the universal video ones that users should be able to reach with one touch -- this is an active choice, but limits the quality of the experience we can offer to users). - Several mobile devices reportedly support H.264 at a certain profile and level, but in practice seem to require more specific settings (which don't always seem to be clearly documented in the guidelines published by the browser/OS developers -- this may or may not be down to bugs, but without clear specs and completely standardised formats it's in any case a significant drain on resources just investigating and testing across a wide field of devices). I'm not referring to DRM at all here, just the problems of using HTML5 technology that isn't sufficiently standardised yet relative to the one-size-fits-all-except-iOS of Flash. 4. In our tests, H.264 in an MP4 file (using the features that are supported in browsers) gets modestly better quality at a given bit rate than a WebM stack and completely outclasses Ogg/Theora/Vorbis. If you have a browser like Firefox that for cultural/legal/whatever reasons won't support H.264, then the best result is that Firefox users will see lower-quality video or need more bandwidth to see the same quality. There's not really anything ambiguous about this. As for DRM, if it ever interferes noticeably with legitimate users, that's obviously a bad thing. Again, my personal line is that any technology we do decide to use to protect our content in any way should be transparent to someone using our service legitimately. But if we're talking about someone visiting a web page to watch a video, why does the user care what technology is being used to achieve that as long as it looks and sounds as it should? If in some alternate reality I could use a plug-in on iOS smartphones to provide a better user interface instead of relying on Apple's compulsory full-screen presentation, or if we decided to produce an iPhone app for the same reason, would you still object to requiring 3rd party software so a customer could use our service more easily? > But at the same time, the arguments for DRM aren't strong either. The argument for some form of transparent DRM in our internal discussions is simple and compelling: either it works and we potentially make more sales to legal customers at the expense of pirates, or it doesn't work and we're probably no worse off than we would have been anyway. Unless either the implementation costs are high or we're at risk of losing significant numbers of legitimate customers for some reason, it's essentially a plan with no drawbacks other than the bad taste it leaves in the mouth. Once again, I feel I should stress that I'm writing personally here and not in any official capacity. I should also be clear that I am playing devil's advocate to some extent, as are other people when we debate this in-house. No-one is evangelising DRM here, we're just not buying the anti-DRM arguments without reading the full brochure either. > The only argument in favor of DRM that I can get behind is: "It's my content, I can do what I want with it." Well, yes, and to the extent that "I can do what I want with it" means "I can run a viable business that helps my paying customers" and "People who don't pay us for it don't get to have it" I don't think anyone here has much of a problem with that. If genuine users have even the slightest problem because of any technological content protection measures, that's a serious issue for me. If it costs us a lot of time and/or money to implement those measures and they don't generate a worthwhile return, that's also a serious issue. However, being nice to people who are blatantly trying to rip us off rather than paying a price that, frankly, almost anyone in our target market can easily afford is... not a priority, let's say.