4 ms·
Maybe I'm just a weird person, but I am surprised DRM is not mentioned at all here. (I guess it's due to the article being mostly focused on video games?) When
by koito17 3y ago
Maybe I'm just a weird person, but I am surprised DRM is not mentioned at all here. (I guess it's due to the article being mostly focused on video games?)
When I want to purchase books, comics, music, etc., I steer clear from anything with DRM that can only be decrypted by a proprietary service. For books and comics, I would rather be able to obtain an EPUB that I can load directly on any device I own, and when it is simply impossible to do so (e.g. Book Walker or Kindle DRM), then I buy physical copies and avoid digital copies entirely. I don't care if I pay a marginally higher cost, because I see value in being able to take the book with me anywhere. Likewise, for music, I would much rather pay $1 on Bandcamp for some FLAC file than pay $10/month in perpetuity for temporary access to said song (which can be revoked at any time). And if that is impossible, then I check if there is a CD I can purchase and, if not, then simply avoid paying money.
- lazide 3y agoDon’t BluRAYs have ‘remote bricking’ functionality/DRM built in?
- squeaky-clean 3y agoThere is encryption based DRM which is built into both the disc and player. But the player cannot brick your disc without a way of destroying it. Also just don't ever connect your bluray player to the internet.
- adamzochowski 3y agoNew players can stop supporting decrypting keys, locking out a disc. Famously intel stopped supporting some encryption chip tech and bluray players for pc stopped working. Finally, new disks too van stop supporting keys. This means that new disks could bad playback on old players. So yeah. The tech supports broken behavior and encourages it.
- jonhohle 3y agoThere are several UHD drives that are “unlocked” and those with the ability to extract encryption keys from others (or software players). I doubt this will be a concern, as I’m fairly sure UHD will be the last physical video format.
- simpaticoder 3y agoI agree with you, and I buy physical media for similar reasons. I also like that its so cheap! But the problem for people like us is that it doesn't matter. This whole subject is about entertainment access, and on the list of things that matter that's pretty far down. It's like the drive for prisoner human rights - people care, a little bit, but it's so far down the list of priorities it never gets attention. I believe that media companies are THE smartest companies in the world on the subject of selling and human psychology, and they know EXACTLY what they are doing and how much they can get away with, and they probably even have accurate models that describe how long it takes for new constraints on a population to be normalized such that anyone who complains is alienated by their peers, and the central authority need do nothing.
- squeaky-clean 3y agoIt's titled "overlooked reasons to still buy physical media". DRM is basically the primary reason to buy physical media, so it's not overlooked.