9 ms·

I have to wonder A) What does DRM realistically accomplish for the media companies? And, B) How are these DRM schemes actually being defeated? I do occasionally

I have to wonder A) What does DRM realistically accomplish for the media companies? And, B) How are these DRM schemes actually being defeated? I do occasionally don my pirate hat* and have never had an issue finding what I want at the quality I want within an hour of a episode/movie being released to streaming. That would seem to indicate that these efforts at DRM are actually failing to have any noticeable effect at all. [*] Jellyfin & and the -arr daemons are far more usable and stable then wading through the various streaming services interfaces, so I'll download episodes even though I do actually pay for the streaming services.

thomastjeffery 2y ago
DRM implements the same problem Copyright does, but in a different place. To explain that, here's some backstory: Copyright defines art as a good (instead of a service), and demands everyone play along. An artist can use their copyright to monopolize both the distribution and the derivation of their work. Effectively, this places a wall between any would-be collaborators, because collaboration is derivative. In a world without copyright, you could collaborate with the work of Disney by making derivative work. With copyright, however, Disney can demand you stop that work by monopolizing its copy. By abusing this demand, Disney can entrench itself as the only Mickey-Mouse compatible corporation. In the software world, collaboration of work requires source code redistribution. Because of this, the social incompatibility that copyright is founded upon translates into literal software incompatibility; including proprietary software platforms and libraries. For example, Microsoft Office has entrenched itself as the "industry standard" for rich text and spreadsheets by leveraging the incompatibility of its data formats. While collaboration isn't impossible, Microsoft is granted a legally-enforced anticompetitive advantage from its copyright monopoly. NVIDIA uses the copyright monopoly of its CUDA implementation to sell more hardware. It is able to do this because the hardware and software engineers are both part of the same vertically-integrated corporation. Because of copyright, AMD's software engineers are not allowed to collaborate with the CUDA developers, and AMD drivers cannot be made CUDA compatible. This is where the story gets to DRM: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and others are all vertically integrated hardware-media-advertising corporations. Each of them wants to abuse their respective copyright monopolies (their media businesses) to sell hardware, just like NVIDIA does with CUDA. To accomplish this, they told us the exact reverse story: Digital Rights Management. The story of Digital Rights Management says that hardware needs to be incompatible in order to enforce the copyright monopoly. See what they did there? Now any anticompetitive advantage that we get in our hardware and advertising businesses was all just from us doing whatever it takes to support those poor starving artists! I can hear you asking yourself, "But where is the hardware incompatibility?". That's the extra sneaky bit on top. Unlike having a clear winner and a loser like NVIDIA and AMD, hardware-media-advertising corporations are all winners. Each one of them benefits from the other using DRM. All of their moats intersect into one giant ~~swamp~~, I mean lakefront development. Here's an example to chew on: App Stores. Both Google and Apple have their own separate incompatible app stores. Sure, it's a loss to Google when a popular app only works on iOS, but that's a two way street. The important part is that they have a moat at all: when the little guys try to make a competitive alternative, they drown. There is plenty of room for two players at this game, and the intersection of moats guarantees there will never be a third. Even when Apple's moat starts to flood Android Island, what's left standing will be worth more than a drained swamp.
jsheard 2y ago
> How are these DRM schemes actually being defeated? Stripping the more advanced forms of DRM usually relies on compromised device keys which can and will be revoked if it becomes known that they've leaked, so the details are deliberately kept very quiet. If you've ever experienced a device suddenly losing the ability to play 4K Netflix, it may have been because its keys were revoked.
majormajor 2y ago
DRM has likely had a big impact in shifting the casual consumer conversation to "hey they're gonna start down on account sharing" from early-2000s style "here's a straight-up copy I made for you." And this helps prop up the "they'll get a Netflix account to binge the same three shows over and over" part of the business model. The cumulative monthly cost adds up but it feels cheaper than forking over a few hundred bucks for a few box sets + buying a disc player. None of the hurdles stop 100% of people. But every hurdle causes some people to stop bothering.
- watermelon0 2y ago
  In many cases, downloading torrents and watching on a laptop/PC has a better UX than using streaming services. For example, it's impossible to watch 4k content on popular streaming services if you use Linux, and even with macOS/Windows you need a specific combination of hardware + OS + browser, if a service even offers it.
  - LegionMammal978 2y ago
    To be fair, UX isn't only about the point of consumption. 4k torrents don't grow on trees (luckily, 1080p is good enough for my own tastes), and for old or less-popular movies, it's often tough to find seeders, or they all upload at 100 kbps or only have half the file or something dumb like that. (At least on the public trackers I'm aware of: I have no clue what goes on in the super-duper-exclusive private trackers that some love to boast about.) So I'd put accessibility and consistency as important parts of UX that torrenting can often miss out on. For the common person who is using Windows/Chrome, macOS/Safari, or a gaming console, those parts can easily be more important. Of course, these methods start to shine when legitimate methods are even less accessible. For instance, U.S. sports streaming is an absolute mess with multiple networks, regional blackouts, etc., on top of buggy apps, so that you sometimes can't watch a game legally for any price. People have widely picked up illegal streams as an alternative, usually preferring familiar platforms like YouTube if the streams aren't taken down quickly enough.
    - charrondev 2y ago
lotharcable 2y ago
> A) What does DRM realistically accomplish for the media companies? Control publishing rights, platforms, software and hardware that is used for the consumption of said media. The publishers control the DRM, which then needs to be licensed by television makers, software writers, and such things. Then that gives them control over how is it presented, how it is sold, how it is consumed and it forces everybody to agree to their terms. It is a power thing. They want to have power over other businesses. DRM laws help them do that. > How are these DRM schemes actually being defeated? Well I don't follow DRM piracy stuff, but at a high level the people that want to consume the media must be able to decrypt it to enjoy it. So if you buy one of these DRM devices and figure out how they work then you can decrypt anything that is compatible with them. And you only need to decrypt it once since digital media can be copied a infinite amount of times.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > It is a power thing. They want to have power over other businesses. DRM laws help them do that. This is the argument for repealing them, which is why you rarely see them making it out loud. Instead they come up with some rubbish about making it marginally more difficult (spoiler: it's still easier to pirate stuff than use legal services and the only thing actually preventing everyone from doing it is that some people want to follow the law). So it's good to knock those fake arguments down when you see them and leave no excuse to keep the bad laws that ought to be repealed. Accepting their actual motivation like it's a legitimate reason to keep those laws is like saying the reason we should keep doing the stuff Snowden revealed is so the intelligence agencies can spy on the elected officials regulating the intelligence agencies.
jakogut 2y ago
There's always an analog loophole. Even if the OS is unable to access the memory storing the decrypted data, you could always just plug the output of the machine into a capture card and capture the decrypted stream that way. I suppose some monitors and TVs have "features" to cryptographically handshake with the GPU and ensure a secure link, but at some point the data must be decrypted and decoded to be displayed. This doesn't seem like much more than a speed bump for a motivated individual.
- tasn 2y ago
  The end goal is DRM all the way to the screen. No capture cards will be allowed. It's a cat and mouse game, but I wouldn't discount these efforts as a mere speed bump. Screen enforced DRM will make things much harder. A motivated individual with the right tools and hardware hacking know how may be able to jailbreak a screen to record stuff, but that's going to make things out of reach for most people.
  - geerlingguy 2y ago
    With how good modern screens are, and how good cameras are (and how easy both are to hack), you could always play back the video and capture the photons through the air. There was something called Macrovision back in the VHS/DVD days that tried to defeat digital/analog conversion, and I'm sure visual techniques could be devised... But I imagine someone with a good OLED and a good mirrorless camera (or even a cell phone nowadays) could make a pretty good 4K replication of any media that displays.
    - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
      Especially when you add HDR to the mix, I think it's still extremely difficult to get a high quality screen recording, if only because it's so hard to get the exposure right.
      - Retr0id 2y ago
        You could record multiple exposures and merge them after the fact (and I agree the result would likely be subpar, but better than it's ever been at any previous point in time)
userbinator 2y ago
[flagged]
bambax 2y ago
Yes, DRM are a perfect example of the "Smart Cow" problem [0]. This is so obvious that, as you say (A) it's quite obscure why media companies still bother with DRM? The only beneficiaries of DRM seem to be hardware vendors, and even for them it's unclear if it's a net benefit, since it makes everything more expensive. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_cow_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_cow_problem
- fluidcruft 2y ago
  Probably advantage of DRM is that circumvention can be criminalized and absence of DRM implies circumvention.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    What advantage does this have over just criminalizing the underlying infringement regardless of DRM? Also, how does criminalizing it actually help anything, since the difficulty is in the scale of it happening and the difficulty of detecting it rather than the severity of the penalties, and imposing draconian penalties on random kids only turns the public against you?
    - fluidcruft 2y ago
      I think it plays differently before a jury. Juries can easily understand copying files and could potentially invalidate. But it's different when lawyers get to move the conversation to scary hacker garble about technical skill and intent. Evidence of intent is the real value.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        Juries are far less incompetent than they're made out to be, not least because both sides get to describe what's happening. And you can't even get evidence of intent from this anyway because DRM circumvention tools don't actually come with a ski mask and a set of lockpicks. You install a tool called "video downloader" which supports a hundred sites and 10% of them have some kind of DRM which it automatically strips in the background, you may not even be aware that it's happening when you use it.
dannyobrien 2y ago
IIUI it's mostly a question of a mess of contractual language and incentives. Rightsholders license content, and in their licensing contracts they require a certain level of DRM for certain products. So streamers, etc, implement the DRM to comply with those contracts. Nobody at any level has an incentive or leverage to change the contracts, so the DRM continues.
- codethief 2y ago
  > IIUI If I understand incorrectly? (Jokes aside, though, I haven't been able to figure out what IIUI stands for.)
  - merrywhether 2y ago
    If I understand it?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- cryptonector 2y ago
  That and also various principals are under the impression that DRM is possible, therefore they should implement it because it protects their IP, and protecting their IP is a fiduciary duty, therefore they must if they can.
  - anticensor 2y ago
    > protecting their IP is a fiduciary duty, This is not the case, unless we are talking about trade secrets, and in case of trade secrets, only applicable to board members and employees.
    - cryptonector 2y ago
      That's not how copyright works. The copyright owners want to maximize earnings, and the licensees/distributors also want to maximize earnings -- they are typically for-profit businesses, and as such they have a fiduciary duty to maximize earnings. If they think that DRM will help them, they'll want DRM. Of course for music DRM has proven to be pointless. People want to stream music, not buy music, and preserving media across so many media obsolenscence events has been such a pain that streaming is the only manageable solution for most people -- consumers don't want to make and manage copies anymore. The same should apply to movies and such, but maybe not -- it's not clear yet.
refulgentis 2y ago
That things are just annoying enough to pirate that there isn't ever a freeforall, like limewire or kazaa, again.
- maeil 2y ago
  Depends, in certain locales pirate IPTV is very popular, arguably even easier than Kazaa ever was! Stick a USB in your TV, done.
roenxi 2y ago
The sort of person who can set up -arr daemons isn't going to really be on the radar of anyone pushing DRM. Those skills are so rare people will pay for them. The point is that there is a huge market of people who barely know what an internet is but want to watch media. As long as they can't figure out how to get pirated content up and running quickly then DRM is doing its job. Pirated content represents a relatively small and motivated community. There'll always be something like it, so the question for rightsholders is how to manage the size and visibility of that community.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > Those skills are so rare people will pay for them. People will pay you to move dirt from one side of a lot to the other side.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    I'm not convinced you're making a point. Physical skills are also something of a rarity. Not as rare as technical administration, but manual labouring tasks are demanding and not for everyone. There are a lot of unfit, old, young or weak people who I wouldn't want to see hauling dirt because they aren't up to the challenge and wouldn't do a good job. Similarly there are a lot of clueless individuals who I would not want setting up -arr demons professionally.
throwaway654322 2y ago
> B) How are these DRM schemes actually being defeated? 1. Disable video hardware acceleration in browser (preferably FF) 2. Open OBS studio 3. Record screen while streaming service of your choice is running. Still works in modern OSs like Windows 10. You're technically not circumventing the DRM decryption routines when you do this since the pixels displayed on screen have already been decrypted (just like recording cable to VCR post-decryption), so the legality of it is towards the lighter grey end compared to ripping DVDs. IANAL though.
- jsheard 2y ago
  That only works with the weaker tiers of DRM which are typically only allowed to stream low resolutions. As mentioned in the OP article, the stronger DRM tiers never make the cleartext visible to software and those are mandatory for high quality streaming. Not to say the stronger tiers never get broken but it's a lot more involved than just recording them with OBS.
  - kuschku 2y ago
    You can get HDMI capture cards that do 4K30 HDR while removing HDCP for $20. Use Microsoft edge for playback (so you get 4K HDR). Stylish as addon to remove any player hud. Especially useful if you want to legitimately use copyrighted content but obviously can't just use a pirated version.
    - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
      Which cards strip modern HDCP?
      - ec109685 2y ago
        Something like this produces a clean hdmi stream: ViewHD 2 Port 1x2 Powered HDMI 1... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004F9LVXC?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004F9LVXC?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_shar...
timewizard 2y ago
They hate "losing" money more than they enjoy making it. It's worthwhile to mention that Hollywood was and still is a cartel system.
jhanschoo 2y ago
> A) What does DRM realistically accomplish for the media companies? My guess is that when content platforms negotiate with IP holders, there is some need to show that some DRM is in place.
pornel 2y ago
Piracy is just a convenient excuse. DRM is really about control. It's a technical trick that thanks to DMCA anti-reverse engineering clauses becomes a legal trick to dictate exactly who and how can play the content, much tighter than what copyright and consumer laws allow by default. For example, without DRM you couldn't effectively sell separate licenses for computer screens and TVs, because users could just connect their computer to a TV. DRM allows negotiating everything about distribution, up to who pays who for having a button on the TV remote. Those who control the DRM have a veto power over everything, and have it viciously enforced internationally thanks to it being tied to copyright.
- pie_flavor 2y ago
  What are you talking about? You can connect your computer to a TV just fine. No, lost sales are not 'just a convenient excuse', the sales they lose to piracy are far more numerous than the ones they'd gain with this fictional system that relies on people being willing to throw away money for no reason. 'It's about control' is a favorite element of conspiracy theories but corresponds to no real-world corporate need.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
n144q 2y ago
DRM has definitely made pirating more difficult, and that is good enough for media companies, even though it is not enough to stop all forms of it. Also as others have pointed out, often it has more business/legal meaning than technical meaning. One example -- it has made creating pirated videos almost inaccessible to most people. In the past, if all other methods fail, you can always just record your screen with a common recording application. That's not possible with GPU enabled DRM, which is enough to stop a casual consumer to share a movie to their friends (even at a less ideal quality). > have never had an issue finding what I want at the quality I want within an hour of a episode/movie being released to streaming. That's because you are consuming mainstream/popular media. You often won't find recordings of a lot of performance art (ballet, concerts etc)* and I-am-not-going-to-name-it-content because there is a lot less demand. * an interesting exception is that a lot of content released via Blu-ray gets decrypted, ripped and torrented.
tonymet 2y ago
It seems to have been a success. Prior to DRM, pirated material was much more common than paid streaming services. Now that has been reversed. Now that streaming is commonplace it seems less necessary, but it was an essential stepping stone and an ongoing defense against piracy
rustcleaner 2y ago
DRM is the camel-nose of a worldwide technocratic North Korean-style digital future.

thomastjeffery 2y ago

DRM implements the same problem Copyright does, but in a different place. To explain that, here's some backstory: Copyright defines art as a good (instead of a service), and demands everyone play along. An artist can use their copyright to monopolize both the distribution and the derivation of their work. Effectively, this places a wall between any would-be collaborators, because collaboration is derivative. In a world without copyright, you could collaborate with the work of Disney by making derivative work. With copyright, however, Disney can demand you stop that work by monopolizing its copy. By abusing this demand, Disney can entrench itself as the only Mickey-Mouse compatible corporation. In the software world, collaboration of work requires source code redistribution. Because of this, the social incompatibility that copyright is founded upon translates into literal software incompatibility; including proprietary software platforms and libraries. For example, Microsoft Office has entrenched itself as the "industry standard" for rich text and spreadsheets by leveraging the incompatibility of its data formats. While collaboration isn't impossible, Microsoft is granted a legally-enforced anticompetitive advantage from its copyright monopoly. NVIDIA uses the copyright monopoly of its CUDA implementation to sell more hardware. It is able to do this because the hardware and software engineers are both part of the same vertically-integrated corporation. Because of copyright, AMD's software engineers are not allowed to collaborate with the CUDA developers, and AMD drivers cannot be made CUDA compatible. This is where the story gets to DRM: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and others are all vertically integrated hardware-media-advertising corporations. Each of them wants to abuse their respective copyright monopolies (their media businesses) to sell hardware, just like NVIDIA does with CUDA. To accomplish this, they told us the exact reverse story: Digital Rights Management. The story of Digital Rights Management says that hardware needs to be incompatible in order to enforce the copyright monopoly. See what they did there? Now any anticompetitive advantage that we get in our hardware and advertising businesses was all just from us doing whatever it takes to support those poor starving artists! I can hear you asking yourself, "But where is the hardware incompatibility?". That's the extra sneaky bit on top. Unlike having a clear winner and a loser like NVIDIA and AMD, hardware-media-advertising corporations are all winners. Each one of them benefits from the other using DRM. All of their moats intersect into one giant ~~swamp~~, I mean lakefront development. Here's an example to chew on: App Stores. Both Google and Apple have their own separate incompatible app stores. Sure, it's a loss to Google when a popular app only works on iOS, but that's a two way street. The important part is that they have a moat at all: when the little guys try to make a competitive alternative, they drown. There is plenty of room for two players at this game, and the intersection of moats guarantees there will never be a third. Even when Apple's moat starts to flood Android Island, what's left standing will be worth more than a drained swamp.

jsheard 2y ago

> How are these DRM schemes actually being defeated? Stripping the more advanced forms of DRM usually relies on compromised device keys which can and will be revoked if it becomes known that they've leaked, so the details are deliberately kept very quiet. If you've ever experienced a device suddenly losing the ability to play 4K Netflix, it may have been because its keys were revoked.

majormajor 2y ago

DRM has likely had a big impact in shifting the casual consumer conversation to "hey they're gonna start down on account sharing" from early-2000s style "here's a straight-up copy I made for you." And this helps prop up the "they'll get a Netflix account to binge the same three shows over and over" part of the business model. The cumulative monthly cost adds up but it feels cheaper than forking over a few hundred bucks for a few box sets + buying a disc player. None of the hurdles stop 100% of people. But every hurdle causes some people to stop bothering.

watermelon0 2y ago
In many cases, downloading torrents and watching on a laptop/PC has a better UX than using streaming services. For example, it's impossible to watch 4k content on popular streaming services if you use Linux, and even with macOS/Windows you need a specific combination of hardware + OS + browser, if a service even offers it.
- LegionMammal978 2y ago
  To be fair, UX isn't only about the point of consumption. 4k torrents don't grow on trees (luckily, 1080p is good enough for my own tastes), and for old or less-popular movies, it's often tough to find seeders, or they all upload at 100 kbps or only have half the file or something dumb like that. (At least on the public trackers I'm aware of: I have no clue what goes on in the super-duper-exclusive private trackers that some love to boast about.) So I'd put accessibility and consistency as important parts of UX that torrenting can often miss out on. For the common person who is using Windows/Chrome, macOS/Safari, or a gaming console, those parts can easily be more important. Of course, these methods start to shine when legitimate methods are even less accessible. For instance, U.S. sports streaming is an absolute mess with multiple networks, regional blackouts, etc., on top of buggy apps, so that you sometimes can't watch a game legally for any price. People have widely picked up illegal streams as an alternative, usually preferring familiar platforms like YouTube if the streams aren't taken down quickly enough.
  - charrondev 2y ago

lotharcable 2y ago

> A) What does DRM realistically accomplish for the media companies? Control publishing rights, platforms, software and hardware that is used for the consumption of said media. The publishers control the DRM, which then needs to be licensed by television makers, software writers, and such things. Then that gives them control over how is it presented, how it is sold, how it is consumed and it forces everybody to agree to their terms. It is a power thing. They want to have power over other businesses. DRM laws help them do that. > How are these DRM schemes actually being defeated? Well I don't follow DRM piracy stuff, but at a high level the people that want to consume the media must be able to decrypt it to enjoy it. So if you buy one of these DRM devices and figure out how they work then you can decrypt anything that is compatible with them. And you only need to decrypt it once since digital media can be copied a infinite amount of times.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> It is a power thing. They want to have power over other businesses. DRM laws help them do that. This is the argument for repealing them, which is why you rarely see them making it out loud. Instead they come up with some rubbish about making it marginally more difficult (spoiler: it's still easier to pirate stuff than use legal services and the only thing actually preventing everyone from doing it is that some people want to follow the law). So it's good to knock those fake arguments down when you see them and leave no excuse to keep the bad laws that ought to be repealed. Accepting their actual motivation like it's a legitimate reason to keep those laws is like saying the reason we should keep doing the stuff Snowden revealed is so the intelligence agencies can spy on the elected officials regulating the intelligence agencies.

jakogut 2y ago

There's always an analog loophole. Even if the OS is unable to access the memory storing the decrypted data, you could always just plug the output of the machine into a capture card and capture the decrypted stream that way. I suppose some monitors and TVs have "features" to cryptographically handshake with the GPU and ensure a secure link, but at some point the data must be decrypted and decoded to be displayed. This doesn't seem like much more than a speed bump for a motivated individual.

tasn 2y ago
The end goal is DRM all the way to the screen. No capture cards will be allowed. It's a cat and mouse game, but I wouldn't discount these efforts as a mere speed bump. Screen enforced DRM will make things much harder. A motivated individual with the right tools and hardware hacking know how may be able to jailbreak a screen to record stuff, but that's going to make things out of reach for most people.
- geerlingguy 2y ago
  With how good modern screens are, and how good cameras are (and how easy both are to hack), you could always play back the video and capture the photons through the air. There was something called Macrovision back in the VHS/DVD days that tried to defeat digital/analog conversion, and I'm sure visual techniques could be devised... But I imagine someone with a good OLED and a good mirrorless camera (or even a cell phone nowadays) could make a pretty good 4K replication of any media that displays.
  - Wowfunhappy 2y ago
    Especially when you add HDR to the mix, I think it's still extremely difficult to get a high quality screen recording, if only because it's so hard to get the exposure right.
    - Retr0id 2y ago
      You could record multiple exposures and merge them after the fact (and I agree the result would likely be subpar, but better than it's ever been at any previous point in time)

userbinator 2y ago

[flagged]

bambax 2y ago

Yes, DRM are a perfect example of the "Smart Cow" problem [0]. This is so obvious that, as you say (A) it's quite obscure why media companies still bother with DRM? The only beneficiaries of DRM seem to be hardware vendors, and even for them it's unclear if it's a net benefit, since it makes everything more expensive. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_cow_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_cow_problem

fluidcruft 2y ago
Probably advantage of DRM is that circumvention can be criminalized and absence of DRM implies circumvention.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  What advantage does this have over just criminalizing the underlying infringement regardless of DRM? Also, how does criminalizing it actually help anything, since the difficulty is in the scale of it happening and the difficulty of detecting it rather than the severity of the penalties, and imposing draconian penalties on random kids only turns the public against you?
  - fluidcruft 2y ago
    I think it plays differently before a jury. Juries can easily understand copying files and could potentially invalidate. But it's different when lawyers get to move the conversation to scary hacker garble about technical skill and intent. Evidence of intent is the real value.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      Juries are far less incompetent than they're made out to be, not least because both sides get to describe what's happening. And you can't even get evidence of intent from this anyway because DRM circumvention tools don't actually come with a ski mask and a set of lockpicks. You install a tool called "video downloader" which supports a hundred sites and 10% of them have some kind of DRM which it automatically strips in the background, you may not even be aware that it's happening when you use it.

dannyobrien 2y ago

IIUI it's mostly a question of a mess of contractual language and incentives. Rightsholders license content, and in their licensing contracts they require a certain level of DRM for certain products. So streamers, etc, implement the DRM to comply with those contracts. Nobody at any level has an incentive or leverage to change the contracts, so the DRM continues.

codethief 2y ago
> IIUI If I understand incorrectly? (Jokes aside, though, I haven't been able to figure out what IIUI stands for.)
- merrywhether 2y ago
  If I understand it?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
cryptonector 2y ago
That and also various principals are under the impression that DRM is possible, therefore they should implement it because it protects their IP, and protecting their IP is a fiduciary duty, therefore they must if they can.
- anticensor 2y ago
  > protecting their IP is a fiduciary duty, This is not the case, unless we are talking about trade secrets, and in case of trade secrets, only applicable to board members and employees.
  - cryptonector 2y ago
    That's not how copyright works. The copyright owners want to maximize earnings, and the licensees/distributors also want to maximize earnings -- they are typically for-profit businesses, and as such they have a fiduciary duty to maximize earnings. If they think that DRM will help them, they'll want DRM. Of course for music DRM has proven to be pointless. People want to stream music, not buy music, and preserving media across so many media obsolenscence events has been such a pain that streaming is the only manageable solution for most people -- consumers don't want to make and manage copies anymore. The same should apply to movies and such, but maybe not -- it's not clear yet.

refulgentis 2y ago

That things are just annoying enough to pirate that there isn't ever a freeforall, like limewire or kazaa, again.

maeil 2y ago
Depends, in certain locales pirate IPTV is very popular, arguably even easier than Kazaa ever was! Stick a USB in your TV, done.

roenxi 2y ago

The sort of person who can set up -arr daemons isn't going to really be on the radar of anyone pushing DRM. Those skills are so rare people will pay for them. The point is that there is a huge market of people who barely know what an internet is but want to watch media. As long as they can't figure out how to get pirated content up and running quickly then DRM is doing its job. Pirated content represents a relatively small and motivated community. There'll always be something like it, so the question for rightsholders is how to manage the size and visibility of that community.

thaumasiotes 2y ago
> Those skills are so rare people will pay for them. People will pay you to move dirt from one side of a lot to the other side.
- roenxi 2y ago
  I'm not convinced you're making a point. Physical skills are also something of a rarity. Not as rare as technical administration, but manual labouring tasks are demanding and not for everyone. There are a lot of unfit, old, young or weak people who I wouldn't want to see hauling dirt because they aren't up to the challenge and wouldn't do a good job. Similarly there are a lot of clueless individuals who I would not want setting up -arr demons professionally.

throwaway654322 2y ago

> B) How are these DRM schemes actually being defeated? 1. Disable video hardware acceleration in browser (preferably FF) 2. Open OBS studio 3. Record screen while streaming service of your choice is running. Still works in modern OSs like Windows 10. You're technically not circumventing the DRM decryption routines when you do this since the pixels displayed on screen have already been decrypted (just like recording cable to VCR post-decryption), so the legality of it is towards the lighter grey end compared to ripping DVDs. IANAL though.

jsheard 2y ago
That only works with the weaker tiers of DRM which are typically only allowed to stream low resolutions. As mentioned in the OP article, the stronger DRM tiers never make the cleartext visible to software and those are mandatory for high quality streaming. Not to say the stronger tiers never get broken but it's a lot more involved than just recording them with OBS.
- kuschku 2y ago
  You can get HDMI capture cards that do 4K30 HDR while removing HDCP for $20. Use Microsoft edge for playback (so you get 4K HDR). Stylish as addon to remove any player hud. Especially useful if you want to legitimately use copyrighted content but obviously can't just use a pirated version.
  - HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
    Which cards strip modern HDCP?
    - ec109685 2y ago
      Something like this produces a clean hdmi stream: ViewHD 2 Port 1x2 Powered HDMI 1... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004F9LVXC?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004F9LVXC?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_shar...

timewizard 2y ago

They hate "losing" money more than they enjoy making it. It's worthwhile to mention that Hollywood was and still is a cartel system.

jhanschoo 2y ago

> A) What does DRM realistically accomplish for the media companies? My guess is that when content platforms negotiate with IP holders, there is some need to show that some DRM is in place.

pornel 2y ago

Piracy is just a convenient excuse. DRM is really about control. It's a technical trick that thanks to DMCA anti-reverse engineering clauses becomes a legal trick to dictate exactly who and how can play the content, much tighter than what copyright and consumer laws allow by default. For example, without DRM you couldn't effectively sell separate licenses for computer screens and TVs, because users could just connect their computer to a TV. DRM allows negotiating everything about distribution, up to who pays who for having a button on the TV remote. Those who control the DRM have a veto power over everything, and have it viciously enforced internationally thanks to it being tied to copyright.

pie_flavor 2y ago
What are you talking about? You can connect your computer to a TV just fine. No, lost sales are not 'just a convenient excuse', the sales they lose to piracy are far more numerous than the ones they'd gain with this fictional system that relies on people being willing to throw away money for no reason. 'It's about control' is a favorite element of conspiracy theories but corresponds to no real-world corporate need.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

n144q 2y ago

DRM has definitely made pirating more difficult, and that is good enough for media companies, even though it is not enough to stop all forms of it. Also as others have pointed out, often it has more business/legal meaning than technical meaning. One example -- it has made creating pirated videos almost inaccessible to most people. In the past, if all other methods fail, you can always just record your screen with a common recording application. That's not possible with GPU enabled DRM, which is enough to stop a casual consumer to share a movie to their friends (even at a less ideal quality). > have never had an issue finding what I want at the quality I want within an hour of a episode/movie being released to streaming. That's because you are consuming mainstream/popular media. You often won't find recordings of a lot of performance art (ballet, concerts etc)* and I-am-not-going-to-name-it-content because there is a lot less demand. * an interesting exception is that a lot of content released via Blu-ray gets decrypted, ripped and torrented.

tonymet 2y ago

It seems to have been a success. Prior to DRM, pirated material was much more common than paid streaming services. Now that has been reversed. Now that streaming is commonplace it seems less necessary, but it was an essential stepping stone and an ongoing defense against piracy

rustcleaner 2y ago

DRM is the camel-nose of a worldwide technocratic North Korean-style digital future.