13 ms·

You don't get paid for the value you produce, you get paid for the value you can withhold. The DRM capabilities of Flash, Silverlight, iOS, etc. are the only re

by lukifer 14y ago

You don't get paid for the value you produce, you get paid for the value you can withhold. The DRM capabilities of Flash, Silverlight, iOS, etc. are the only reason that Hulu and Netflix stay in business; torrents are fantastic, but in a free-info model, there's nothing to withhold and no way to get paid. Embedded commercials would get immediately edited out, and product placement only goes so far. I don't like the situation either, but without a new business model (or a new economic system), we're stuck with what we have. (Most) video content is insanely expensive to produce, and physical disc sales continue to decline.

w1ntermute 14y ago
> The DRM capabilities of Flash, Silverlight, iOS, etc. are the only reason that Hulu and Netflix stay in business; torrents are fantastic, but in a free-info model, there's nothing to withhold and no way to get paid. Embedded commercials would get immediately edited out, and product placement only goes so far. How is this any different from the situation right now with DVDs and Blu-rays? You can copy videos very easily. And what about torrents? If people wanted to download and copy files, they could do that with torrents. But instead, the people who actually bother to pay for the movies and TV shows are punished. And this same argument could be applied to music stores, but Amazon and iTunes operate without DRM, and there are no issues there. A lot of pro-DRM people said the iTunes store would collapse without DRM, but things seem to be working just fine for them. We've been through this exact same argument half a decade ago with music. The only reason it's being repeated is being the old farts in charge of the media companies are too shortsighted to see what will benefit their companies in the long term.
- lukifer 14y ago
  I didn't mean to imply that DRM-free video stores can't work; I meant that (a) torrents themselves are nigh-impossible to monetize, and (b) suits at Big Content will never feel comfortable with opening up their precious data, even though you and I know that the raw data exists already. Though millions are sometimes spent to market music, that's peanuts compared to the costs of producing movies and television, and that money won't get spent without some confidence that it can be recouped. It's one thing for Louis CK to gamble $0.2M on a DRM-free standup special, and another for Disney to gamble $220M on a DRM-free Avengers. > How is this any different from the situation right now with DVDs and Blu-rays? You can copy videos very easily. Nerds can, but DVD ripping is still much less friendly to regular people compared to MP3 swapping, and requires much more work to play back compared to iPods and CD burning. If the industry ever got behind open standards, eventually many more people would pirate movies instead of just college kids. Borrowing a DVD from a friend would be no different than taking it permanently, resulting in fewer total sales. Don't get me wrong: DRM is a plague. Hell, I'd even support a tax that made all content part of a universal digital library, with funds distributed proportionally to usage. But without somehow creating a new economic system for digital content, every "rational actor" is going to do whatever they can to maintain maximum leverage. The only reason the RIAA caved was that the damage was already done, and they had lost most of their leverage already. (Also, it was something of a ploy to give Amazon an advantage over iTunes, which was enjoying a brief hegemony over paid music downloads; user freedom was a happy side effect.)
- Annapolisguy 14y ago
  In one word, the digital content publishers and resellers need to tryst their consumers. Though you protect the digital content with DRM, smart consumers can use a special tool (how to remove DRM from iTunes for free http://dig4u.org/rip-drm/remove-drm-from-itunes-for-free.html http://dig4u.org/rip-drm/remove-drm-from-itunes-for-free.htm... )to 'hack' them.

by lukifer 14y ago

w1ntermute 14y ago

> The DRM capabilities of Flash, Silverlight, iOS, etc. are the only reason that Hulu and Netflix stay in business; torrents are fantastic, but in a free-info model, there's nothing to withhold and no way to get paid. Embedded commercials would get immediately edited out, and product placement only goes so far. How is this any different from the situation right now with DVDs and Blu-rays? You can copy videos very easily. And what about torrents? If people wanted to download and copy files, they could do that with torrents. But instead, the people who actually bother to pay for the movies and TV shows are punished. And this same argument could be applied to music stores, but Amazon and iTunes operate without DRM, and there are no issues there. A lot of pro-DRM people said the iTunes store would collapse without DRM, but things seem to be working just fine for them. We've been through this exact same argument half a decade ago with music. The only reason it's being repeated is being the old farts in charge of the media companies are too shortsighted to see what will benefit their companies in the long term.

lukifer 14y ago
I didn't mean to imply that DRM-free video stores can't work; I meant that (a) torrents themselves are nigh-impossible to monetize, and (b) suits at Big Content will never feel comfortable with opening up their precious data, even though you and I know that the raw data exists already. Though millions are sometimes spent to market music, that's peanuts compared to the costs of producing movies and television, and that money won't get spent without some confidence that it can be recouped. It's one thing for Louis CK to gamble $0.2M on a DRM-free standup special, and another for Disney to gamble $220M on a DRM-free Avengers. > How is this any different from the situation right now with DVDs and Blu-rays? You can copy videos very easily. Nerds can, but DVD ripping is still much less friendly to regular people compared to MP3 swapping, and requires much more work to play back compared to iPods and CD burning. If the industry ever got behind open standards, eventually many more people would pirate movies instead of just college kids. Borrowing a DVD from a friend would be no different than taking it permanently, resulting in fewer total sales. Don't get me wrong: DRM is a plague. Hell, I'd even support a tax that made all content part of a universal digital library, with funds distributed proportionally to usage. But without somehow creating a new economic system for digital content, every "rational actor" is going to do whatever they can to maintain maximum leverage. The only reason the RIAA caved was that the damage was already done, and they had lost most of their leverage already. (Also, it was something of a ploy to give Amazon an advantage over iTunes, which was enjoying a brief hegemony over paid music downloads; user freedom was a happy side effect.)
Annapolisguy 14y ago
In one word, the digital content publishers and resellers need to tryst their consumers. Though you protect the digital content with DRM, smart consumers can use a special tool (how to remove DRM from iTunes for free http://dig4u.org/rip-drm/remove-drm-from-itunes-for-free.html http://dig4u.org/rip-drm/remove-drm-from-itunes-for-free.htm... )to 'hack' them.