7 ms·

> All DRM is a non-solution really. I know that by now it's tradition to say this, but can we please stop? It seems to be that a law of life is 'everything di

> All DRM is a non-solution really. I know that by now it's tradition to say this, but can we please stop? It seems to be that a law of life is 'everything dies'. Is medicine therefore useless? Are all the people who spend money for nothing but delaying the inevitable getting ripped off? We all admit perfect security is impossible. Yes, you're right! Controlling the spread of information is a very hard problem. Yes, you're right! It would be very nice if the things I want to watch and listen to were made freely available by their creators. But no, you're wrong. DRM has a purpose, and it can be successful even without perfectly achieving its goals. People tend to avoid effort, and if you can make pirating content more difficult than obtaining it legitimately, most people will obtain it legitimately. There is no fundamental reason why information deserves to be free, it's just easier to copy than physical things.

noonespecial 14y ago
DRM has a purpose, and it can be successful even without perfectly achieving its goals. People tend to avoid effort, and if you can make pirating content more difficult than obtaining it legitimately, most people will obtain it legitimately. I haven't yet met a DRM scheme that doesn't achieve this purpose backwards(1). What it really rests on is that people don't know they could just get it easier on "allmyvideos.net". There is no fundamental reason why information deserves to be free, it's just easier to copy than physical things. Its not just easier. A copy has zero marginal cost. That makes it special and different than anything that came before. DRM seems to just be a monkey-patch to try to get that marginal cost to be non-zero. I'm not saying that it deserves to be free. I'm not even saying that I think it should be. I'm saying that it IS free. We don't want it to be, because our economic models don't support it (yet), but that's its natural state. I stand by "DRM is silly". If that money were spent providing a better, easier product, they'd make more than they do now with DRM. It seems like they're perfectly willing to spend $3 to keep from losing $1 to piracy. It feels like a kind of willful ignorance. No data, of course, just a strong opinion, held loosely. (1) It doesn't take long outside the US to find out that there are plenty of things DRM makes impossible to aquire legitimately.
- brian_cloutier 14y ago
  > DRM seems to just be a monkey-patch to try to get that marginal cost to be non-zero. Yes, that's absolutely what it is. As a society, we seem to believe that information can be owned. We get angry at each other for 'stealing jokes'. Fanboys around the world are up in arms whenever another platform copies some feature from their beloved. Plagiarism is an accusation which can ruin a career. We have always felt entitled to do what we please with the fruit of our labors, and we feel no differently when that fruit is information. We have all had bad experiences with DRM, but we've all had bad experiences with technology in general. Especially here on HN, why does the conclusion have to be "DRM is intrusive and impossible to do right anyway" instead of "What an opportunity for a non-intrusive alternative"? I'm not saying the second option is right, but why can't it be?
  - pyre 14y ago
    > Plagiarism is an accusation which can ruin a career. There's a difference between ownership of an idea, and plagiarism. An example of trying to 'own' an idea would be: 1) Person A creates an idea 2) Person B independently creates the same idea (or something extremely similar). 3) Person A attempts to assert control over the idea by dictating what Person B can or cannot do with it based on the fact that Person A 'got there first.' An example of plagiarism would be: 1) Person A creates an idea. 2) Person B copies Person A's idea, and attempts to claim independent creation (or attempts to claim creation prior to Person A). The real difference is that with plagiarism, Person B is committing a fraud about the source of the idea. It's more about authorship than anything else. Even in a society where you couldn't own an idea, you could still have authorship as the first person to think of something.
    - rictic 14y ago
      Related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights_(copyright_law) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights_(copyright_law)
  - beagle3 14y ago
    > Yes, that's absolutely what it is. As a society, we seem to believe that information can be owned Two wrongs (information cannot be "owned" in the same sense of a physical thing, regardless of how much one wants to be believe it; and that DRM can be effective) do not make one right. Note that I'm not discussing values here - just pure technical issues. Here's the two problems of DRM in a nutshell, that make it into snake oil. 1. The "owner" of the content wants to make said content available to person X, but not to person X's recording device, which is indistinguishable from X. 2. It is enough for said content to be freed from DRM once, to become universally free of DRM. No matter how smart your protocols, cryptography etc is, because (1) if you can display it on a screen, and take a picture of said screen, with a high resolution capture device, you've defeated DRM. And then because of (2) the DRM scheme, regardless of its other merits, becomes ineffective. That's why DRM cannot be done right, even if you assume it's the right thing to do. (which I don't)
MichaelGG 14y ago
Name one real-world DRM system that makes piracy look less attractive for content (movies, music, books). The only successful shops I can think of, such as Amazon, Steam, etc., aren't successful due to DRM (at least, not from the piracy perspective). It's due to an easier shopping experience, with the DRM getting out of the way. I'm not sure you can even meaningfully call Amazon MP3's approach DRM: it's just watermarking. Pirating content is trivial and easy. In order to compete, you have to make an as-nice experience. Buying a book on the Kindle store is _easier_ than torrenting the book (if only slightly) - DRM has nothing to do with this aspect. DRM doesn't even remotely stop the spread of content. The only time I've heard DRM being remotely effective is really complicated systems on games, delaying a crack by a week or so, which apparently increases sales (at the cost of plenty of bad-will from paying customers) - although I'm not aware of any published studies that really investigate that and compare to the negative sides. This is the only time your analogy of medicine delaying death makes sense; one small use case, and only for specific programs, not general content. But for content? DRM is a non-solution, really.
- brian_cloutier 14y ago
  > Pirating content is trivial and easy. In order to compete, you have to make an as-nice experience. Yes, but it's a two-part process. Bits are very easy to copy around, and providing an easy way of giving money will only get you so far. What happens when the alternative of pirating is just as easy, but doesn't require money? If you want to make a nicer experience, you will eventually have to make pirating harder. > DRM doesn't even remotely stop the spread of content. Of course it does! No, it doesn't stop you. You know what torrents are, you know which torrents are likely to be viruses and which are in formats your computer is capable of reading. Many people out there know none of that, but can easily find the itunes button on their ipads. And all of those people have no way of sharing the things they buy, thanks to DRM. > Name one real-world DRM system that makes piracy look less attractive for content (movies, music, books). Here's another: Netflix. All you do is give Netflix a little bit of money each month, and then you don't have to worry about starting the download a couple hours before you want to start watching. You don't have to worry about getting caught under the new six-strikes program. You can't easily copy what Netflix gives you thanks to good old DRM, but that doesn't really hurt you.
lambda 14y ago
> People tend to avoid effort, and if you can make pirating content more difficult than obtaining it legitimately, most people will obtain it legitimately. The problem with DRM is that with information, it doesn't matter if it's more difficult for any given user to pirate. It only takes one person to make a copy of it without DRM, and they can then share it, and now nothing can stop anyone from viewing it. At least, that's the case without horribly repressive measures that don't allow anyone to view their own media. All the DRM does is make legitimate use harder. If you want to find a free copy, you can; but if you're a legitimate user, and want to make a backup of your DVD? Nope, sorry, people aren't allowed to sell tools to help you do that. Want to capture a few seconds to comment on? Nope, sorry, people can't legitimately distribute tools that allow that. Want to skip the stupid previews? Nope sorry, also illegal. The problem with DRM is that if it doesn't work perfectly, all of the bad things that it's trying to prevent can still happen, and in the meantime, tons of legitimate uses are banned, and we start to produce technology that is oppressive and works against the interests of its users.
bad_user 14y ago
Perfect security is theoretically possible, what gets in the way is human error - AND it really matters what you're trying to protect and from whom. Encryption deals with sending messages from A to B such that a third-party C can't intercept the message. In a DRM scheme B and C are the same, which is why DRM is flawed by design, because: (1) no amount of patching can ever fix it (2) it punishes legitimate customers, as pirated content is far easier to deal with, while not suffering from lock-in effects; the irony might be that DRM is helping the prevalence of piracy (3) no matter how hard it gets to create the initial DRM-free copy, from then on all other copies are zero-cost - which means it only takes one dedicated individual to create a pirated copy and all people that pirate stuff can enjoy it ;-) > DRM has a purpose Of course it does. Its purpose is to save a dying business model that was made obsolete by technology ... 1000 years ago there were businesses selling ice to clients. The equivalent of DRM would have been to restrict refrigerators from producing ice. Fortunately for us, we realized that selling refrigerators is a lucrative business too.
- dagw 14y ago
  Perfect security is theoretically possible, what gets in the way is human error I forget where I read the story (might have been Cryptonomicon), and I don't know if it's true, but I find it quite illustrative of the point. During WWII the British where finding that some of their messages encrypted with one time pads where being cracked by the Germans. Since they where pretty sure that was mathematically impossible they where quite shocked and immediately launched a full investigation. Eventually they found that the problem was the team generating the one time pads (basically a room full of people drawing bingo balls with letters on them at random) had started second-guessing the randomness of letters generated. They'd started to subconsciously avoid balls that would lead to what they thought where patterns in an attempt to make the otp more random. Of course this lead to less randomness and broke the security of the otp.

noonespecial 14y ago

DRM has a purpose, and it can be successful even without perfectly achieving its goals. People tend to avoid effort, and if you can make pirating content more difficult than obtaining it legitimately, most people will obtain it legitimately. I haven't yet met a DRM scheme that doesn't achieve this purpose backwards(1). What it really rests on is that people don't know they could just get it easier on "allmyvideos.net". There is no fundamental reason why information deserves to be free, it's just easier to copy than physical things. Its not just easier. A copy has zero marginal cost. That makes it special and different than anything that came before. DRM seems to just be a monkey-patch to try to get that marginal cost to be non-zero. I'm not saying that it deserves to be free. I'm not even saying that I think it should be. I'm saying that it IS free. We don't want it to be, because our economic models don't support it (yet), but that's its natural state. I stand by "DRM is silly". If that money were spent providing a better, easier product, they'd make more than they do now with DRM. It seems like they're perfectly willing to spend $3 to keep from losing $1 to piracy. It feels like a kind of willful ignorance. No data, of course, just a strong opinion, held loosely. (1) It doesn't take long outside the US to find out that there are plenty of things DRM makes impossible to aquire legitimately.

brian_cloutier 14y ago
> DRM seems to just be a monkey-patch to try to get that marginal cost to be non-zero. Yes, that's absolutely what it is. As a society, we seem to believe that information can be owned. We get angry at each other for 'stealing jokes'. Fanboys around the world are up in arms whenever another platform copies some feature from their beloved. Plagiarism is an accusation which can ruin a career. We have always felt entitled to do what we please with the fruit of our labors, and we feel no differently when that fruit is information. We have all had bad experiences with DRM, but we've all had bad experiences with technology in general. Especially here on HN, why does the conclusion have to be "DRM is intrusive and impossible to do right anyway" instead of "What an opportunity for a non-intrusive alternative"? I'm not saying the second option is right, but why can't it be?
- pyre 14y ago
  > Plagiarism is an accusation which can ruin a career. There's a difference between ownership of an idea, and plagiarism. An example of trying to 'own' an idea would be: 1) Person A creates an idea 2) Person B independently creates the same idea (or something extremely similar). 3) Person A attempts to assert control over the idea by dictating what Person B can or cannot do with it based on the fact that Person A 'got there first.' An example of plagiarism would be: 1) Person A creates an idea. 2) Person B copies Person A's idea, and attempts to claim independent creation (or attempts to claim creation prior to Person A). The real difference is that with plagiarism, Person B is committing a fraud about the source of the idea. It's more about authorship than anything else. Even in a society where you couldn't own an idea, you could still have authorship as the first person to think of something.
  - rictic 14y ago
    Related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights_(copyright_law) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights_(copyright_law)
- beagle3 14y ago
  > Yes, that's absolutely what it is. As a society, we seem to believe that information can be owned Two wrongs (information cannot be "owned" in the same sense of a physical thing, regardless of how much one wants to be believe it; and that DRM can be effective) do not make one right. Note that I'm not discussing values here - just pure technical issues. Here's the two problems of DRM in a nutshell, that make it into snake oil. 1. The "owner" of the content wants to make said content available to person X, but not to person X's recording device, which is indistinguishable from X. 2. It is enough for said content to be freed from DRM once, to become universally free of DRM. No matter how smart your protocols, cryptography etc is, because (1) if you can display it on a screen, and take a picture of said screen, with a high resolution capture device, you've defeated DRM. And then because of (2) the DRM scheme, regardless of its other merits, becomes ineffective. That's why DRM cannot be done right, even if you assume it's the right thing to do. (which I don't)

MichaelGG 14y ago

Name one real-world DRM system that makes piracy look less attractive for content (movies, music, books). The only successful shops I can think of, such as Amazon, Steam, etc., aren't successful due to DRM (at least, not from the piracy perspective). It's due to an easier shopping experience, with the DRM getting out of the way. I'm not sure you can even meaningfully call Amazon MP3's approach DRM: it's just watermarking. Pirating content is trivial and easy. In order to compete, you have to make an as-nice experience. Buying a book on the Kindle store is _easier_ than torrenting the book (if only slightly) - DRM has nothing to do with this aspect. DRM doesn't even remotely stop the spread of content. The only time I've heard DRM being remotely effective is really complicated systems on games, delaying a crack by a week or so, which apparently increases sales (at the cost of plenty of bad-will from paying customers) - although I'm not aware of any published studies that really investigate that and compare to the negative sides. This is the only time your analogy of medicine delaying death makes sense; one small use case, and only for specific programs, not general content. But for content? DRM is a non-solution, really.

brian_cloutier 14y ago
> Pirating content is trivial and easy. In order to compete, you have to make an as-nice experience. Yes, but it's a two-part process. Bits are very easy to copy around, and providing an easy way of giving money will only get you so far. What happens when the alternative of pirating is just as easy, but doesn't require money? If you want to make a nicer experience, you will eventually have to make pirating harder. > DRM doesn't even remotely stop the spread of content. Of course it does! No, it doesn't stop you. You know what torrents are, you know which torrents are likely to be viruses and which are in formats your computer is capable of reading. Many people out there know none of that, but can easily find the itunes button on their ipads. And all of those people have no way of sharing the things they buy, thanks to DRM. > Name one real-world DRM system that makes piracy look less attractive for content (movies, music, books). Here's another: Netflix. All you do is give Netflix a little bit of money each month, and then you don't have to worry about starting the download a couple hours before you want to start watching. You don't have to worry about getting caught under the new six-strikes program. You can't easily copy what Netflix gives you thanks to good old DRM, but that doesn't really hurt you.

lambda 14y ago

> People tend to avoid effort, and if you can make pirating content more difficult than obtaining it legitimately, most people will obtain it legitimately. The problem with DRM is that with information, it doesn't matter if it's more difficult for any given user to pirate. It only takes one person to make a copy of it without DRM, and they can then share it, and now nothing can stop anyone from viewing it. At least, that's the case without horribly repressive measures that don't allow anyone to view their own media. All the DRM does is make legitimate use harder. If you want to find a free copy, you can; but if you're a legitimate user, and want to make a backup of your DVD? Nope, sorry, people aren't allowed to sell tools to help you do that. Want to capture a few seconds to comment on? Nope, sorry, people can't legitimately distribute tools that allow that. Want to skip the stupid previews? Nope sorry, also illegal. The problem with DRM is that if it doesn't work perfectly, all of the bad things that it's trying to prevent can still happen, and in the meantime, tons of legitimate uses are banned, and we start to produce technology that is oppressive and works against the interests of its users.

bad_user 14y ago

Perfect security is theoretically possible, what gets in the way is human error - AND it really matters what you're trying to protect and from whom. Encryption deals with sending messages from A to B such that a third-party C can't intercept the message. In a DRM scheme B and C are the same, which is why DRM is flawed by design, because: (1) no amount of patching can ever fix it (2) it punishes legitimate customers, as pirated content is far easier to deal with, while not suffering from lock-in effects; the irony might be that DRM is helping the prevalence of piracy (3) no matter how hard it gets to create the initial DRM-free copy, from then on all other copies are zero-cost - which means it only takes one dedicated individual to create a pirated copy and all people that pirate stuff can enjoy it ;-) > DRM has a purpose Of course it does. Its purpose is to save a dying business model that was made obsolete by technology ... 1000 years ago there were businesses selling ice to clients. The equivalent of DRM would have been to restrict refrigerators from producing ice. Fortunately for us, we realized that selling refrigerators is a lucrative business too.

dagw 14y ago
Perfect security is theoretically possible, what gets in the way is human error I forget where I read the story (might have been Cryptonomicon), and I don't know if it's true, but I find it quite illustrative of the point. During WWII the British where finding that some of their messages encrypted with one time pads where being cracked by the Germans. Since they where pretty sure that was mathematically impossible they where quite shocked and immediately launched a full investigation. Eventually they found that the problem was the team generating the one time pads (basically a room full of people drawing bingo balls with letters on them at random) had started second-guessing the randomness of letters generated. They'd started to subconsciously avoid balls that would lead to what they thought where patterns in an attempt to make the otp more random. Of course this lead to less randomness and broke the security of the otp.