12 ms·

This is one of the most important points about DRM. DRM are marketed to users (and the society, including politicians) and to artists as a way to prevent copie

by jbk 12y ago

This is one of the most important points about DRM. DRM are marketed to users (and the society, including politicians) and to artists as a way to prevent copies. Most engineers implementing DRMs think so too. And all the discussions we've seen on HTML5 are around this. People have little arguments against this because it "sounds morally good" to help artist "live of their creations". I am the de facto maintainer of libdvdcss, and have been involved on libbluray (and related projects) and a few other libraries of the same style; I've done several conferences on this precise subject and I've fought the French High-Authority-on-DRM in legal questioning about an unclear piece of law... Therefore, I've studied DRM quite closely... The truth is that if you consider the main goal of DRM to prevent copies, no DRM actually work. ALL of them got defeated in a way or another. Indeed, GoT-broadcast-to-top-of-TPB time is counted in a couple of hours; so why do they try to push those technologies still? The answer is probably because the main goal of DRM is to control distribution channels, not copy-prevention. Copy-prevention is a side goal. This post of Ian is excellent to explain this. PS: You can see me speaking of the same point, in French, in June 2013 here: http://www.acuraz.net/team-videolan-lors-de-pas-sage-en-seine-2013/ http://www.acuraz.net/team-videolan-lors-de-pas-sage-en-sein... NB: I'm not discussing here whether DRM are good or bad.

shmerl 12y ago
It doesn't sound morally good because it's overreaching and preemptive policing (even if we falsely assume that DRM is effective). The fact is, most people don't think this issue through and don't realize how crooked and unethical the whole idea of DRM is.
- jbk 12y ago
  I'm sorry if I was not clear on this part. If you speak about DRM-for-copy-prevention to people in the street, a lot of them consider it as a 'necessary evil' because 'the artists need to live of their work'. When you know more about DRM, you usually have stronger arguments against, of course.
  - shmerl 12y ago
    Yes, and they make two mistakes - that's it's necessary (as you pointed out, DRM doesn't prevent piracy), and that such evil is acceptable (accepting massive surveillance or other overeaching police state kind of methods is similar).
    - jbk 12y ago
      I'm not making any judgment on DRMs, I'm just trying to explain how they work.
      - shmerl 12y ago
        I understand. You are right about the main issue behind it - most people are not thinking this through, otherwise there would be more opposition to DRM.
    - edanm 12y ago
      Somewhat off topic advice - if you're trying to convince people of your views, calling things "evil" rarely works. I'm willing to believe that DRM doesn't further the interest of society, but evil? I don't think you can say that considering the real evil that exists in the world.
      - shmerl 12y ago
        Would you call police state evil? I would. Same thing is about DRM in my view. How would you call something like this for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit
evv 12y ago
> DRM are marketed to users (and the society, including politicians) and to artists as a way to prevent copies. Most engineers implementing DRMs think so too. And all the discussions we've seen on HTML5 are around this. People have little arguments against this because it sounds morally good to help artist live of their creations. And to that end- that is the legitimate, marketable feature of DRM. As far as consumers are concerned, thats what it buys them- it allows the producers of the content to retain some control, live off of their art, and continue producing. How would content producers possibly deter copying without exerting control on the consumption hardware and software? The only answer there is standardized DRM. So HTML5 DRM seems to be the only solution which meets the consumer need (artists getting paid), and avoids the commercial control over your hardware and software.
- shmerl 12y ago
  > And to that end- that is the legitimate, marketable feature of DRM. Except that it's not legitimate. First of all as the post above implied, DRM simply doesn't advance the goal of "living off one's art" in any way. Or to put it in business terms, DRM doesn't increase sales (because it doesn't reduce piracy). I'd even say it decreases sales because some users avoid DRMed products and it as well increases piracy (because some pirates see breaking DRM as sport - i.e. they are more likely to direct their attention to a DRMed product to pirate it, rather than to a DRM-free one). Plus, it's not legitimate to employ overreaching preemptive policing justified by "need to live off one's art". Same way it's not legitimate to violate everyone's privacy by installing police cameras in people's houses as a preemptive measure against crime. > How would content producers possibly deter copying without exerting control on the consumption hardware and software? They can't deter it. They can reduce it (i.e. turn part of the pirates into paying customers). The way to do it is old and well known, yet many fail to remember it - treat customers with respect (and not as criminals by default). Establish more direct relation with your users, don't be a jerk, be user friendly and so on. People appreciate services which are explicitly DRM-free. On the other hand, paranoid attempts to "deter all copying" result in treating all customers as criminals by default, which turns many of them into pirates (i.e. serves exactly the opposite purpose). For some reason not being a jerk and being user friendly is a novel idea for many legacy publishers which they find hard to digest. Independent studios get it way better.
hga 12y ago
"The answer is probably because the main goal of DRM is to control distribution channels, not copy-prevention." How is this, in principle, inconsistent with "helping artists live off their creations"? How IP products are sold, though what sort of channels at what prices, has to inherently be a part of that, if for no other reason than that these companies won't be sending rich royalties to artists for unsuccessful properties, they're not charities. Which is very different than reality, of course. Don't know about the French scene besides the movies I like, but as you've probably heard, Hollywood has its own very special kind of accounting, although I suppose its stars tend to get less screwed than US recording artists. To reify this, back in the '70s, thanks to a loophole in US law, my family (and many others) made a lot of money making unauthorized by record labels 8-track tapes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-track_tape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-track_tape). This was legal as long as you sent the artists their royalties. BUT, the biggest relevant entity to do that through, ASCAP, absolutely refused to accept payments from my father, who on advice of his lawyer put the money in an escrow account....
- jbk 12y ago
  > How is this, in principle, inconsistent with "helping artists live off their creations"? In principle, it's not. The point was that I prefer when things are correctly labeled and explained to people, for them to choose.
  - shmerl 12y ago
    The fact that the public is misled about intentions behind DRM only demonstrates the point that it should not be acceptable. But the public somehow needs to become aware about it first.
- exelius 12y ago
  It's not about artists; it's about distribution (which eventually makes it back to artists, but that's another story entirely). The distribution of media content is controlled through very complex business agreements where the content rights owners assign licenses and limited copy rights to other organizations based on a number of factors, including time windows, geographic restrictions, device restrictions, etc. The content owners generally do not trust the distributors to enforce these restrictions; nor should they (why have 500 implementations of something when you can support 2 or 3?) Enter DRM. When digital copies of content are given to a distributor for distribution, that content is encrypted. Usually this content must be played through a special player that contacts a DRM license server to get a decryption key. One of the things this player does is verify you have an account with rights to play the content. The company you have an account with has certain distribution rights (like the content is only licensed for playback in the UK before December 1, 2014), so the player then checks your location through some mechanism (GPS, geolocation, etc) and the date before decrypting and playing the content. If it's after December 1 or you're outside the UK, it won't play back. Because the player has to be trusted to enforce these restrictions, that rules out any sort of open source player. Even if the default distribution of the player enforced the rules, it would be trivial to modify it and remove this enforcement mechanism. Hence why DRM is so despised by the open source crowd. For better or for worse, these types of distribution agreements are fundamental to how the media industry works. Sometimes rights will get passed along two or three times before they actually make it into the hands of the consumer (e.g. a studio licenses their US movie distribution to Disney, who then licenses a subset of films to Epix, who then licenses a subset of those to Amazon, but only in a certain window). It's likely not changing any time soon because as you said, it makes the owners of this IP a lot of money. DRM can be broken relatively easily if piracy is your goal; but the real goal of DRM is to provide content owners control over legal distribution channels.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
lifeisstillgood 12y ago
So is it a fair précis to say DRM enables content owners to choose who (which distribution channel) is allowed to distribute their content to the vast majority of mainstream users who cannot be bothered to hunt down a DRM-free copy, and so through that choice extract rent. A perfect uncrackBle DRM would still serve the same purpose.
Fuxy 12y ago
I'm quite curious what would happen if DRM got banned and everything had to be open. I know it's wishful thinking however ironically I predict that content creators would experience an increase in sales since giving up control means that companies are given freedom to integrate all entertainment devices together and make them work more elegantly possibly offering something piracy might not be able to offer or has offered for a long time and legitimate sources just couldn't match it. It's a interesting idea that companies are very uncomfortable in exploring even though a very similar idea lead to the creation of the internet.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  > I'm quite curious what would happen if DRM got banned and everything had to be open. While I personally support many copyright reforms, chief among them is that any work that is DRMed should be exempt from copyright protection. They should be forced to choose which they want, and not be allowed both. When they DRM a work, they're stealing from the future public domain... this has already happened, and the problem will only grow bigger. Right now, there exists media that cannot be recovered because of DRM. It's the Divx optical disc format from about 1999. Everything released on that format was released on others as well, so thankfully all of it is recoverable. But if there were works that could only be found on that (which is very plausible, considering that many older works exist only on some surviving piece of a single format)... then the crypto keys to recover them are already gone. Since the entire point of copyright is that you only get this protection so that the work may eventually enter the public domain, and since DRM will someday serve to make that impossible, no work that employs it should enjoy copyright protection.
  - eurleif 12y ago
    >Since the entire point of copyright is that you only get this protection so that the work may eventually enter the public domain I've never heard that described as the purpose of copyright law. Why would it be? In the absence of copyright law, all works would effectively be in the public domain. I believe you're thinking of patent law. To get a patent, you have to release the details of your invention, which you could keep private otherwise. There's nothing equivalent with copyright law.

by jbk 12y ago

shmerl 12y ago

It doesn't sound morally good because it's overreaching and preemptive policing (even if we falsely assume that DRM is effective). The fact is, most people don't think this issue through and don't realize how crooked and unethical the whole idea of DRM is.

jbk 12y ago
I'm sorry if I was not clear on this part. If you speak about DRM-for-copy-prevention to people in the street, a lot of them consider it as a 'necessary evil' because 'the artists need to live of their work'. When you know more about DRM, you usually have stronger arguments against, of course.
- shmerl 12y ago
  Yes, and they make two mistakes - that's it's necessary (as you pointed out, DRM doesn't prevent piracy), and that such evil is acceptable (accepting massive surveillance or other overeaching police state kind of methods is similar).
  - jbk 12y ago
    I'm not making any judgment on DRMs, I'm just trying to explain how they work.
    - shmerl 12y ago
      I understand. You are right about the main issue behind it - most people are not thinking this through, otherwise there would be more opposition to DRM.
  - edanm 12y ago
    Somewhat off topic advice - if you're trying to convince people of your views, calling things "evil" rarely works. I'm willing to believe that DRM doesn't further the interest of society, but evil? I don't think you can say that considering the real evil that exists in the world.
    - shmerl 12y ago
      Would you call police state evil? I would. Same thing is about DRM in my view. How would you call something like this for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit

evv 12y ago

> DRM are marketed to users (and the society, including politicians) and to artists as a way to prevent copies. Most engineers implementing DRMs think so too. And all the discussions we've seen on HTML5 are around this. People have little arguments against this because it sounds morally good to help artist live of their creations. And to that end- that is the legitimate, marketable feature of DRM. As far as consumers are concerned, thats what it buys them- it allows the producers of the content to retain some control, live off of their art, and continue producing. How would content producers possibly deter copying without exerting control on the consumption hardware and software? The only answer there is standardized DRM. So HTML5 DRM seems to be the only solution which meets the consumer need (artists getting paid), and avoids the commercial control over your hardware and software.

shmerl 12y ago
> And to that end- that is the legitimate, marketable feature of DRM. Except that it's not legitimate. First of all as the post above implied, DRM simply doesn't advance the goal of "living off one's art" in any way. Or to put it in business terms, DRM doesn't increase sales (because it doesn't reduce piracy). I'd even say it decreases sales because some users avoid DRMed products and it as well increases piracy (because some pirates see breaking DRM as sport - i.e. they are more likely to direct their attention to a DRMed product to pirate it, rather than to a DRM-free one). Plus, it's not legitimate to employ overreaching preemptive policing justified by "need to live off one's art". Same way it's not legitimate to violate everyone's privacy by installing police cameras in people's houses as a preemptive measure against crime. > How would content producers possibly deter copying without exerting control on the consumption hardware and software? They can't deter it. They can reduce it (i.e. turn part of the pirates into paying customers). The way to do it is old and well known, yet many fail to remember it - treat customers with respect (and not as criminals by default). Establish more direct relation with your users, don't be a jerk, be user friendly and so on. People appreciate services which are explicitly DRM-free. On the other hand, paranoid attempts to "deter all copying" result in treating all customers as criminals by default, which turns many of them into pirates (i.e. serves exactly the opposite purpose). For some reason not being a jerk and being user friendly is a novel idea for many legacy publishers which they find hard to digest. Independent studios get it way better.

hga 12y ago

"The answer is probably because the main goal of DRM is to control distribution channels, not copy-prevention." How is this, in principle, inconsistent with "helping artists live off their creations"? How IP products are sold, though what sort of channels at what prices, has to inherently be a part of that, if for no other reason than that these companies won't be sending rich royalties to artists for unsuccessful properties, they're not charities. Which is very different than reality, of course. Don't know about the French scene besides the movies I like, but as you've probably heard, Hollywood has its own very special kind of accounting, although I suppose its stars tend to get less screwed than US recording artists. To reify this, back in the '70s, thanks to a loophole in US law, my family (and many others) made a lot of money making unauthorized by record labels 8-track tapes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-track_tape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-track_tape). This was legal as long as you sent the artists their royalties. BUT, the biggest relevant entity to do that through, ASCAP, absolutely refused to accept payments from my father, who on advice of his lawyer put the money in an escrow account....

jbk 12y ago
> How is this, in principle, inconsistent with "helping artists live off their creations"? In principle, it's not. The point was that I prefer when things are correctly labeled and explained to people, for them to choose.
- shmerl 12y ago
  The fact that the public is misled about intentions behind DRM only demonstrates the point that it should not be acceptable. But the public somehow needs to become aware about it first.
exelius 12y ago
It's not about artists; it's about distribution (which eventually makes it back to artists, but that's another story entirely). The distribution of media content is controlled through very complex business agreements where the content rights owners assign licenses and limited copy rights to other organizations based on a number of factors, including time windows, geographic restrictions, device restrictions, etc. The content owners generally do not trust the distributors to enforce these restrictions; nor should they (why have 500 implementations of something when you can support 2 or 3?) Enter DRM. When digital copies of content are given to a distributor for distribution, that content is encrypted. Usually this content must be played through a special player that contacts a DRM license server to get a decryption key. One of the things this player does is verify you have an account with rights to play the content. The company you have an account with has certain distribution rights (like the content is only licensed for playback in the UK before December 1, 2014), so the player then checks your location through some mechanism (GPS, geolocation, etc) and the date before decrypting and playing the content. If it's after December 1 or you're outside the UK, it won't play back. Because the player has to be trusted to enforce these restrictions, that rules out any sort of open source player. Even if the default distribution of the player enforced the rules, it would be trivial to modify it and remove this enforcement mechanism. Hence why DRM is so despised by the open source crowd. For better or for worse, these types of distribution agreements are fundamental to how the media industry works. Sometimes rights will get passed along two or three times before they actually make it into the hands of the consumer (e.g. a studio licenses their US movie distribution to Disney, who then licenses a subset of films to Epix, who then licenses a subset of those to Amazon, but only in a certain window). It's likely not changing any time soon because as you said, it makes the owners of this IP a lot of money. DRM can be broken relatively easily if piracy is your goal; but the real goal of DRM is to provide content owners control over legal distribution channels.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

lifeisstillgood 12y ago

So is it a fair précis to say DRM enables content owners to choose who (which distribution channel) is allowed to distribute their content to the vast majority of mainstream users who cannot be bothered to hunt down a DRM-free copy, and so through that choice extract rent. A perfect uncrackBle DRM would still serve the same purpose.

Fuxy 12y ago

I'm quite curious what would happen if DRM got banned and everything had to be open. I know it's wishful thinking however ironically I predict that content creators would experience an increase in sales since giving up control means that companies are given freedom to integrate all entertainment devices together and make them work more elegantly possibly offering something piracy might not be able to offer or has offered for a long time and legitimate sources just couldn't match it. It's a interesting idea that companies are very uncomfortable in exploring even though a very similar idea lead to the creation of the internet.

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
> I'm quite curious what would happen if DRM got banned and everything had to be open. While I personally support many copyright reforms, chief among them is that any work that is DRMed should be exempt from copyright protection. They should be forced to choose which they want, and not be allowed both. When they DRM a work, they're stealing from the future public domain... this has already happened, and the problem will only grow bigger. Right now, there exists media that cannot be recovered because of DRM. It's the Divx optical disc format from about 1999. Everything released on that format was released on others as well, so thankfully all of it is recoverable. But if there were works that could only be found on that (which is very plausible, considering that many older works exist only on some surviving piece of a single format)... then the crypto keys to recover them are already gone. Since the entire point of copyright is that you only get this protection so that the work may eventually enter the public domain, and since DRM will someday serve to make that impossible, no work that employs it should enjoy copyright protection.
- eurleif 12y ago
  >Since the entire point of copyright is that you only get this protection so that the work may eventually enter the public domain I've never heard that described as the purpose of copyright law. Why would it be? In the absence of copyright law, all works would effectively be in the public domain. I believe you're thinking of patent law. To get a patent, you have to release the details of your invention, which you could keep private otherwise. There's nothing equivalent with copyright law.