[HN Gopher] The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright viola...
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The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations (2013)
Author : marcodiego
Score : 278 points
Date : 2021-12-28 03:19 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.archive.org)
| darawk wrote:
| This article is clickbait. The headline makes a bold claim, and
| then the article goes on to say: The purpose of DRM isn't to
| prevent copying, it's to prevent unlicensed reproduction. That
| is, it says 'copying' in different words, by trying to talk about
| things adjacent to copying, like forcing ads to play. Yes,
| content owners want to enforce all kinds of other things with
| DRM, but the fundamental thing is control of playback and
| distribution (aka copying).
| bobsmooth wrote:
| HDCP is trivial to circumvent but no big brand will ever sell a
| device that promotes this functionality.
| jimmyearlcarter wrote:
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I don't feel we ready the article the same way, interesting.
|
| Early in it makes a strong and specific claim :
|
| "The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage
| against creators of playback devices."
|
| This is explicitly stated and I believe a meaningful hypothesis
| to explore and base an article around. It frames the argument
| instead of just "creator vs pirates" as "one industry vs
| another" which is a sufficiently different ballgame. I found it
| quite in line with title.
| darawk wrote:
| > "The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage
| against creators of playback devices."
|
| What does this actually mean, though? What is it that the
| playback devices are doing that they don't want other than
| playing unauthorized material?
|
| Framing the problem as "it's not about copying, it's about
| unauthorized playback" is meaningless. That's just another
| word for copying in this context. They want control over when
| and how their IP is played. The word 'copying' has always
| been shorthand for this.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| > They [content providers] want control over when and how
| their IP is played.
|
| Yes, that is indeed the case. Who is in a position to
| enforce those controls over playback? The device
| manufacturers! So we are in a scenario where device
| manufacturers want to commoditize the content ("play
| anything on as many of our devices as you want"), while
| content providers want to restrict the content so they can
| monetize access to it.
| Linosaurus wrote:
| > This article is clickbait. > (..) but the fundamental thing
| is control of playback and distribution (aka copying).
|
| Yeah. It's even arguing against itself. If I interpret it
| correctly,
|
| * The purpose of DRM _is not_ to prevent copyright violations.
| (Implied to mean: Ensure exactly 0 copies exist online).
|
| * The purpose of DRM _is_ to prevent copyright violations.
| (Implied to mean: by our paying customers)
| netcan wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| The point this article is making is that DRM, as it works, is
| highly conducive to "platform" power. Whether or not this is
| the "true purpose" is a rather meaningless question, beyond
| casual rhetorical usage.
|
| The language of the legislation, legislators, perhaps judges
| will likely refer to protecting the moral rights of creators.
| IRL, "creator" can be whoever owns the Beatles catalogue. IRL,
| the who and how of controlling "playback and distribution,"
| dictates what kind of a company will make the commercial gains.
|
| Those irl concerns exist, effect legislation and its details a
| lot. You could call _those_ the "true purpose," but IMO there
| ain't no such thing as a generally true purpose. Different
| actors have different purposes.
| gbanfalvi wrote:
| > then the article goes on to say: The purpose of DRM isn't to
| prevent copying, it's to prevent unlicensed reproduction. That
| is, it says 'copying' in different words, by trying to talk
| about things adjacent to copying,
|
| I don't see that at all in the article. Anywhere.
|
| What I read in the article is that it says that the purpose of
| DRM isn't to prevent _unlawful behaviour_, it's to enforce
| _lawful behaviour_ to be performed in a specific way. The
| actual _act_ of copying (or distribution, or playback, which
| are all a form of "copying", sure) is not as relevant to the
| author as the way that it is being done.
| canistel wrote:
| Isn't the reason for widely used messaging/chat platforms not
| using open protocols also (roughly) the same?
| kube-system wrote:
| I also don't think it's even necessary to prevent copyright
| infringement to achieve a goal of effectively steering people
| towards paid sources.
|
| I often hear arguments that its "easier to pirate movies than use
| DRM'd software". But I don't think this is actually the case for
| the average non-tech-savvy person. If you can operate a torrent
| client or even know what one is, you are much savvier than the
| average Netflix/Roku/etc user.
|
| DRM means that there isn't a point-and-click app for my mom to
| send her sister a movie. This is the average person who buys
| movies. Not some geek on a tech forum.
| mkotowski wrote:
| > If you can operate a torrent client or even know what one is,
| you are much savvier than the average Netflix/Roku/etc user.
|
| Probably depends from where you are. In Poland some 15 years
| ealier, it was quite a common skill, even for people who rarely
| used anything else on the internet. Many people had crappy and
| unstable connections and torrenting was the only viable option
| for them to watch anything from the Internet.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| popcorn-time used to work ten times better than any paid
| streaming service of today.
|
| also, no ads.
|
| there is nothing inherently difficult in watching unlicensed
| content.
|
| and downloading has been a thing since I can remember.
|
| Everyone in my age range or younger than me (mid 40s) should
| know exactly how to do it.
|
| the main two reasons people watch paid services nowadays are:
|
| 1 - they have kids and don't want to do parenting, because it's
| hard, so they buy Disney+ and leave the kids in front of it
|
| 2 - they are young and have been educated to them by their
| parents (AKA they don't pay for it)
|
| 3 - go back to one
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Why "used to" ? Have the new "owners" made the experience
| worse ?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| When you're young being excluded from the principle cultural
| medium film/television cause social exclusion to done extent.
| When you can't afford to pay I think this provides a genuine
| moral reason for copyright infringement. With morally
| defensible copyright terms it might not.
|
| As you age (30s-40s), generally your can afford more and so
| access some of these most popular cultural artefacts without
| copyright infringement; so you _should_ pay. Also, it may
| become less important to establishing and maintaining
| friendships and status (like if you find your niche in
| society).
|
| I don't think those following such a social progression need
| be aware of it.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > As you age (30s-40s), generally your can afford more and
| so access some of these most popular cultural artefacts
|
| At my age I have no FOMO, truth is I never had it before
| either, it might be me or the fact that I am naturally
| immune to most mimetic tactics, I simply get no reward from
| social acceptance.
|
| Anyway: at my age I have developed my own moral compass,I
| pay to go to the movies, I pay for concerts, I pay for
| records, I pay for books, I pay to watch and listen online
| content that I think it's worth it (I buy a lot of music
| from Bandcamp) I have no ethical problem boycotting VC
| funded services that want to build a monopoly (growth, they
| call it) and have fragmented the market in ways that
| "excluded [people] from the principle cultural medium
| film/television" of their times.
|
| sorry, not sorry.
| nescioquid wrote:
| To complement your argument, with the rise of mass culture
| and mass advertising, marketing to children and youth
| proved to be lucrative. U.S. culture is mostly youth
| culture. Market cigarettes to children, and you'll have
| customers for life. Make and market your movie franchise to
| young people, and you can keep making predictable profits
| for as long as you can punch out sequels.
|
| But who has the disposable income? Who is being catered to,
| really?
| 14 wrote:
| My dad is elderly and has figured out how to watch online
| movies for free. He goes to [1] and it is just like netflix
| point and click no skill needed.
|
| 1 https://flixtor.to/home
| kube-system wrote:
| I have no doubt that one, or even thousand of seniors are
| pirating the latest movies. I'm not saying that people don't
| pirate stuff.
|
| But Netflix has 213 million users. If pirating was really so
| much easier and DRM made legal options unusable, they
| wouldn't.
|
| DRM sucks, but Netflix isn't going out of business any time
| soon
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > But Netflix has 213 million users
|
| Nitpicking, but Netflix has 213 millions subscribers, not
| users.
|
| We don't know how many of them are active or how many
| people are using them.
|
| We simply know they paid one time.
| kube-system wrote:
| I'll phrase it another way: in 2020, some number of
| people collectively decided it was easier to send Netflix
| 25 billion dollars instead of pirating movies.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| Let's look at it from another perspective: in 2020 people
| collectively decided it was easier to send Netflix $25
| billion instead of other forms of entertainment (cinemas,
| theaters, concert halls, stadium, etc were closed)
|
| Pirating skyrocketed as well during 2020
|
| The two things are not adversaries as much as one might
| think
|
| Theatrical releases on streaming services have helped
| piracy, now you can download a movie mere days after it
| came out and the quality is gonna be perfect.
|
| > _More people are pirating movies during the coronavirus
| lockdown During the last seven days of March, there was a
| 43% spike in Americans visiting sites that pirate movies
| compared with the last seven days of February. Italy,
| which went under lockdown orders on March 9, saw visits
| to piracy sites spike 66%_
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| How do those spikes compare to the spikes on sites that
| you believe to be non-infringing?
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| I don't know.
|
| If you know more, I'm curious to listen.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| It's not because it's easier. People could park in no
| parking zones, it would be easier, they don't because
| they've made a moral and/or financial judgement.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "But Netflix has 213 million users. If pirating was really
| so much easier.."
|
| I am willing to bet there are more than 500 million people
| pirating, so I don't think this argument carries much
| weight. Netflix is a very 'rich western country' thing. The
| rest of the world exists.
| toraway1234 wrote:
| > DRM means that there isn't a point-and-click app for my mom
| to send her sister a movie.
|
| "magistv"
| grishka wrote:
| Reasons piracy still exists and will exist approximately
| forever:
|
| - Something not being available in your country
|
| - The version that is available is a "helpfully" translated one
| when you would rather watch the original with subs
|
| - Your device isn't worthy of receiving a high-quality stream
| despite you paying for one and your hardware being capable of
| decoding it
|
| - The player is just shitty and you can't use your own
|
| - There are ads despite you paying a subscription
|
| - You "bought" a movie, then it was taken away from you because
| the seller lost the license. In other words, your continued
| access to something you allegedly own is still contingent on
| the seller and its whims.
|
| It's surprising how much people are willing to tolerate, but in
| general, around me torrenting something is still the default.
| Some people do have Netflix or other subscriptions, but they
| are a minority. Just no one is having this whole "you get the
| same exact movie but you pay AND you get a worse UX" thing.
|
| And DVDs? I don't think I've ever seen an actually licensed and
| encrypted DVD. Many players ignore all those "no fast
| forwarding" flags as well.
| jayd16 wrote:
| If pirate sites were allowed to flourish, they'd surely end up
| feeling as good as Netflix or better.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| I don't know. You have to put up with popups from streaming
| sites, sure - adblocker only stops _most_ of them - but in
| general, playback is just fine and I can find most movies and
| shows.
|
| The allure of Netflix is simply legality, but for selection
| it is a step backwards from a decent streaming site.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Yes. It's a major step back in terms of selection. And more
| to the point, it's continuous major steps back every year,
| even compared to itself from a few years ago.
|
| Part of what people don't seem to remember is that one of
| the benefits of iTunes was its huge selection. Netflix is
| becoming more and more like BandCamp, not iTunes, in terms
| of selection. I don't go there to find something to watch
| anymore. I only go there if I want to watch one of the few
| things worth watching on it.
|
| There is currently no legal video platform for watching all
| the things. (And that's ignoring the DRM crap.)
| consp wrote:
| Popcorn time was/is pretty much the pinnacle of it so I'd say
| they got pretty close to being better than the streaming
| services.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Popcord time created resillient dustributed video service,
| with no hosting costs. It is technologically superior to
| anything all those billion dollar companoes have ever
| created.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Not that resilient in the end, since it is mostly shut
| down.
| dartharva wrote:
| There also exist a lot of centralized pirate streaming
| sites with huge catalogues that give you HD content right
| from your browser, and many of them feature players that
| give users more control in playback speed, video quality,
| subtitles etc. in an arguably better manner than any
| legitimate streaming service.
| zo1 wrote:
| I never actually used Popcorn Time. What made it so great?
| juliendorra wrote:
| It was as easy to use as an official streaming service
| is, with integrated subtitles downloads in the background
| (from open subtitles), links to trailers and critics
| sites (it also pulled a lot of metadata from different
| sources).
|
| Popular movies were always on top of the list because the
| default sorting was by seeders and these movies would
| load instantly
|
| At the time it was the best streaming experience
| existing, paid or free combined.
|
| [edit] oh and install was just dropping an all-in-one app
| somewhere on your computer and launch it.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Why "was" ?
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Mostly the GUI, which is reminiscent of Netflix, and also
| the torrent client config. You hit play button on a video
| poster image, client sequentially downloads blocks of
| videos until the buffer outruns the download rate (this
| is the main difference from other clients which
| can't/don't download blocks sequentially), then it
| autoplays, pausing for more buffering if needed, with one
| click.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| "I often hear arguments that its "easier to pirate movies than
| use DRM'd software". But I don't think this is actually the
| case for the average non-tech-savvy person. If you can operate
| a torrent client or even know what one is, you are much savvier
| than the average Netflix/Roku/etc user."
|
| I don't know many folks that actually torrent things now. If
| you want to be able to see it offline, sure, or if you want the
| physical file. It isn't necessary, though. Even if it was, the
| last torrenting software I used was pretty easy and you didn't
| need to be _that_ tech savvy to use it.
|
| It doesn't matter because this isn't necessary. Streaming sites
| exist, and they are definitely easy to use. So long as you have
| a decent internet connection, there is no real reason to
| download anything.
| devwastaken wrote:
| I thought this was true until I visited an old friend in a
| trailer park, of which their family would borrow DVDs written
| with pirated movies. There were many reasons why. No internet,
| too expensive, no blu-ray player, etc. It was amazing how they
| could just put in a DVD, and instantly movie for their
| children. These kids had rarely ever seen an ad on TV in their
| life. The people who made the disks got paid, too. Market
| incentives are a universal concept. Digital content by it's
| nature is infinitely copiable. So who has the better market
| offer? Guy in trailer park for $1 for a movie or $50/month Hulu
| live subscription + 70/month internet?
|
| This is how it goes in other countries, too, where you cannot
| even legitimately get disks or downloads, much less be able to
| afford them.
|
| It is true it's simpler to just stream content for those that
| have the money and tech, but if you've seen how the media
| giants have split the market it's not affordable to most people
| to have Hulu live tv, Netflix, Disney+, Spotify, etc - all to
| watch a few specific movies. Piracy is a natural result.
|
| Don't underestimate the amount of tech knowledge people have
| nowadays, especially if it will save money. They themselves may
| not know, but they know someone that does. The internet has
| become a beautiful resource to learn absolutely anything. VPN's
| are advertised everywhere on YouTube. Necessity is the mother
| of invention after all.
| oriolid wrote:
| > The people who made the disks got paid, too.
|
| Interesting point. Did the people who made the content get
| paid too? And is the value of the DVD in the physical object
| or the content?
| ui4jd73bdj wrote:
| > Did the people who made the content get paid too?
|
| No, they chose to opt-out of this market.
| indigochill wrote:
| > Did the people who made the content get paid too?
|
| Usually yes, because those would be the
| actors/cameramen/directors/editors/etc who would be paid
| for their work before the finished work then would be sold
| on to consumers. The question here is really "Did the
| people who fronted the money for the content get paid?" For
| simplicity I'm ignoring royalties here.
|
| > And is the value of the DVD in the physical object or the
| content?
|
| If we agree that copies of digital content are zero-cost,
| then the monetary value of the DVD is in the physical
| object.
|
| Obviously that's only half the argument because nobody's
| watching blank DVDs.
|
| But how do we fairly compensate the group that fronts the
| money for the content to be created? IMO, this is the
| genius of crowdfunding and why I'm bullish about it being
| the economic future of content. If a content creator can
| convince enough people to give them money to make
| something, then there is nobody who needs to profit from
| distribution. The content is fully paid-for up-front.
|
| It's also not a new idea. Rich patrons funded works of art
| in the Renaissance. Rights management would have actually
| been counterproductive because the point of the art was the
| aggrandizement of the patron.
| oriolid wrote:
| > The question here is really "Did the people who fronted
| the money for the content get paid?" For simplicity I'm
| ignoring royalties here.
|
| I admire your intellectual honesty about admitting that
| royalties exist. Anyway, the question here is where did
| the money for up-front salaries come from and does does
| it keep coming when the if the publisher's profits are
| reduced?
|
| I have participated in a few crowdfunding campaigns and I
| agree that it could work for a specific niche: where the
| content creators are already well known enough that they
| can attract a sufficient audience that trusts them to do
| something sensible with their money. It's going to be
| hard for newcomers. Just look at failed kickstarters:
| there is a lot of trash there but there could be some
| unpolished gems there.
|
| > Rights management would have actually been
| counterproductive because the point of the art was the
| aggrandizement of the patron.
|
| This is kind of the point. If I have to choose blindly
| between a show that's made because Jeff Bezos wants to
| fund it and meddles with it personally or a show that
| Jeff's firm funds because some professionals believe it's
| going to attract paying viewers, my bet is on the latter.
| kube-system wrote:
| I'm not claiming that piracy doesn't exist. I'm claiming that
| those pushing DRM have mostly achieved their goals. They are
| making good money from the people who have it to spend.
|
| The person in your anecdote likely wasn't a profitable
| customer anyway. Their goal is to make money from the masses
| who have it, not to try to squeeze blood from a stone.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| > Don't underestimate the amount of tech knowledge people
| have nowadays, especially if it will save money.
|
| This works also in the opposite direction. I know of some
| couples, who can easily share even 200USD/month on streaming
| services, however they consider "the alternatives" to "save
| money", who are of course illegal here in Europe.
|
| Nowadays "saving" let's say 20USD for Netflix per month is -
| in my opinion - a very bad bargain considering the fact, that
| you can end up paying a lot of punitive damages.
|
| Pirated software/movies always added some sort of value to
| the product. For example, DVDs forced (and still do) you to
| watch a couple of minutes of FBI warnings, anti-piracy
| trailers etc. instead of just letting you instantly watch the
| movie you paid (!) for. Pirated DVDs just offered the movie,
| full control to the user - like in streaming nowadays.
|
| So if you have the money, I do not get people who want to
| "save money" on streaming.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Nowadays "saving" let's say 20USD for Netflix per month
| is - in my opinion - a very bad bargain considering the
| fact, that you can end up paying a lot of punitive damages.
|
| Funny thing is that pirated content is the only ethical
| content I know of, that doesn't rely on ads (streaming
| services have ads too, even if you pay)
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Pirated content doesn't need ads because they steal the
| work of people who do.
| jackthezipper wrote:
| It's not stealing it's sharing.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Pirates don't pay media companies to produce media
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| Let's not pretend that media companies are givers
| though...
|
| https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/music-news/tv-
| film-co...
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-
| radio/2021/oct/26/squid-g...
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-57838473
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-57382459
|
| https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/scarlett-johansson-sues-
| dis...
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-56815282
|
| Also, streaming services are swimming in cash and using
| it to monopolize the market, instead of rewarding
| creators.
| acdha wrote:
| I'm far from a proponent of the big media companies but
| isn't this argument basically "my theft is okay because
| they've stolen too"? Arguing that those companies are
| abusive seems like a much stronger argument for watching
| something else or voting for legal reforms, not taking
| advantage of other people's work without compensation.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| would you download a car?
|
| theft is when you take something from someone, when you
| download a movie, Netflix users can still watch it,
| Netflix can still stream it and they don't lose anything.
|
| In fact their profits have gone up, despite helping
| piracy by releasing more and more content easily sharable
| outside of their platforms.
|
| Netflix alone made 7.5 billions in the third quarter of
| 2021, up from 6.4 billions in the third of 2020.
|
| someone really believes that leaks are unfortunate? have
| you seen a single image leaked from the next Indiana
| Jones movie? Do you know the title?No? you know why?
| because they'll work next year on the post production and
| are keeping everything under rigorous control. leaks will
| be useful only when they are ready to launch. When
| Luca..ehm Disney wants to take secrecy seriously, they
| absolutely can and will.
|
| Anyway: I pay for prime video, because it's included with
| prime. I rarely watch other streaming services nor
| download their content.
|
| Last exception was Foundation from Apple, thank god I did
| not pay for that!
|
| Usually it works like this: I wanna watch an old movie,
| say Total Recall, some streaming service bought it for
| Christmas or whatever occasion together with all
| Schwarzenegger movie, to release a "member berry" bundle
|
| I probably already have it, ripped from DVD, when it
| comes out I download it again because I'll probably find
| the x265 version which is smaller or the 2160p (or 1080p)
| restored version.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > would you download a car?
|
| If someone ever one day invents the Star Trek replicator,
| it would end scarcity of physical goods overnight! This
| would be an amazing thing for humanity (and would likely
| be opposed/outlawed by the same moneyed interests that
| oppose the sharing of non-physical goods). This
| hypothetical invention would utterly change humanity for
| the better.
|
| I would download a car! No question. If the alternative
| is needlessly spending money on the exact same product,
| of course I would, and so would nearly everyone posting
| here. What an absurd campaign that was! In a world
| without physical good scarcity, there would be nothing
| ethically wrong with doing it.
|
| Oh, and we've only been talking about cars and movies--
| luxury goods. Notice how the argument is never "would you
| download food?" Or "would you download insulin?" I think
| even EvilStudioExec might have a hard time arguing
| against downloading necessities or life-saving medicine.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| The difference is than in many countries on this planet,
| that call themselves free, food and insulin are
| guaranteed to (almost) anybody.
|
| If you go to the hospital in my country you can "download
| inulin" because it's free for everybody who needs it,
| rich or poor.
| acdha wrote:
| > theft is when you take something from someone,
|
| Yes, such as when you use someone's creative work
| contrary to their express desire. Digital goods don't
| work the same way as physical works, it's true, but all
| of the people involved in making them still need to get
| paid.
|
| The principled, ethical stance is not to watch things you
| don't want to pay for. Nobody's life is impoverished by
| making the percentage of entertainment they don't watch
| go from 99.9987% to 99.999%.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Yes, such as when you use someone's creative work
| contrary to their express desire.
|
| No, that's not theft.
|
| That's infringement of rights.
|
| But I speak with many artists and creators, they are more
| mad than me, I have a job where I get paid no matter what
| the result is, because they pay for my time.
|
| they are between a rock and a stone: accept to work for
| these platforms and get paid shit, while they nmake
| billion, or don't and get paid shit, but at least own
| your work. Guess which way many are starting to take...
|
| > The principled, ethical stance is not to watch things
| you don't want to pay for.
|
| according to what ethical stance, exactly?
|
| yours?
|
| do you really think it is so relevant?
|
| or the ethic of corporations, which is objectively
| something to stay way from.
| acdha wrote:
| > they are between a rock and a stone: accept to work for
| these platforms and get paid shit, while they nmake
| billion, or don't and get paid shit, but at least own
| your work. Guess which way many are starting to take...
|
| Again, I'm not saying that the current situation is great
| but if you were really concerned about artists being
| fairly compensated you would not take the action which
| results in them not getting paid. You could buy directly
| from the artist or you can go without, but taking
| advantage of their work without the agreed upon
| compensation calls your motives into question.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| I like to think that it's people taking from
| corporations, while UGC is corporations taking from
| people, spamming them with ads, monetizing their hobbies
| and selling their personal data.
|
| anyway, if I pay for Netflix who has produced their own
| content, why should I also watch the ads for other
| Netflix content?
|
| Isn't it enough to pay for it?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| You get ads on Netflix? Which country are you in?
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| Italy
| vetinari wrote:
| You don't get the pre-roll ads? A button to skip them
| eventually appears, but it is still annoying.
| acdha wrote:
| Not here in the U.S.
| jen20 wrote:
| I definitely see them in the US. Trailers are just as
| unacceptable as ads.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| What shows or movies have you seen trigger pre-roll ads
| on Netflix? I'm in the US and have never seen one.
| vetinari wrote:
| Witcher, for example.
| acdha wrote:
| That does not have trailers for me.
| acdha wrote:
| Interesting, I wonder whether there's a plan age or other
| threshold -- I've never seen one, as a Netflix customer
| since the 2000s.
| jlokier wrote:
| Here in the UK, I don't get pre-roll ads on Netflix.
| After clicking play on an episode or movie it starts
| immediately. Remarkably good quality over low bandwidth
| rural links, too.
| kaetemi wrote:
| The DVD player in our house is a suspiciously branded region-
| free box.
|
| Because that's apparently the only way to watch legitimate
| DVDs.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I can relate. In my country this stuff gets sold out in the
| open like it was nothing. Every once in a while some police
| operation disrupts their activities but it feels like it's
| just for show. Maybe I'll read about these operations in the
| US trade office's annual reports one day.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| > This is how it goes in other countries, too, where you
| cannot even legitimately get disks or downloads, much less be
| able to afford them.
|
| Oh yes, thank you for remembering that. It's truly an
| exception around here.
|
| Pretty much all streaming services refuse to accept my money
| or provide access to 0.1-1% of their catalog (compared to
| what is available in the US, literally a few to a few dozen
| shows/movies) for exactly the same price per month, so who
| would even bother? Of course, you can always try to find a
| working VPN, if they weren't getting blocked all the time.
|
| I believe Spotify is the only service that gives access to
| the same selection as in every other country.
|
| So everyone "pirates" everything, especially if you want
| content in its untranslated original form.
|
| Edit: except for games. Most games are available from Steam
| and other major platforms, and those are very popular.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Same experience here. Video game consoles used to come with
| modchips preinstalled. For a long time I was the odd guy
| who bought original stuff. Streaming services made it much
| easier to consume but I still see the occasional person
| relying on ad-filled blogs with download links.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| Spotify has different selection depending on the country.
| In the past Spotify was not available in my country, so I
| had to use workarounds, which meant using accounts from
| different countries, and jumping between them definitely
| changed what I was able to play from my playlists.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| How is drm responsible for the absence of such apps? If
| anything it's the dmca systems and an army of lawyers
| kube-system wrote:
| Technical friction is also a factor. It's much like speed
| bumps on a road. They don't prevent people from going 50 in a
| 25. But they make it more of a PITA, even when a cop also
| might pull you over.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Speedbumps are way more effective than cops
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Considering the fact many popular releases hit the torrents
| often times _before_ official version is even available
| anywhere I dont think your speedbump metaphor is really
| working here =)
| oriolid wrote:
| Not really. The speed bumps affect everyone, but it's
| enough that one person or group cracks the DRM and makes
| the result available for everyone.
| kube-system wrote:
| It doesn't have to be much friction to have an impact.
| People take the path of least resistance.
| DarylZero wrote:
| But it does, because of the effect just mentioned.
| 99.999% of people can take the path of least resistance
| while the 1 in 100,000 exception bears all of the
| friction for all of them.
|
| Perhaps though the real friction is not exactly technical
| but that the piracy sites don't have the same attention-
| capturing "feed" or recommendation mechanisms set up.
| Just the friction of having to make choices.
| oriolid wrote:
| There are still entire websites dedicated for TV shows
| and music (and after you have looked at them once, they
| show up on Android feed), Facebook and Twitter feeds,
| etc. And I guess everyone agrees that Netflix
| recommendations are not that great.
| petepete wrote:
| Popcorn Time being shut down by the MPAA is the reason there's
| no simple app for your mum and aunt.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time
|
| Unfortunately now there are so many streaming platforms piracy
| will gain in popularity again. Lots of people don't mind paying
| for one or two, but probably not five or six. Especially when
| some just have one or two good programmes.
| malermeister wrote:
| There's a ton of popcorn time forks you could give your mom
| tho :-)
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Lots of people don 't mind paying for one or two, but
| probably not five or six. Especially when some just have one
| or two good programmes._
|
| 'Subscription rotation' may become a thing: you pay for a
| service for a few months, catch up on any shows that were
| released on it that you haven't seen, and then cancel and
| move onto the next one. A year later you come back to the
| first one and do a new catch-up.
|
| There may be one or two that you stick with (e.g., Disney if
| you have kids).
| jtbayly wrote:
| People will Pirate before they do this.
| gruez wrote:
| Disagree. Turning subscriptions on/off (assuming that
| doesn't require phoning in) seems much easier to the
| layperson than figuring out how to torrent something
| without getting viruses and/or copyright strikes.
| PickledHotdog wrote:
| Remembering to turn subscriptions on and off is where the
| pain will lie
| gruez wrote:
| Use reminder app on your phone?
| rocketbop wrote:
| I do it. I'm sure a lot of people do it Nd will
| increasingly as number of services grows...
| oarsinsync wrote:
| Wikipedia link shows that it's very much still alive, just on
| a different domain. MPAA managed to shutdown various domains,
| and get Github to stop hosting their source, but it appears
| that they're still very much alive and kicking.
| fabioborellini wrote:
| One of my favourite anecdotes is about an employee of a not-
| so-successful video streaming startup not knowing Popcorn
| Time being illegal, promoting its use at the water cooler and
| apparently using their company laptop for using it.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
|
| If your monitor displays it and your speakers play it, it can be
| recorded.
| progbits wrote:
| Off-topic but the archive.org page is unusable for me on mobile
| due to the donation banner: the close button is obscured by the
| timeline and can't be clicked, "maybe later" replaces it with a
| different banner asking for contact info which I also can't
| close.
|
| I love IA and have donated to them before but this is slowly
| sliding into the dark UX patterns making web unusable.
| IceWreck wrote:
| > I love IA and have donated to them before but this is slowly
| sliding into the dark UX patterns making web unusable.
|
| This is ironic because the internet archive made this just last
| year https://wayforward.archive.org/
| ziml77 wrote:
| It broke reader mode too. I got the text of the donation banner
| and nothing else.
|
| Had to zoom into the corner so I could tap the microscopic
| close button on the timeline so I could then close the donation
| banner.
| opan wrote:
| Your description immediately reminded me of Wikipedia. It's a
| shame these good projects fall to these levels.
| gcr wrote:
| Nonprofits gotta solicit donations. NPR does this, PBS'
| infamous pledge week does this. This isn't "falling," it's an
| old practice.
| zinekeller wrote:
| I don't know IA's budget (might be just the pandemic has
| tolled its finances), but I have reservations about
| Wikimedia's use of money. (Only the main foundation, others
| like the German affiliate is efficient about money and
| except for 2020 has a surplus which obviously went to cover
| inevitable shortfalls.)
| [deleted]
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| IA is fighting a lawsuit over its pandemic digital book
| lending service - where they begged for a lawsuit by
| deliberately offering unlimited lending of scanned books.
| This is obviously something they must win, so it's going
| to get really expensive.
|
| A quick search shows that the lawsuit is currently in the
| discovery phase, which is around the time that lawsuits
| start to get really, really expensive. And apparently the
| two sides are fighting, leading the judge to extend
| discovery while they work out the issues. $$$$
| throw10920 wrote:
| Why is the lawsuit that they _intentionally_ begged for
| "obviously something they must win"?
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| The publishers that sued them are asking for a seriously
| large amount of money and the deletion of all the books
| they've ever scanned. That's a pretty big deal, don't you
| think?
| progbits wrote:
| Yes that is fine. I'll donate to them again.
|
| But can it please be without the annoying banners, "we need
| to talk" or similar email subjects and so on? I'm sure it
| helps convince some people, but doesn't it discourage more?
| alvarlagerlof wrote:
| Same.
| hybrid1999 wrote:
| It works for me. I am using chrome on android
| pmontra wrote:
| No banner on Firefox Android. Maybe it's uBlock Origin. But I
| had to use reader mode to read the tiny non reflowing text.
| kiklion wrote:
| I use default safari on iPhone and was able to hit the x to
| hide the timeline and then another x to hide the donation
| banner.
| grishka wrote:
| That banner was annoying enough for me on desktop that I
| removed it with my ad blocker a while ago.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| The post is still up on the author's self-hosted blog, no
| archive needed: http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1363672582&count=1
| [deleted]
| anothernewdude wrote:
| It's actually a scheme by pirates to increase the relative worth
| of their offerings.
| joshlemer wrote:
| This may be a good place to ask, where do you buy DRM-free
| ebooks? Amazon only sells "Kindle Edition" books which are DRM or
| a proprietary format. Same with Google Books and the Kobo store.
| There are independent publishers who publish content DRM-free
| like
|
| * https://www.manning.com/
|
| * https://pragprog.com/
|
| But is there something like Amazon which has a huge library of
| DRM-free ebooks for sale?
| whatch wrote:
| This year I purchased a couple of amazing quality books
| directly from authors via gumroad.
| kuharich wrote:
| Past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7751110 (May
| 15, 2014, 234 comments)
| dbrueck wrote:
| I worked in the online media space for a long time, and the fact
| of the matter is that DRM enabled the era of networks putting
| their content online, it enabled Netflix, etc. - DRM was the only
| way to get past the liability gridlock between content owners and
| distributors. Also, in practice DRM is bad for users only when
| its presence causes friction in the legitimate viewing process.
| It has a bad rap because, historically, it has almost always
| caused a lot of friction for legitimate users.
|
| More fundamentally, DRM is a bandaid whose need arises from
| trying to apply traditional economic models (of buying and
| selling physical, tangible things) to digital assets that never
| wear out and cost /essentially/ nothing to duplicate and
| distribute. Even basic concepts of ownership and having
| possession of something don't really apply in the traditional
| way.
|
| If we could start from scratch, what might work is a purely use-
| based model, where e.g. every time you listen to a song, you pay
| a tiny, tiny fee for it. This creates a much stronger correlation
| between creators providing value and consumers deriving value
| from what they created, which in the long term makes more sense
| anyway. There are a lot of hurdles to getting there, though. On
| the consumer side, the concept of paying-means-owning is pretty
| ingrained, so we balk at the idea of continuing to pay for
| something after we already bought it. On the creator/provider
| side, the price for each use is going to seem far lower than what
| they think is fair, again for largely the same reason.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| > DRM is a bandaid whose need arises from trying to apply
| traditional economic models (of buying and selling physical,
| tangible things) to digital assets that never wear out and cost
| /essentially/ nothing to duplicate and distribute
|
| We need to embrace the digital model, not fight it. Detach
| ownership and control from the output, there are plenty of
| business models that work when the product is freely
| reproduceable.
|
| Because right now we've created a hellscape where consumers
| have zero control or agency over their media, and we are
| erasing the old ways of physically possessing it.
| swagasaurus-rex wrote:
| Most of the examples of a free business model I can think of
| are built on advertising, which also requires control of the
| playback devices to prevent you from skipping them.
| viscountchocula wrote:
| That wouldn't obviate the need for DRM, though, as there would
| still need to be a way for the content owner to be confident
| that players register each use.
|
| And we sort of have this use-based system now, but with
| unlimited uses per month of active subscription.
| dbrueck wrote:
| > That wouldn't obviate the need for DRM
|
| Yes and no. In order for the scheme to work, yes, you'd
| always need _something_ that encourages people to play by the
| rules, but it would look very, very different from many of
| the DRM systems of today, whose focus is on shoring up the
| ill-fitting concepts of ownership and possession. For
| example, in today 's DRM, it's typical to have mechanisms for
| granting a license to allow playing the media N times, or
| being able to play the media from startDate thru endDate.
| Most (all?) of that would go away.
|
| Ideally the new system would not have any noticeable friction
| for end-users, but as a practical matter, things can still
| work if we at least get to the point where the friction is
| significantly lower than just stealing it (much like today -
| if it's easy enough to just consume the media legitimately,
| for many people piracy just isn't worth the effort).
|
| > And we sort of have this use-based system now, but with
| unlimited uses per month of active subscription.
|
| It's definitely a partial step in that direction, yes, and
| I'm encouraged by the fact that I don't buy DVDs or music
| anymore because it shows consumers are being weaned off the
| concept of digital media ownership (and I hope the NFT fad
| dies out, because it runs counter to this).
|
| A couple of big hurdles that remain are (a) content
| distributors are still way too bent on gatekeeping and
| content control - for this to really work they are going to
| have to dial that back quite a bit, and (b) too little of the
| compensation is making it back to the content creators and/or
| the compensation is still often one or a few transactions
| (Bruce Springsteen recently sold the rights to all his music
| for half a billion dollars) instead of an ongoing
| compensation for as long as people are using it.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| > If we could start from scratch, what might work is a purely
| use-based model, where e.g. every time you listen to a song,
| you pay a tiny, tiny fee for it.
|
| This requires something track me each time I listen to
| something. Why should the creator, or an agent of the creator
| of that work get that power over me?
|
| Traditional economics don't require this tracking. E.g. I buy a
| car off of a car lot--the car lot doesn't need to know where
| and when I'm using the car.
|
| IMHO royalty is a concept that is a burden on society and the
| legal system when we live in an age where it is so easy to
| create certain types of works - never in any point in society
| have there been so many writings, songs, artworks,
| games/software, and motion pictures produced. For copyright to
| really work as it's intended, all avenues of human
| communication need to be MITMed and massive data stores
| tracking everything any human being creates need to be
| maintained. Various cartels actively work for this.
| dbrueck wrote:
| > Why should the creator, or an agent of the creator of that
| work get that power over me?
|
| Well, you have no inherent right to the creator's work at
| all, so consider it one of the terms of the agreement in
| which you get access to the content and the creator gets some
| form of compensation.
|
| But just to reiterate, this is how it would work under a use-
| based model. If you have something better to suggest, then by
| all means do, because I don't think we've uncovered the best
| solution yet. The comments about copyright require, as you
| noted, tracking too, but copyright itself only covers part of
| the problem, and that is not destroying the incentive to
| create and innovate in the first place (see below).
|
| > Traditional economics don't require this tracking. E.g. I
| buy a car off of a car lot--the car lot doesn't need to know
| where and when I'm using the car.
|
| Right, but traditional economic models also don't know how to
| deal with a situation in which you can buy a car, never have
| it wear out, and create an infinite number of exact
| duplicates for free that you could keep for yourself or turn
| around and sell to anyone else, which is basically the
| situation we have with digital works.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| > Well, you have no inherent right to the creator's work at
| all, so consider it one of the terms of the agreement in
| which you get access to the content and the creator gets
| some form of compensation
|
| True and a creator has no inherent right to my physical
| property or location info. If I hear a song over public
| airwaves and record it, or download it from a consenting
| party using bandwidth I pay for, the fact that I'm supposed
| to obey some license terms that I haven't consented to is
| an infringement on me. Creators can limit how things are
| released if they care so much. Supposedly Wu-Tang Clan did
| it -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_in_Shaolin.
|
| > If you have something better to suggest, then by all
| means do
|
| The sustainable path is commission-based works which could
| extend to patronage. I want something from an artist, I ask
| them to do it, then pay them for it. Musicians are already
| doing this with concerts.
|
| For things that are beyond the reach of a single person,
| there's no reason why this can't be done group-style a la
| Kickstarter-type services. If the artist wants more money,
| they can make more works.
|
| The mass-market motion picture and TV industry might
| collapse, but with the advent of streaming services it
| doesn't matter anymore.
|
| FWIW I do think trademark and patents are needed and do
| benefit society.
|
| > Right, but traditional economic models also don't know
| how to deal with a situation in which you can buy a car,
| never have it wear out, and create an infinite number of
| exact duplicates for free that you could keep for yourself
| or turn around and sell to anyone else, which is basically
| the situation we have with digital works.
|
| That's because an economic model resolves scarcity and is
| the wrong tool/framework/mindset when scarcity doesn't
| exist. If the above existed, then everyone should have as
| many cars as they want.
| dbrueck wrote:
| > The sustainable path is commission-based works which
| could extend to patronage
|
| I'd be curious to see how this would play out - maybe
| it'd be great, I dunno. I do wonder, though, if
| approaches like this discourage people from paying and
| instead encourages hedging their bets to see if everyone
| else pays. For example, if there is a Kickstarter for a
| movie idea you find interesting, but you know that once
| the movie is made that you can get a copy for free (since
| there is no control over media in this model), you are
| incentivized to wait and see if it will get funded
| without you.
|
| Similarly, without any content control, there is little
| incentive for anyone to sign up for streaming services,
| so relying on them for funding doesn't seem like it'd
| work either.
| fleddr wrote:
| "The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against
| creators of playback devices."
|
| Yes...and?
|
| The problem with this discussion is that it looks at this issue
| from one side only. It is kind of implied that content providers
| and creators are bad guys whilst us consumers are clearly the
| good guys, needlessly oppressed and restricted in our supposed
| "right" to consume all of the content in the world in the way we
| see fit.
|
| Maybe, just maybe, this leverage is a necessary evil to actually
| keep the lights on. If you look at Netflix, they deliver a
| tremendous amount of value whilst only recently becoming
| profitable. We're talking single digit billions, which sounds
| like a lot, but really isn't. Content costs a fortune to produce
| and is risky.
|
| As Netflix tries to monetize, yes they will experiment with
| arbitrary business models that can appear consumer-hostile. It
| may not make sense to you to pay more for using multiple screens.
| It is wrong to assume though that this "harm" is because Netflix
| enjoys harming you. It may simply be a model because other models
| fail.
|
| A very "fair" model would be entirely usage-based. You pay for
| how much you match as well as taking account the value of the
| content you watch (the production cost). This model would
| completely fail. It's a morally pure and fair concept, yet would
| be rejected by consumers. It just shows how neither party is
| interested in fairness or morality.
|
| Likewise, consumers normalize account sharing, VPN into low cost
| countries, and buy accounts from Alibaba. All to undermine the
| business model.
|
| Let's not kid ourselves as if we're doing this as part of some
| human rights struggle. We're just trying to get access to
| commercial entertainment in the cheapest way possible. We're in
| absolutely no position to preach or lecture.
| Skyy93 wrote:
| I think the problem is also the loss of control. I talked to
| someone today about this issue (for me its an issue) and this
| person did not even know what DRM is. If you do not know about
| something you can not build an opinion for or against it. Also
| you do not know if there is an alternative or another way.
| Therefore the dictation of hard- and software without the user
| really knowing whats going on is an actual issue. Content
| provider also do not want to inform their customer because
| perhapts they are no customers in the future if they know about
| their actual business process and monetizing.
| fleddr wrote:
| I think the issues that DRM creates are multiple, where each
| one differs in the way it affects the average consumer.
|
| What you may consider a massive issue as a series/movie
| fanatic may not be an issue at all to a casual that watches
| their favorite series after work. Content platforms base
| their business model on casuals, not a needy extremist.
| kingcharles wrote:
| All of that article is wrong.
|
| I used to work in DRM. I implemented, I believe, the first DRM
| for practically every major and minor record label in Europe and
| North America. The only reason any of them stated to me that they
| required DRM was to prevent copyright infringement. Yes, I
| pointed out the insanity of their solution. The firm I worked for
| didn't have the muscle of the one that came on our heels (Apple)
| and managed to temporarily remove DRM from music.
| shmerl wrote:
| Stated intent [?] real intent. I doubt they'll openly admit
| real crooked reasons behind it. That's besides simple stupidity
| of some possibly indeed thinking that DRM increases their
| sales.
| DeWilde wrote:
| Especially in large corporations where each level of the
| hierarchy lives in a bubble of sort, meaning that the people
| OP interacted might have actually believed it was to prevent
| piracy while the people in that corp some level above them
| had a different motive to getting DRM pushed.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| Yeah, I find that looking for a conspiracy here absolutely
| hilarious. Why can't it just be as simple as copyright holders
| really, really, really hate piracy, and are definitely willing
| to make a technical mess to do it?
|
| They hate piracy because it does cost them. How complicated
| does it need to be?
| danuker wrote:
| > They hate piracy because it does cost them.
|
| https://torrentfreak.com/eu-piracy-report-suppression-
| raises...
|
| > "In general, the results do not show robust statistical
| evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright
| infringements,"
| kube-system wrote:
| Read the next sentence too.
|
| > That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect
| but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with
| sufficient reliability that there is an effect.
|
| Absence of evidence != evidence of absence.
| lstodd wrote:
| Absence of evidence == there must be more study before
| any conclusions.
|
| Instead of the usual hypocrisy.
| midjji wrote:
| Unwillingness to change, I think, is a important part of the
| explanation. The old music companies were unable to provide
| the service their customers now asked for, i.e. convenient
| online, streaming, etc. In order to do so they would need to
| fundamentally change every aspect of their industry, from
| production, to artist contracts, to marketing, to financing,
| to distribution, and sales.
|
| Now if you were an executive on any level on such a
| corporation, would you want to continue doing the minimum
| effort thing of keeping everything the same? Or would you
| recommend completely changing everything, including replacing
| you with someone with different skills. Itunes did not hire
| the same distribution of people as the old record companies
| had, not even close. They could not fight it forever, and the
| change is still in progress, with more artists than ever
| using alternate crowdsourcing, etc.
| zrm wrote:
| > The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage
| against creators of playback devices.
|
| That was what they thought it was for.
|
| Turns out it gives the creators of playback devices leverage
| against content providers, e.g. iOS App Store.
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| There's a couple of problems with this analysis.
|
| 1) it only considers two of the three main actors in the DRM
| sphere - content "providers", by which the author seems to mean
| content distributors, and manufacturers of playback devices. It
| completely ignores why content creators, the people who actually
| make stuff, might want to use DRM. Yes sometimes these are the
| same entities as the content distributors. But not always.
|
| 2) it ascribes intent(purpose) to actors without examining what
| those actors say about their intent. The closest it gets is
| criticising the arguments of fellow opponents of DRM. This isn't
| even strawmanning. If you want to understand the purpose behind
| your opponent's acts its generally a good idea to look at the
| arguments of said opponents rather than the arguments of your
| allies.
|
| Ignoring 2, let's look at why content creators might want to use
| DRM, knowing that it can eventually be circumvented. If you're a
| content creator then delaying pirates by just a week or two can
| have a massive effect on your revenue. For example on steam
| roughly 1/4 to 1/2 of a games revenue for the first year will be
| earned in the first week[1].
|
| The movie business and book publishing is similarly skewed to
| opening weekends. While sleeper hits and cult classics do exist
| they are the exception, not the rule.
|
| So from a content creator's (mine) point of view, the purpose of
| DRM is to delay pirates long enough to earn that crucial opening
| weekend or weeks revenue, and this continue eating. Creators know
| that pirates will likely crack the DRM at some point, and its not
| unusual to remove it after a time, since by that point it no
| longer matters.
|
| I frankly don't care a jot about some imagined power struggle
| between distributors and manufacturers. What I care about is
| being able to make a living.
|
| I know there will always be parasites who want everything for
| free despite being able to pay, and people who genuinely can't
| afford to pay for content (fair enough, but do you actually need
| a copy of generic superhero movie pt. XII to live a fulfilling
| life. No), and I accept that. But I don't have to make life easy
| for them.
|
| [1]https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/steam-the-state-of-
| long...
| Beldin wrote:
| Your argument (the purpose of DRM is to delay pirates long
| enough to earn that crucial opening weekend or weeks revenue)
| is based on a few assumptions. A big one is that unlicensed
| downloading of creative works will meaningfully affect opening
| weekend revenue.
|
| I could go along with that argument for movies that have been
| available for weeks on download sites. But I don't see how DRM
| would prevent a film from leaking way before its release date.
| If that happens, I'd venture you have a different problem.
|
| For creative works with a longer "main revenue" window that are
| consumed on a computer (i.e. games), I can go along with this
| reasoning for top-priced titles. For games that are $15 on
| steam, dunno. Doesn't seem worth the effort to deprive the
| creator of some revenue, just to save 15 bucks. But what do I
| know, I don't make & sell games.
|
| E-books seem different yet again - but again, I don't write and
| sell ebooks. Except for a handful of well-known titles or
| titles receiving universal praise and prize considerations, I'd
| guess you'd be lucky to be noticed in the book market. I have
| no clue whether more popularity will drive sales more than
| downloads will cut into sales.
| nathias wrote:
| DRM is a way to harvest the userbase for ekstra profit.
| [deleted]
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Why the conspiracy theory? It works very well to stop piracy
| (since it's a hassle to have to pick a bottorrent program,
| install it, deal with it's annoying popups and ads (because
| you're a normal user and chose a popular bittorrent client),
| avoid the popups on the pirate bay, know what a magnet link it,
| find a player for .mkv files.
|
| It's easier to pay $15 to buy the show on Amazon.
|
| Anyone who disagrees hasn't tried to help their friends pirate
| things, or shut their eyes to the reality.
| dvdkon wrote:
| I'd say it's much harder for kids to pay any amount of money
| online than to spend lots of time figuring out a workaround.
| And when they learn to pirate as a kid, they'll carry that
| knowledge into their adult life.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > It's easier to pay $15 to buy the show on Amazon.
|
| My local currency is currently exchanged for USD at a factor of
| nearly 6 to 1, making that $15 nearly 10% of minimum wage where
| I live. And that's before taxes.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| There are all-in-one solutions like Popcorn Time that do
| everything for you automatically and simply provide a Netflix
| like browsing experience.
| jorams wrote:
| Nothing you mention has anything to do with DRM. I wish I could
| just pay $15 to get high quality DRM-free files for a season of
| a TV show, but the only thing on offer is a streaming copy full
| of DRM (which I can't play at full quality), or a physical copy
| full of DRM (which I can't play without extra hardware).
| dartharva wrote:
| It's always weird how people keep insisting pirating stuff is
| hard and only for "techies", when all it takes is to go to a
| trusted website and hit the play or download button. You can
| literally get pirate streaming sites in google results by
| searching "watch <movie name> online", often in reasonable
| video quality.
|
| I wonder what kind of hoops you have gone through in helping
| your friends with something as simple as this to have such an
| opinion.
| 10000truths wrote:
| Trusted websites are hard to find, though. Any site that gets
| sufficiently popular (e.g. Megaupload) gets shut down or
| taken off search results via DMCA, and anything you do find
| is usually some extremely sketchy site which (if it does
| actually have the content you want) spams you with popup ads
| for gambling/cam sites and whatnot every time you click
| anywhere.
|
| That said, downloading Bittorrent + a VPN, browsing the
| Pirate Bay, and clicking a magnet link isn't some Herculean
| effort, either. If you can figure out how to download
| software on a computer, it's not hard to figure out how to
| pirate it, too.
| DeWilde wrote:
| Not really, the issue with pirated content isn't getting the
| content from the DRM protected sources, it is distributing it.
|
| What prevents distribution is taking down the sites that host
| content, leaving old-school torrenting as the most viable
| option, which is a hassle to most people.
| danuker wrote:
| > It's easier to pay $15 to buy the show on Amazon.
|
| Depends on the value of your time. If you get paid less in the
| amount it takes you to learn all that (like living in a 3rd
| world country), then it's not worth the $15.
| tdsamardzhiev wrote:
| The amount of time it takes to learn all that is like 15
| minutes. And it's one-time investment.
| spankalee wrote:
| This is a post about NFTs right?
|
| NFTs are DRM 2.0, but without any current leverage against the
| "players". If there ever is such leverage (which in the article
| should be copyright as much as DRM), then it will be the players
| that enforce DRM, not the blockchain. Just like copyright doesn't
| enforce itself.
| kebos wrote:
| DRM is a requirement of the insurance providers who insure
| distributors and pay out if the distributor leads to the content
| being leaked.
|
| In reality the DRM technology isn't that important its more akin
| to the questionnaire you get for car insurance that says do you
| have a thatcham alarm.
|
| Too much analysis looks at this from technical angle when it's
| really an insurers tool to lower their risk (only to lower it!).
|
| It's not a big deal when a device/content is compromised merely a
| policy pays out in the background to the provider to the effect
| of % lost revenue. All normal insurance ruled apply, payout
| decided by expert witness, higher premiums for less secure
| devices etc.
| zucker42 wrote:
| > DRM is a requirement of the insurance providers who insure
| distributors and pay out if the distributor leads to the
| content being leaked.
|
| Do you have any evidence of such insurance policies existing?
| I've never heard of them before. It seems strange considering
| that most pieces of content are leaked fairly quickly.
| kebos wrote:
| The contracts and indemnity policies drawn up against the
| contract aren't public things so there is no example I can
| show.
|
| The leaking of content doesn't matter that much unless it
| really affects revenues in the scale of the revenues.
|
| It's ironic really. The absolute prevention of leaking
| content isn't expected. DRM is more like making sure the
| front door isn't wide open.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| But _why_ does insurance require it?
| shmerl wrote:
| Indeed it's not. Its purpose is control and extending copyright
| law way beyond its indented use by making breaking DRM itself
| illegal and then slapping DRM on anything that requires that
| control.
| fallingknife wrote:
| I don't get how the DRM prevents a DVD player manufacturer from
| making a player that skips the "unskippable" ads. How does the
| content provider enforce that legally?
| jessaustin wrote:
| ISTM Hixie's own blog [0] would be a better link than a wayback
| reference to a G-funct service.
|
| [0] http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1363672582&count=1
| netcan wrote:
| >> The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage
| against creators of playback devices.
|
| This is a good spot to place the pin.
|
| The "theological" view is that (1) copyright is a moral right.
| (2) The Law just protects right against wrong, and(3) economic
| side effects of laws are incidental.
|
| Real life is a lot less naive, so to speak. The commercial
| intellectual property concerns at stake are are record labels,
| apps, stores/distributors, large music & film portfolios and
| such. These exist, don't exist, have huge potential or not
| depending largely on the IP/DRM legislation and enforcement
| environment.
|
| DRM is, IMO, an industrial policy. It gives shape and dimension
| to the music & film industry. Negotiating the leverage party type
| X has over Y is always a key feature of such policies.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| My take: "The purpose of DRM is to give content providers
| leverage against creators of playback devices and their own
| consumers."
|
| How have I regretted purchasing Blu-Rays in the past. They
| require an update to the drive firmware, they require their own
| GPU driver version, they require an update to the player
| software, and they try to sneak spyware onto my PC anyway. It
| is almost impossible to legally watch an authentic blu-ray on a
| Windows PC.
|
| Similarly, how have I regretted allowing my TV to connect to
| the internet. The first thing that happened was that it started
| shoving ads into my face. So I did a factory reset and
| disconnected it. Now, Netflix and Prime TV are unusable. Plus
| the YouTube app never managed to play back 4K videos on a 4K TV
| without crashing.
|
| I don't quite know why they hate me so much, but whenever I try
| to be nice to movie companies and purchase their stuff, they
| treat me like shit. And DRM is their legal whip to fuck me
| over. Blu-Ray? doesn't work. DRM. Offline iTunes? doesn't work
| in 4K. DRM. Prime TV? mandatory internet for DRM. Then ads.
| Netflix? mandatory internet for DRM. Then ads.
|
| On the other hand, an mkv file on a USB stick "just works", has
| exceptional audio and video quality, doesn't buffer, and I can
| skip all the ads.
| jevoten wrote:
| > I don't quite know why they hate me so much, but whenever I
| try to be nice to movie companies and purchase their stuff,
| they treat me like shit.
|
| It's called "paying the Danegeld".
| gambiting wrote:
| I mean, it might not be legal where you live(definitely not
| illegal here) but MakeMKV takes about 20 minutes per disc and
| you can just watch the movie in VLC, works 100% of the time.
| Why bother with any special players.
| mysterydip wrote:
| My personal favorite example right now, having three smaller
| children, is amazon's "expiration" of videos installed on
| their kindles, that we don't find out about until we're on a
| trip somewhere. How do I explain to a kid that they can't
| watch their favorite movie that worked fine last time, or
| that they can't download any more episodes of their favorite
| show because someone decided they could only have 20 videos
| regardless of storage capacity?
| krylon wrote:
| It has been like that for a long time. The non-skippable
| intro screen warning viewers of the evils of unlicensed
| copying was only ever seen by people _not_ watching an
| unlicensed copy.
|
| FWIW, I think movies need to take the same route music did.
| Ever since I found out I could just buy DRM-free high-quality
| audio at a reasonable price, I have happily paid for the
| music I like, because it was so very convenient. If it was as
| convenient to legally buy copies of movies / TV shows, I'd be
| happy to spend some money for that.
| netcan wrote:
| Netflix & Spotify are currently worth $275bn & $45bn. I
| think it's quite unlikely that such results would be
| achieved with a pay-x-get-y store model.
|
| Even Disney & Universal, themselves enormously valuable
| companies, are greedily eying the platform model. It has
| everything they want. Recurring revenues. Content pushing
| abilities, which is usually the most strategically
| important asset. Platform monopoly potential, where most
| artists/studios take your take-it-or-leave-it terms.
|
| They don't hate you. They just do whatever is most valuable
| to them. They don't care about you. They may or may not
| value your custom, but that's about it.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| You're severely discounting the value Netflix and Spotify
| provide in discovery and ease of access.
|
| I vastly prefer those services because I don't have much
| interest in managing my own library.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >You're severely discounting the value Netflix ...
| provide in discovery and ease of access.
|
| What the what? Discover on Netflix? If you mean accepting
| what they think you want to watch based on their curated
| lists of what they want you to watch shoved into your
| face in their carousels of boredom, then I'm going to
| have to disagree with you.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| You don't have to like Netflix, but as far as the UI
| goes, where are you finding better content discovery for
| shows and movies?
| dylan604 wrote:
| They all suck. Look at each platform's verion of
| "Trending Now". It's just a rehash of titles in the other
| categories prominently displayed in "Just Added" or other
| some such listing of 10 to at most 20 titles. Of course
| those are trending because discovery of titles suck and
| people just give up and choose something that's right in
| front of them.
|
| I want to "discover" by browsing not the most current
| titles available in this current licensing window. I want
| to be able to browse from the evergreen catalog. I want
| to see the things that don't have a high dollar marketing
| campaign guaranteeing prominent placement. Maybe these
| platforms don't have a large inventory of evergreen
| content??? There are times I want to find some title that
| is older. The content that wasn't along the outer walls
| of Blockbuster.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| I would agree with you that that all suck, and the
| quality of Netflix has certainly gone downhill.
|
| But you pretty much answered your own question. The
| platforms don't have giant catalogs of evergreen & niche
| content, because that is extremely expensive to license.
| That's not really a discovery problem, though.
|
| The trade off is of course, the old buying/renting model.
| But that's oriented much more towards the enthusiast
| consumer, which I am not and it would seem you are.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The evergreen titles are usually the back catalog of the
| various studios. However, since all of the various
| studios seem to be creating their own streaming service,
| I can see how Netflix might be short on that content.
|
| However, finding these titles on the various studio
| services is also not as easy to discover. Mainly because
| these nascent services know they have to get their A-list
| content out first to attract users. The process of
| bringing the back catalog stuff onto these new services
| will take time. In the meantime, we're just stuck being
| force fed what the studios want us to see.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| Yeah it's a content ownership and licensing problem more
| than anything else.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Netflix "discovery" often feels no better than the ads
| before the DVD menu. Their own productions featured
| prominently even if they are absolute garbage, the rest
| is just a vague list of what's popular.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| I think the parent meant that he favors convenience over
| tinkering.
|
| Download Netflix app on pretty much any device,
| subscription is affordable, scroll and click to play. New
| content gets added each week or whatever which is more
| than one can consume.
|
| it's a bit like cooking vs going to a restaurant. how can
| someone with a sense of real taste and care for
| health/nutrition understand the millions of people who
| regularly hit fast food chains. Convenience. It simply
| has to be 1/ affordable 2/ saving time, and bingo.
|
| of course learning how to cook, going shoping to 7
| different local suppliers, having a large range of
| stocked spices and other condiments, spend 1h and half
| putting things together and appreciate a great healthy
| meal is a better approach to eating, but not everyone
| accept the burden, some don't even understand the actual
| pro/cons of each option.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| I like this metaphor, but it breaks down in one aspect:
| the notion that it's akin to eating junk vs healthy.
|
| At the end of the day I can hunt around and curate the
| perfect library of movies and shows, but I can also find
| plenty of good content on streaming platforms. It's not
| like I'm eating empty calories at the end of the day.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'd go out on a limb and say if you're watching reality
| TV shows like Housewives, Kardashians, Bachelor/ette,
| etc, then you are very much eating empty calories. But
| it's your body, and you can do with it whatever you like.
| Just be honest about what you are consuming.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| Huh? How was that the implication?
|
| Netflix has reality tv, but that doesn't mean you're
| watching reality tv on Netflix by default.
| ipaddr wrote:
| 275 billion? Seems overvalued as we enter a new cycle of
| more services going online.
| outside1234 wrote:
| You are probably right, but remember that Netflix is
| essentially a worldwide leader in producing and
| distributing movies - something we really haven't seen
| before.
| b3morales wrote:
| Netflix and Spotify don't model their service as a
| purchase, though. Netflix in particular is very clearly
| still shaped like a rental with their DVD service. I
| think of them as more convenient radio and TV: I can
| choose the thing I want, but I don't expect that it's
| portable.
|
| This is sharply contrasted with the so-called "purchase"
| model of Amazon or iTunes video, and even more with the
| way physical media works these days (comment above about
| Blu-ray).
| rhino369 wrote:
| True, but I think the parents point was that "buying"
| media was essentially dying anyway. Disney will still
| sell you a BluRay of Frozen if you want it, but they
| really want to sell you 65 dollars a year Disney+.
| stilisstuk wrote:
| Where do you buy audio? I don't use apple (itunes) and only
| some stuff is on bandcamp...
| krylon wrote:
| Mostly on Amazon. When possible on bandcamp.
| l72 wrote:
| Primarily bandcamp, since I can get flac and support
| artists directly. But I also use 7-digital for more
| mainstream releases (they also offer flac and some
| releases as Hi-Res 24-bit flac if that is your thing)
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Not sure if this is what you want, but I occasionally "buy"
| a TV show from Google Play. There's no forced ads.
|
| I mostly do it because it's cheaper than a cable
| subscription, and the player is easier to use than Kodi.
| dahart wrote:
| > DRM is, IMO, and industrial policy [...] Negotiating the
| leverage party type X has over Y is always a key feature of
| such policies.
|
| I like this take from a high level because it's true. But, DRM
| is also an industrial technical attempt to enforce copyrights,
| not primarily against an industrial party, but primarily
| against consumers. Copyright law itself is a 'rights
| management' system, it just isn't targeted at digital assets,
| and the truth is that copyright law doesn't come with built-in
| or automatic enforcement, and a large number of consumers and
| businesses are perfectly content to ignore the law and
| consume/copy/distribute without permission or payment.
|
| Let's momentarily ignore the fact that a: many DRM
| implementations overstep copyright and prevent some kinds of
| consumption that are legal under copyright law, and b: many DRM
| implementations are technically bad and make some kinds of
| legal and legitimate consumption difficult, annoying or
| inconvenient.
|
| It doesn't seem like the author's claim is correct or justified
| that DRM gives content creators leverage over playback device
| manufacturers. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it seems like
| the claim is backwards and inside-out.
|
| DRM is a symptom of the existing leverage, it isn't the cause.
| DVD player makers reluctantly put DRM in because they've been
| asked/forced to, because the MPAA and licensing groups already
| have leverage, not because DRM itself is bestowing more
| leverage. The very control and leverage that content makers
| want over playback manufacturers is the ability to force them
| to implement DRM!
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| >> The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage
| against creators of playback devices.
|
| I think it's noteworthy that game consoles do this in the
| opposite direction: give creators of playback devices leverage
| over content providers. This was basically why console DRM
| evolved in the first place (in the early forms of the 10NES
| lockout chip and the Atari 7800 signature scheme). Accordingly,
| console DRM schemes are typically stronger against unauthorized
| publishing of novel works than they are against unauthorized
| copying of already-published works (the latter being encrypted
| and signed in the expected way, thus only requiring subversion
| of a weaker "authentic disc" check). Apart from norms differing
| by industry, I would guess that the key to the directionality
| is which side thinks they can control access to a greater
| number of customers.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Games have (and more generally, all software has) a unique
| weakness that doesn't apply to other forms of media: they are
| entirely at the mercy of their playback technologies to
| exist.
|
| So, just as an example... let's talk about the last major
| physical media format war: HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. The thing that
| killed HD-DVD was that Blu-Ray had better DRM. Switching
| between the two formats was as simple as copying a file from
| one encoder to another; so the movie studios picked the one
| that gave them the most control.
|
| Switching between game consoles is like telling the director
| of a movie to change from shooting in 16:9 to 21:9. It's
| possible, but you're going to be spending a lot of extra time
| and effort to switch aspect ratios. Now, granted, people have
| gotten really good at porting games to new systems, but it
| still requires time and effort to do, especially when it
| comes to testing and certification.
|
| A game developer porting a game to a system is, ultimately, a
| vote of confidence that the system will have a viable
| commercial software market 1-2 years down the line.
| Developers are at the mercy of console manufacturers, and
| thus they're very conservative with what platforms to develop
| on. So companies trying to enter the console business
| basically need to do half a decade's worth of business
| development and funding just to get a foot in the door. Which
| makes the few platforms that _are_ successful that much more
| powerful.
|
| Another interesting quirk of the games industry is that
| consoles are often manufactured by companies that _also_ fund
| or develop games, and those companies specifically withhold
| their games from other platforms to make their own consoles
| better. There 's no need for Nintendo to demand that they pay
| themselves a 30% platform royalty to publish games on their
| own platform; and they aren't going to _start_ paying Sony
| 30% so that people can buy Mario on PlayStation.
|
| Very, very early on in the history of American cinema, the US
| government made an antitrust case against movie studios that
| more or less banned them from owning the theaters that
| displayed their content. Since then, it's been the case that
| production and distribution were two separate specialties,
| with copyright law existing to ensure the latter can't screw
| over the former. Hence where we get "DRM exists to control
| player manufacturers". Games came along much later and their
| business models more or less never attracted antitrust
| scrutiny[0] until very recently when Epic decided to make a
| federal lawsuit out of it.
|
| My gut feeling is that it doesn't actually make a whole lot
| of business sense as a publisher or developer to outsource
| distribution to a third party. That's why you've seen Netflix
| go from "everything streaming instantly for cheap" to
| original productions; and why every other publisher made
| their own streaming platform to cut out the Netflix
| middleman. The only remaining link in the chain from
| publishers to you are device manufacturers: Apple, Google,
| Samsung, Roku, etc. This business looks a lot more like game
| consoles than player manufacturing, which shifts the balance
| of market power to the companies making the players.
|
| [0] Yes, the FTC sued Nintendo but that was more about the
| price of games and consoles, not the software lockout that
| prohibited you from otherwise lawfully making and selling
| your own Nintendo cartridges.
| criddell wrote:
| I think this is true in ebooks and ereaders as well. There's
| a whole generation of readers that have bought a lot of
| ebooks from a single vendor. It has the effect of locking
| them to that vendor or possibly losing their collection.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> (3) economic side effects of laws are incidental.
|
| Not with intellectual property. This isn't ten-commandments
| stuff, protections against evil. Intellectual property law is
| an openly commercial law meant to increase the profitability of
| innovations.
|
| I remember an article from way back about what the Bible would
| think of copyright "piracy". It is such modern set of laws that
| anyone mentioned in the bible would probably stare in
| bewilderment at the concept. It would be like asking about the
| morality of air traffic control regulations.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| I agree that the purpose of copyright is not moral rights,
| even in theory. But I disagree that the theoretical purpose
| is profit (i.e. economic benefit to the creator).
|
| The idea (again, this is just in theory) is economic benefit
| to society overall. The idea is that if there's no copyright
| then creators would have no economic incentive to create
| anything, so they wouldn't bother. Profit to copyright owners
| is just a mechanism to incentivise them to create benefit to
| society.
|
| Actually, that's the theoretical reason for all profit, not
| just for copyright.
|
| A consequence of this is that there shouldn't be any increase
| to copyright term that only increases profits but doesn't
| increase benefit to society. But obviously political
| lobbyists don't follow that theory.
| coldpie wrote:
| > The idea is that if there's no copyright then creators
| would have no economic incentive to create anything, so
| they wouldn't bother.
|
| And yet, we've had creative works from all of human
| history, despite copyright being barely a hundred or two
| years old, and our modern effectively-infinite conception
| of copyright is only now reaching 50 years old. This theory
| doesn't hold up to even a couple seconds of scrutiny.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Not only historically, but today too. If there is one
| thing in the world that requires no external incentive to
| motivate, it's art and creative work. The entire internet
| is stuffed full of people making and posting creative
| work, 99% of the time with no expectation of economic
| benefit. It would all exist anyway, without copyright
| "nudging it along". Every garage band in existence would
| also exist without copyright. Every performer on the
| street corner would still perform without copyright.
| Every fanfic site would still have heaps of content
| without copyright. This idea that "oh, nobody would ever
| make art if we didn't give them a near-infinite monopoly
| on distribution rights" is totally absurd.
|
| The only "art creation" scenario copyright seems to
| promote is "Corporation hires army of workers to make
| $100M 17th Spider-Man Sequel". No, those specific kinds
| of work probably would not exist without government-
| mandated monopoly, but to say it promotes art in general
| is kind of exaggerating.
| DarylZero wrote:
| > Every garage band in existence would also exist without
| copyright
|
| I think you are under-estimating the extent to which
| these people are seeking to "make it" and become
| profitable later.
|
| There are also lots of SV start-ups that never make any
| money, yet it doesn't prove that they would still exist
| if NONE of them EVER made any money.
| coldpie wrote:
| I don't believe the assertion that no one would make
| money with creative works without copyright.
| DarylZero wrote:
| I didn't assert that.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Obviously, we don't need copyright to have any creative
| works. Some people will do it for free. But the sale of
| copies is a huge incentive. And the result is much more
| creative work now than ever before--at least some types.
|
| Pre-copyright, content was either commissioned by patrons
| or done by bored independently rich people. Artists
| didn't have some burning desire to paint rich ladies and
| religious works, that's just what was demanded.
|
| We could go back to that system. But it won't be a
| prolific as our current system. If copyright ended for
| TV/movies, we'd probably get some BBC/PBS content, some
| indie movies, but we'd probably just have a bunch of
| reality TV with an insane amount of product placement.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| I agree that, without copyright, lots of creative works
| would (and did!) still get created. But there are
| certainly some creative works that only would get created
| if copyright law exists. Think of a Pixar-level animated
| movie or Hollywood-style live action movie, that involve
| huge teams of people working full time for extended
| periods.
|
| [Edit: just be clear, people working on side projects on
| their own and huge multimillion dollar projects are two
| extremes of a large spectrum. I chose the opposite
| extreme to make a point but almost everything in the
| middle also only exists because of copyright.]
|
| Maybe some would still exist to some level through
| alternative mechanisms e.g. government or charitable
| funding, or a group effort akin to open source. But I
| think it's clear that you're talking orders of magnitude
| less output.
|
| Don't forget copyright also applies to software. It's
| even more clear that open-source movements work for
| software! But it's still the case that without copyright
| there would be some software that wouldn't get written.
| Certainly, speaking personally, my software economic
| output would be lower if it weren't my full time job!
| _0ffh wrote:
| Yes, though I prefer an alternative "theological" view: (1)
| Property rights exist to peacefully resolve conflicts over
| naturally scarce resources (2) Information resources are not
| naturally scarce
| pmontra wrote:
| I try to be the Devil's advocate.
|
| The scarse resource is not that song or that movie. It's the
| time of the people that created that song and that movie.
| That's is part of the cost of production.
|
| This is similar to there are millions of houses but only a
| few in the most scenic places. Want one of them, pay more. It
| could be the same for the most popular songs and movies. The
| time of their creators is more valuable than mine. When
| writing software probably the other way around.
|
| Of course they don't sell songs and movies like that and
| creators sometimes only get peanuts. I'm not a very good
| Devil's advocate.
| Gormo wrote:
| > The scarse resource is not that song or that movie. It's
| the time of the people that created that song and that
| movie. That's is part of the cost of production.
|
| That's not really valid, though. Time is not the thing
| being exchanged -- it's impossible to do that -- so isn't a
| resource, scarce or otherwise, in the sense we mean. On top
| of that, the previous commenter made an error -- property
| rights aren't a solution to disputes over scarce resources,
| they're a solution to disputes over _rival_ resources,
| regardless of how scarce they are. Since time is not
| transferable, it 's not rival.
|
| More to your point, though, the consumption of time engaged
| in a productive activity is a capital expenditure, with the
| risk borne by those expending it, as with any other capital
| expenditure -- your investment lets you bring a product to
| market, but no one is obligated to do business with you,
| and whether people compensate you enough to generate a
| sufficient return is up to _them_.
| mycall wrote:
| Time can in fact be exchanged. For example, jail -- some
| action is traded for a timeout from society. Also,
| learning is a time-based process to replace entropy with
| reason, increasing resources from scarcity.
| Zxian wrote:
| Time is a consumable. It is not infinite, and it is
| unique to each individual.
|
| We do not "trade" time in jail between society and an
| individual. We deny certain freedoms for a period of
| time. There is no economic equivalent when it comes to
| time.
|
| Learning is a process that consumes time now for improved
| capability or efficiency in the future.
| _0ffh wrote:
| Oops, I indeed got that important detail wrong! Thanks
| for expanding my dictionary!
| contravariant wrote:
| Yeah reality is weird. I often find myself thinking
| copyright and DRM should obviously be advantageous to the
| authors only to subsequently recall that before the
| printing press predictably made copyright a thing there was
| a much greater demand for new manuscripts as they would
| quickly lose their value once in circulation [1].
|
| [1]: https://virginica.substack.com/p/the-printing-press-
| nfts-and... (it also talks about NFTs but that part is not
| relevant for this discussion)
| badrabbit wrote:
| Excuse me but what sort of theology mentions copyrights or how
| did you induce that? Quite the contrary, sharing what you have
| with others is an obligation in most belief systems, an
| argument can even be made that Copyrights infringe on the
| obligation one has to share posessions and content.
| Uehreka wrote:
| So tonight I watched a 1080p pirated copy of Spiderman: Far From
| Home. And I gotta say, it was kinda crap. The sound would
| randomly cut out, and the compression was absolute ass (it was
| the perfect artifact to show people when explaining "not all
| 1080p's are created equal", especially when they're fighting the
| water elemental)
|
| I really do think that DRM has won folks. We have seen the 4K HDR
| future, and what we find on torrent sites is the same aXXo
| "encoded to be burned to a CD-R" bullshit I used to download as a
| college student. We aren't getting 4K, we're not even really
| getting 1080p. Whatever the DRM people are doing, they have
| succeeded in creating a gulf in quality between what you get on a
| streaming service, and what you get via torrents.
| 14 wrote:
| Maybe for a high visual movie like spiderman but there are many
| movies that are fine watching in a lower quality. Also it just
| depends on the torrent that is available. I have seen screeners
| that were of high quality, mind you a couple scenes were
| missing the special effects but hardly took away from the video
| imo.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| There are certainly groups who sacrifice quality to minimize
| file size. Sounds like you downloaded a file from one of those.
| There are people out there who care so much about quality they
| will splice different sources together because some specific
| section is better in some obscure release for some reason. You
| also have blu-ray remuxes if you want the exact original.
|
| Netflix manages to generate compression artifacts in 90% black
| frames, to say nothing of highly dynamic footage. Satellite TV
| is even worse, it actually hurts to watch. Makes me feel like
| an idiot for actually paying for this.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Strange I have the exact opposite experience. All of the
| content I get from TPB and other sites is often much higher
| quality than what I seem to get when I go "legit" on Netflix
| and such. I rarely use Netflix now because I really enjoy
| pressing the right arrow to skip past parts of content I don't
| find interesting (b-roll, fades, filler content, etc.) and
| Netflix does a pretty poor job of this whereas VLC just works.
| NavinF wrote:
| I've had the opposite experience: If you have a decent
| connection (1gbps), you can torrent the 50GB Blu-ray in 7
| minutes instead of watching the 0.5GB stream on Netflix. The
| difference in bitrate/quality is massive during fast action
| sequences where the Netflix version splits into 100 puzzle
| pieces made of DCT blocks that don't quite fit together.
|
| Oh and Netflix is one of the better sites when it comes to
| bitrate. Other streams are full of artifacts even when the
| camera is panning over a static scene.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Gigabit is not a decent connection, it's an excellent
| connection. Many people can't afford or don't even have
| access to that speed.
| [deleted]
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| You can get 4K HDR blurary rips on torrent. I also just checked
| for the expanse, and there is a 4K HDR version (presumably
| ripped from a streaming service) on the torrent site I'm
| frequenting. I don't think the claimed gap in quality exists.
|
| You just need to know where to look.
| dartharva wrote:
| What!? You have obviously nicked a trash release from somewhere
| shady; there definitely exist pirate releases that are arguably
| better in quality than any modern streaming service. Even after
| having accounts in both PrimeVideo and Netflix I often prefer
| to download and watch from PSArips for the sheer quality (4k
| with 10bit audio).
| jacksonkmarley wrote:
| Sometimes I think it's the copyright holding companies spamming
| downloaders with these crappy versions to gaslight them into
| thinking the official versions are always better.
| norman784 wrote:
| If you are linux user you cannot consume legal content (that
| you paid for) in high quality, even when you are paying for it,
| iirc Prime gives you 720p and Netflix 1080p.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Also in the other cases where it's about VLC, then in _any_
| quality, really, unless you somehow managed to pay a license
| to be able to do it :
|
| https://wiki.videolan.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions/#Legal_.
| ..
|
| > What about personal/commercial usage?
|
| > Some of the codecs distributed with VLC are patented and
| require you to pay royalties to their licensors. These are
| mostly the MPEG style codecs.
|
| > With many products the producer pays the license body (in
| this case MPEG LA) so the user (commercial or personal) does
| not have to take care of this. VLC (and ffmpeg and libmpeg2 -
| which it uses in most of these cases) cannot do this because
| they are Free and Open Source implementations of these
| codecs. The software is not sold, and therefore the end-user
| becomes responsible for complying with the licensing and
| royalty requirements. You will need to contact the licensor
| on how to comply with these licenses.
|
| > This goes for playing a DVD with VLC for your personal
| enjoyment ($2.50 one time payment to MPEG LA) as well as for
| using VLC for streaming a live event in MPEG-4 over the
| Internet.
|
| And the main reason that they haven't been bothered about
| making software that allows this :
|
| https://www.videolan.org/legal.html
|
| > Patents and codec licenses
|
| > Neither French law nor European conventions recognize
| software as patentable
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| And legitimate Disney DVDs are unplayable without installing
| all sorts of extra packages.
|
| So much friction added to something that I own. Certainly was
| the last legitimate purchase I will make of any Disney
| content.
| kbart wrote:
| There are usually several copies of a varied quality to choose
| from based on ones needs on a decent tracker. Of course you
| can't expect stellar quality 2h movie fit into <1 GB, look for
| reasonable file sizes 5+ GB) to avoid ultracompressed versions
| with garbage sound. Making conclusions on a single sample is
| not very wise.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Movies that are theater-only often have very poor copies
| upfront. Camcorder-in-the-theater sort of poor. The site I use
| tells folks when it is in cam, and I wait until there are HD
| versions.
|
| I suggest the same if you want some quality. Streaming pirated
| stuff takes patience - if you really want to watch things
| early, with good quality, I'd suggest theaters if those are
| available to you right now (COVID limits this).
| marcan_42 wrote:
| Meanwhile the anime fansub encoders are taking Blu-Rays
| upscaled with crappy linear scalers, using fancy deconvolution
| math to restore the original resolution material, and encoding
| the result. You get a smaller file, and if played on a player
| with decent upscaling (i.e. mpv, which is what everyone uses
| these days), _better_ quality than the original Blu-Ray. There
| 's also often other processing involved, like de-banding
| filters to remove banding caused by low bit depth processing in
| the original material, deinterlacing/inverse telecine, color
| correction, etc.
|
| It all depends on how much effort the people involved put into
| it.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| Even public trackers have 4K HDR / Dolby Vision / Dolby Atmos
| content, which is more than you get for example from Netflix
| (outside of their own catalog.)
| bobsmooth wrote:
| There's a 4K bluray rip of that movie on TPB. Granted it's 10GB
| but maybe you're just downloading crappy torrents.
| ch17z wrote:
| We?
| johnebgd wrote:
| DRM manages rights like jail manages freedom.
| alisonkisk wrote:
| bni wrote:
| DRM currently works very well to prevent copying of PC games
| during initial sales window. There is a long list of not cracked
| Denuvo games. Some have been on the list for years.
|
| I think it is interesting that this is the case now since 5+
| years ago games were cracked within days, always.
| cloogshicer wrote:
| I think part of this change is just that there is such a high
| number of new games coming out every day.
|
| Also, with sales going on all the time, there is much less
| incentive for many people to torrent. It's also more convenient
| to own the game on Steam due to automatic updates, mods, etc.
|
| As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem. Provide a
| better service and it'll go away. I think this is largely what
| has happened here. Same with streaming services like Netflix.
| gruez wrote:
| > I think part of this change is just that there is such a
| high number of new games coming out every day.
|
| The "high number of new games coming out every day" are
| overwhelmingly indie titles that don't use denuvo. It's not
| like crackers are being overwhelmed with hundreds of indie
| titles per year.
| cloogshicer wrote:
| That's a good counter point. Hadn't considered it. Thanks!
| bserge wrote:
| cute_boi wrote:
| Yea looks like DRM is way to make legit consumer life hard by not
| showing high quality video. But alas if they go to pirate site
| they can get 4k easily.
| otrahuevada wrote:
| The purpose of DRM is ultimately asserting the will of a couple
| corporate ghouls over your use of the thing they basically
| cheated you into renting.
|
| Which wouldn't even be a thing if intellectual property rights,
| which are at the core of the whole debate, were untransferable
| and only endured for the lifetime of the creator.
|
| If anyone were able to lobby those simple, clear changes into
| law, the effects of that would probably be Earth-altering.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Sorry to be a bummer, but I make my living creating copyright
| protected material. DRM protects me and my livelihood.
|
| Yes, I often cut deals with the people you refer to as
| "corporate ghouls". While I often lament the terms, they aren't
| horrible. In the end, I make enough money to avoid searching
| for a job with other corporations trading in material goods.
|
| I would feel differently about the system if it weren't
| performing relatively well for most people. You say these
| ghouls "cheated" you into "renting" things. I'm not disputing
| the various philosophical sophistries that people use to
| complain about artificial scarcity etc. I just know that this
| evening, I"ll be able to get a nice movie that cost millions of
| dollars to make and spend only a few dollars to watch it in my
| living room. That only works when piracy doesn't.
| otrahuevada wrote:
| Your use of scare quotes on plain self-evident terms kinda
| makes me think this is going to be entirely pointless, but
| here goes nothing.
|
| Do you understand that your being more or less content with
| the results of a deal does not have a bearing on how good, or
| decent, or moral, the system overarching that deal is?
|
| Tons of people seem more or less into Nestle products despite
| their long track record of profiting from slavery, do you
| believe that being the case makes agricultural slavery a good
| thing?
|
| On your last statement, how exactly do you think not paying
| for a thing you wouldn't pay for anyway prevents that thing
| from existing? Like, if I torrent "Superheroes in Body Gloves
| 27" instead of, you know, ignoring it, then a time travelling
| ghost will materialize in the set and kidnap the directors?
| Or how would that work
| dahart wrote:
| FWIW, it seems like the parent comment was just quoting
| you, not using scare quotes. I didn't find your use of the
| words particularly self-evident, it might be worth
| patiently explaining what you meant rather than attacking.
|
| Parent's valid and legitimate point is that if nobody pays
| for the content then it's not a viable business model and
| it won't get made in the first place. You can't pirate a
| movie that doesn't exist.
| otrahuevada wrote:
| At least according to their own accounting, movies lose
| otherwise hilarious amounts of money all the time and
| they seem to still exist somehow.
|
| "Piracy", which in reality is probably better called
| "online jaywalking" as it, too, is a made up faux-pas
| created so as to allow a couple soulless drones to make
| more money, hasn't to date represented an obstacle to
| content creation, they still happily churn products all
| the time, so I don't see any reason to think it will
| become an existential threat to the studio suits any time
| soon.
|
| And maybe it should. Which is kind of core to the whole
| debate; is it actually good to anyone in any way to have
| a business based around forbidding free access to easily
| duplicable cultural products? Should such a thing even be
| allowed to thrive?
| dahart wrote:
| Easily duplicable cultural products? You're suggesting
| that you should be able to take something someone else
| made because it's easy to do? It would be easy to steal
| your computer from you -- should that make it legal for
| me to do so? You think movies should become historic
| cultural relics with free access to all whenever they are
| popular? If your wish came true, how exactly would the
| movie's creation get funded in the first place? Movies
| often costs tens to hundreds of millions to produce, and
| they only take on that level of risk because of the
| financial return of people who pay to watch them. How do
| you think that would work if movies were free to
| everyone?
|
| Do you have a job? Do you work for a company that makes
| money? Would you be okay with the product you're working
| on being taken for free by people who insist they
| shouldn't have to pay for it?
|
| Your language feels really very hyperbolic to me. There
| are many real people with real jobs trying to make
| livings, even if the corporations they work for are
| greedy. DRM can indeed be shitty and it often oversteps
| copyright, but we can ignore DRM here because the
| argument you're actually making is one against respecting
| copyright law and against respecting artists.
|
| > is it actually good to anyone in any way to have a
| business based around forbidding free access to easily
| duplicable cultural products? Should such a thing even be
| allowed to thrive?
|
| Yes. The answer is yes, without question. This has been
| debated by scholars and lawmakers and artists and
| business people for hundreds of years, and we have a
| compendium of laws that protect the people who make
| content precisely because it does, in fact, do them some
| good.
|
| See Chesterton's Fence: you don't get to nuke the
| existing system until you actually understand why it's
| there and how it got there. If you believe it serves zero
| people but still manages to exist, that means that your
| belief is wrong and you need to do some research.
|
| The biggest problem with your argument is you're blindly
| focused on the execs and profits of only the very largest
| media conglomerates, and you're ignoring not only the
| tens of thousands of artists they employ, but you're also
| ignoring all smaller businesses that aren't making
| enormous profits and can't afford to give away their
| content for free.
|
| > movies lose otherwise hilarious amounts of money all
| the time and they seem to still exist somehow.
|
| The amount of money someone makes is not any of your
| business, and it does not justify stealing the things
| they make without their permission. Copyright law can and
| does apply even to works that don't cost money, and it
| also applies equally when someone's enjoying handsome
| profits. You are not legally invited to copy anything
| based on someone else's income.
|
| Studios sometimes do lose money on movies and they
| survive because they make multiple movies. Studios also
| sometimes report misleading sales figures. I've worked in
| films and games as an artist, and watched studios do
| "creative accounting". Reports of losses don't prove
| anything, and don't justify breaking copyright law.
| otrahuevada wrote:
| > Easily duplicable cultural products? You're suggesting
| that you should be able to take something someone else
| made because it's easy to do?
|
| No, I'm not. What's more, that's an easily disprovable
| lie: My duplicating of a file does not somehow delete the
| original. My downloading of this page hasn't done
| anything to your post.
|
| > Movies often costs tens to hundreds of millions to
| produce, and they only take on that level of risk because
| of the financial return of people who pay to watch them.
|
| Financial return that, according to themselves, is at
| best terrible? And that you, too, keep mentioning,
| despite loudly proclaiming they are of noone's interest?
|
| > Do you have a job? Do you work for a company that makes
| money? Would you be okay with the product you're working
| on being taken for free by people who insist they
| shouldn't have to pay for it?
|
| My job does not rely on handing copies of our product's
| binaries to people if they pinky promise they'll only use
| it in a way we approve of though. And if we, too rented
| garbled copies of it with time-limited access to the
| ungarbling machinery, we probably should disclose that
| beforehand so that prospective customers don't end up
| feeling like they've been defrauded.
|
| > you're also ignoring all smaller businesses that aren't
| making enormous profits but can't afford to give away
| their content for free
|
| I'm not asking anyone to give anything away for free. And
| in any case the fact that the gatekeeping-culture-
| industrial-complex also exploits other smaller creators
| could easily also be considered problematic in and by
| itself.
|
| > The amount of money someone makes is not any of your
| business
|
| Oh but it is, specifically when they make it into a
| battle cry to invade my privacy and impede my agency in a
| deeply dumb search of unapproved copies of whatever they
| feel like claiming to own.
| dahart wrote:
| The argument that you're not stealing something physical
| is an old, tired, immature, and naive narrative that
| seems willfully ignorant of the reality that copyright
| law is protecting the consumption of copies, it's about
| protecting the initial investment and the business model,
| not the cost of production of individual copies. You
| actually are hurting the artists by consuming a copy
| without their permission, because the transaction they've
| offered is to trade your viewing of the movie for a small
| amount of money. The word "stealing" is defined to
| include taking something without permission, and does not
| depend on whether they get deprived of the thing you
| take.
|
| You've made several snarky and strawman replies about
| money, but ignored the actual point I made; the fact that
| copyright laws do not depend or discriminate based on
| profits. This is a fact, not a debate. Your opinion about
| any given studio's claimed losses is completely
| irrelevant to the question of whether you should be
| allowed to break the law.
|
| > My job does not rely on handing copies of our product's
| binaries to people if they pinky promise they'll only use
| it in a way we approve of though.
|
| Yes it does. You're wrong. Does your product's use come
| with a EULA? Does your company have any security? Does
| your product get paid for? Are you putting your code in
| the public domain? If you write code, your code is
| covered by copyright law, and you have both legal and
| technical mechanisms in place to protect people from
| taking your code and your product for themselves without
| your company's permission. You are doing the same things
| as DRM, you're being hypocritical.
|
| > I'm not asking anyone to give anything away for free.
|
| Then I've gotten the wrong impression, please clarify
| what you mean. You've argued above that you (and
| everyone) should be able to watch movies for free because
| they're easy to duplicate and they are cultural assets.
| What are you asking for then?
| otrahuevada wrote:
| > The argument that you're not stealing something
| physical is an old, tired, immature, and naive narrative
|
| And yet here you are, claiming that "pirating" something
| is somehow bad.
|
| Look, I think our disagreement comes down to definitions.
| So, let's clarify some things.
|
| For me, "A thing" is an entity that is
| capable of being described as "being". For instance, your
| phone, a bottle, a trip, a word, love, inertia.
| "Good" is a desirable quality of "A thing" that by being
| attached to it adds to its value. "Bad" on
| the other hand is an undesirable quality of "A thing",
| which detracts from it. "Control" is
| the ability to do with a thing whatever I want,
| "Selling" "A thing" is relinquishing "Control" over it
| for money, "Buying" "A thing" is
| receiving "Control" of a thing in exchange of money
| "Renting" "A thing" on the other hand is relinquishing
| "some" control of that thing for some time in exchange of
| money. "Promising" something is agreeing
| to do that thing; doing the thing that was agreed upon is
| generally considered "Good". "Cheating" is
| "Promising" "A thing" and then doing a different one,
| which is "Bad" "Copying" "A thing" is
| creating "A thing" that is fundamentally interchangeable
| for "Another Thing"
|
| Given this definitions, it naturally arises that Cheating
| people into thinking they Bought Things when you only
| Rented those Things to them is Bad. Which is the entirety
| of my point.
|
| For you on the other hand all of those terms ostensibly
| appear to mean "whatever lets me sleep at night" and it
| seems that this gap is bothering you a lot.
|
| I also see you seem to be conflating your opinion on
| things with their legality and their moral qualities,
| which are three entirely disconnected things. It is legal
| in some countries to kill perceived deviants in a kind of
| ritual show. Would you call that good? Does that being
| "legal" make it any better?
| dahart wrote:
| Your definitions don't agree with the dictionary _at
| all_. It's relevant to this discussion and important that
| you can sell and buy services for which you may or may
| not have control. I really can't abide with crappy
| incorrect definitions you've made up on the spot that
| don't agree with the ways all other people use these
| words. Your list of definitions here also isn't helping
| clarify anything other than you're giving me the
| impression that you didn't read the actual transaction
| text before you paid for some online movies?
|
| Yes, I do agree that pirating something is somehow bad. I
| don't see the point you're trying to make by quoting me.
| You're going to have to state it rather than expect I can
| read your mind.
|
| I don't agree with your snarky summary of my position.
| What you've demonstrated here is that you 1) didn't
| listen to and/or didn't understand what I said but
| believe you do, 2) don't understand copyright law, why it
| exists and what shapes it, and 3) what the boundaries and
| distinctions are between copyright law and DRM.
|
| Instead of being vague, can you give some specific
| examples of movies you paid for where the language used
| in the actual transaction said you were purchasing a copy
| of the movie, but it ended up being a rental? I'm not
| aware of any streaming service that uses either of those
| words, but it seems like you might have expectations that
| are outside of what the thing being offered was. Please
| give an example of how you were cheated by linking to the
| product.
| otrahuevada wrote:
| Unfortunately, if we can't agree on what words mean, I
| can't justify continuing to waste time in this
| discussion.
|
| Cheerio!
| dahart wrote:
| We can agree on what words mean, as long as you don't
| make up your own definitions. I do agree it's a waste of
| time if you can't use something even remotely close to
| the agreed-upon definitions in the dictionary.
|
| Here are some definitions that seem more reasonable:
|
| https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sell
|
| https://www.dictionary.com/browse/buy
|
| (Note neither of these involve use of the word "control")
|
| Here is the text of US copyright law, I recommend reading
| it:
|
| https://www.copyright.gov/title17/
| qwytw wrote:
| DRM for software or games (which is what I assume you're
| talking about) is hardly comparable with DRM for movies/tv
| shows, they serve a very different purpose. It's basically
| impossible to prevent users from copying video files so it
| has basically no effect on piracy rates or rather it can only
| increase due to the horrible UX.
| dahart wrote:
| What do you mean by "cheated you into renting"? That sounds
| like you're suggesting you're being forced to spend money
| against your will without your knowledge or consent?
|
| I also don't understand your suggestion for fixing copyright
| law. What constitutes a 'creator' in the case of a company that
| makes something? (Same question for a band, or any group of
| multiple people.) How would you handle accidental death? What
| about a company acquisition? How do you define
| 'untransferable'? Are you saying it should be okay for a
| company creator to hold the copyright forever as long as the
| company is in business, but individual people can't give or
| sell copyrights? That would be a boon for Disney and very bad
| for individual artists. It doesn't seem like your suggestion is
| prepared to deal with the realities and complexities of
| business and life...
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