Yes, All DRM
eff.org
eff.org
Remember that there are two reasons DRM is bad. The first is that it prevents you from doing things permitted by copyright law (e.g., fair use). The second is that it has unrelated side effects to your computing freedom. The recent batch of DRM, like streaming from Spotify, is nowhere near as bad for your computing freedom as stuff like Sony's rootkit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk... . The first downside is true of all DRM; the second is true of only some.
Because it is not legal to just have a GitHub project explaining how to break Spotify's DRM, there's no incentive for Spotify to be as malicious as Sony. Their DRM only has to be good enough to convince the publishers that it works. If we say that all copyright protection is off, and DRM stands or falls entirely on its technical strength, we encourage an arms race. There will be non-sketchy websites offering reliable and well-engineered DRM removal tools, and the labels will point to them and insist that Spotify step up their game.
20 years exclusive rights. After that: 50 years commercial rights + dual license as CC-BY-NC-SA. That way content creators can earn money by licensing/selling their work for commercial use, and the public can use it non-commercially.
If the purpose of copyright is to incentivize new creation, applying changes to it retroactively only serves to hurt the public.
- Copyright exists to stimulate new content by allowing creators to distribute the fixed (and sometimes variable) costs of the IP.
- DRM exists to fill the gap where enforcement of the copyright is not very feasible, but can negatively affect users.
Maybe the solution is a better scalable copyright enforcement mechanism?
Copyright without enforcement is no right at all - on that we should be able to agree.
Thus, I believe it's a societal issue in trying to figure out an equitable balance (in this case - currently policing / take downs via DMCA, civil cases a la Beastie Boys curb stomping GoldiBlox). Now, has the scale been tilted in a lopsided way? Oh yeah, I'm no fan of Copyright becoming essentially a Corporate Legal Weapon.
But...and this is a big but...killing Copyright outright also stands to injure many smaller, more vulnerable creators. I've yet to see any remotely feasable avenue to remedy it outside of "Music and movies should just be, like, free, man" like the parent asserts.
I was thinking more along the lines of the specific problem that DRM is attempting to solve - why DRM exists - to see if there is any thoughts as the way to remove DRM completely but still solve the gap in copyright enforcement.
Copyright is currently life of the creator+70yrs, while patents are a mere 20yrs. So, it seems copyright laws are weaponized for a longer duration.
I'm talking about gaps in copyright enforcement that DRM is trying to fill.
I am saying this as a scientist. I think people should be able to share every paper/book/etc. I wrote. I refuse to think of people who share this knowledge (or some tunes) as thieves ---that's what corporations want you to believe. Scientists and artists already have other sources of income. In my view, laws tailored for publishers are hindering the progress and should be undone (see recent discussions on sci-hub, and also pirate party manifesto).
I am sure this goes against the beliefs of many people here: I am a scientist, and our job long precedes industrial revolution, rise of capitalism and corporations, and their byproducts such as copyrights (in its current form) and patents whereas majority of people are a part of Silicon Valley / computer industry (and art is probably older). But I'm quite certain that in its short history, copyright laws by and large worked for big corporations and not for the good of common people.
This structure was forced down through our throats, and of course it shaped today's working landscape. It doesn't mean it is fine.
Why should Netflix take money and provide a service and not pay the creators of the material they wish to make revenue from?
DRM is an inherently weak system because as long as you have root on your device, you can break it. Perhaps it will take some serious reverse engineering effort, but it's always going to be breakable, because in order for you to consume the content in the fist place, your device needs to decrypt it.
(Of course, that's the point the EFF is making here, that that unbreakable DRM requires compromising our ability to have root access to our own devices.)
So yeah, I agree with you. But given the assumption that DRM works (it doesn't), there's no reason why the DRM could not enforce public domain release protocol in the same way it enforces copyright requirements. Just as iTunes lets you "rent" a movie for a day, it could let you "rent" a copyrighted work until it enters public domain.
Another example: root cannot attach the debugger to binaries that have been signed with restrictive entitlements. lldb will refuse to debug `/usr/bin/git`, for example.
This has been the case for at least a year now.
[1] https://www.qualcomm.com/media/documents/files/snapdragon-st... (PDF)
The intent is to distribute the costs of the IP to consumers, in which circumventing the DRM defeats.
I'm not sure if that would be a good idea, but it's not obvious that it's not.
But you are also being obtuse. A DRM'd copy is not the same as a non DRM'd copy, even if the underlying work is the same. If they were, there would be no reason to make the distinction. Really you're claim to the contrary is very Sophistic. I don't believe for a second that you don't see the difference.
The main issue being brought up here is that copyright protection is bundled with a responsibility to relinquish control of the work at the end of the copy protection period. So Johnny_Brahms is saying that if rights holders aren't holding up their side of the deal, then they shouldn't benefit from copy protection. This puts the cost of DRM back on the rights holder, where to date, the cost has been largely externalized.
Under this scheme, rights holders still may opt for DRM, if they expect that DRM will protect the work better than copyright, but they will actually have to do a cost benefit analysis on the matter. Under the current scheme, rights holders have all of the optionality. That is, they take all of the upside, and leave the downside for the public. The aim of this scheme is to force rights holders to put some skin into the DRM game.[1] Which seems appropriate to me, since there are significant costs associated with DRM.
[1] That is, the public pays the costs of access, as well as the cost of loss of access once the DRM authentication chain can no longer be completed (usually because the rights holder loses interest in the work and so stops maintaining the authentication system). We also observe that a lot of weak DRM schemes exist. This is only because copyright exists as a safety net for a broken DRM system. There are actual legal benefits to slapping a trivially circumvented (widely known to be broken) DRM scheme onto a work. But the upside to doing so is very small, and the downside is widely distributed across all legitimate current and future users (plus would be users that are thwarted from legitimate use by the DRM) of the work. If you take away the copyright safety net, then that bit of moral hazard would likely immediately disappear since the costs of adding bad DRM would be jointly borne by the public and the rights holder, rather than just by the public.
[edit: gave the discussion tree root (Johnny_Brahms) credit for the proposal rather than the article, since it was described as a previously held position.
Yeah, yeah, can't use it in a library in 100 years, blah blah. Hasn't proved to be an issue.
You could argue that a work in the public domain with its DRM still attached provides an interesting historical perspective. Sometimes the DRM is more interesting than the content -- and could provide it's own lesson/warning to future generations.
Yes, you could argue that a work in the public domain with its DRM still attached provides an interesting historical perspective; it's a free country. Doesn't mean it's a good argument, though.
¹ http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/reports/orphan-works2015.pdf
The report somewhat misleadingly names anything they cannot digitize as "orphan works." These millions of items are largely books and photographs for which they lack a formal license -- it's a discussion relating to the Google book scanning lawsuit and Fair Use not DRM.
1. There's an issue of orphans works, as the report shows.
2. DRM makes it worse, by making it illegal to bypass the copy protection, which is necessary in order to preserve the work until its legal status can be resolved (even if it's just waiting for copyright to expire).
CDs/DVDs and other physical media in which copyright works are distributed have limited lifetimes, and many won't last the many decades it takes for their content to enter the public domain (it's now lifetime of author + 70 years!). If archival copies are legally prevented by the necessity of having to break DRM, you're essentially ensuring that those works will be lost.
https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/10/28/2015-272...
If we already know what lesson it would be, why wait?
In 1999 I reviewed the Waves (http://www.waves.com/) Native Gold audio plugin bundle on the old ProRec.com. This software was protected by PACE AP DRM software (https://paceap.com/).
The thing about Waves is that it's a staple in the audio world and had already become a staple by 1999. Everyone uses Waves plugs. So Waves had a fairly inelastic demand function, but a small overall market. Enter DRM.
The hateful anti-piracy software they used had some process that snooped around in memory, and if it found anything that it didn't like, it just warm-rebooted the computer.
You'd be recording a vocal take, and BAM! the screen would go black, there'd be a beep, then the BIOS screen, and here comes Windows. No warning, no option to save, nothing. Recording session lost, files left open, disk state inconsistent.
This is unacceptable even once, but the frequency of these intentional crashes was horrifying. In a normal day of use the workstation might crash 20 times or more, typically with some sort of consequential damage (lost work, lost files, corrupted disks, etc). Waves was unable to address the problem successfully for more than a year. Lots of professional workstations were affected, and a lot of customers were very angry.
Nobody wanted to see Waves go under: everyone LOVED the products and wanted to continue to support development. But at the same time nobody could afford to install what amounted to horrible malware on their production workstations.
So the pro audio community had simply evolved a workaround: buy the licensed software, but run the pirated software. Because the pirated software, lacking PACE AP, was perfectly stable.
To this day, most good products in the pro audio community have DRM - many of them still run PACE software. Fortunately, problems are less horrific these days, but everyone in the industry knows the pain of showing up at a session without your Pro Tools dongle, or being at a gig and needing to reinstall a plugin, and there's no internet at the gig with which to validate your license.
TL;DR it amazes me how much pain customers are willing to endure
We don't really know what the presence of DRM means. It could be that DRM works in the audio world. Or it could mean that there's not that many producers of audio world software, and they're taking advantage of the situation. Or it could mean that there's some pernicious and near universal mental fault, a cognitive bias, so that DRM makes some kind of emotional sense if you're licensing software, rather than actually selling something. Or maybe there's a "gentleman's agreement", like the Apple/Google No Poaching pact amongst the vendors.
Personally, I'm in favor of the cognitive bias theory. I think that the concept of ownership, extended to non-physical things, puts the producers of movies, music, software, etc into some weird psychological position where DRM just makes sense to them.
And, no, none of those sites using DRM are "a danger to our rights and our security" as the article breathlessly claims.
I'm sure it's not a popular opinion around here, but I used to be a donor to the EFF and no longer am. I feel they've gone off the deep end on too many issues and they're increasingly using hyperbole and hysteria to make arguments against relatively small issues. I mean, come on:
> "That proposition ranges from unpalatable on a gaming console, to repulsive on laptops and phones loaded with sensors and personal info"
Repulsive? With those scary "sensors" sensing things and you know what happens when DRM and sensors get together!?! Oh, that's right, nothing.
I use and enjoy all of these things but the DRM they include isn't why they are successful - it's the fact that they make it so much easier to deliver content to anyone, immediately, bypassing the normal 'store shelves' systems of distribution. (well, as long as you're in North America or some parts of Europe.)
While I agree that the EFF's message is often more reactionary than necessary, the DRM in these services serves no purpose except to make to provide a placebo to traditional commercial content owners, to get the content on those services. Ultimately, this is only a placebo. Netflix exclusives appear on the Pirate Bay minutes or hours after they go up on the service. Yet Netflix not only survives, but thrives - to such a degree that people use VPNs to circumvent the region locks, not the payment system.
How many years has it been since iTunes music went DRM-free? Yet it's the most popular means of acquiring paid-for music. Build a successful distribution system, make it available to everyone, and people will pay for content.
The sort of DRM that Steam employs is however somewhat useful for targeting people selling effectively stolen keys, as it allows for key revocation. It's this kind of piracy that I (and many content producers) find much more odious, since people think they're buying things legitimately but the producers aren't seeing a dime.
This is irrelevant in comparison with torrenting. If someone is willing to pirate it, sending to a friend won't be the option they'll go with. So justifying usage of DRM with that is simply false.
> 0.001% (probably too high)
Studies show otherwise.
At some point, corporations convinced consumers that buying a whole service contract everytime you play a song is more convenient than just playing a song.
Also, phone sensors contain vital biometric data that the user has no access to.The repulsive thing that happens is that the device is locking your information from you. This is spreading out in other industries like autombiles and medical devices. Now you will have to buy a whole new service contract everytime you drive a car or check your blood pressure. So convenient.
The original iPod had no wifi so that would be tough. And iTunes is more locked in than I like, so I use Amazon for my media purchases.
> "At some point, corporations convinced consumers that buying a whole service contract everytime you play a song."
Well, no one is a buying a new contract every time, but I assume you mean that I'm agreeing to a contract when I listen to a song. If that's the case, yes, it's better than it used to be. I have access to millions of songs. We have on demand radio where I can pick every single song I listen to and I pay next to nothing for it. It's something we've dreamed of for decades.
> " is more convenient than just playing a song"
And are these companies supposed to just provide these songs for me for free to listen to? How would that work? And I can still buy music if I want, which I do for the artists I enjoy.
> "Now you will have to buy a whole new service contract everytime you drive a car"
I will?
It's more about not needing to buy a piece of music to build a library. And it is more convenient to pay <$20/month to avoid piracy. Having a diverse music taste is incredibly expensive to satisfy legally.
How does it "work properly"? All it does is hindering those who pay for such services, since pirates aren't affected by it in any way and get the same content DRM-free.
> And, no, none of those sites using DRM are "a danger to our rights and our security" as the article breathlessly claims.
DRM is always a threat to privacy and security, when it runs some blob code on your machine with intention to police you assuming you are a criminal by default.
DRM is a farce, nobody who uses those services you mentioned does so because DRM. All DRM does it make it a pain in the ass when I can't pre-download netlix movies to my mac.
Dismount your high horse.
Incorrect. PC games, software, console games - many of these have not and likely will not be cracked. That's not to say there aren't many out there but if you have paid attention to information dripping out of cracking groups, you'll see it's becoming much more difficult to get around DRM.
Similarly, Cinavia works. RTMPE works.
It doesn't mean they should be there. It doesn't mean that adding the DRM doesn't cause annoyances to legitimate consumers. But that blanket statement that whatever DRM you add is ineffective is simply wrong.
Edit: quick example - ps4 released Nov 2013. Can you play pirated games on it? Nope. You can install linux but it's likely a number of years before piracy can happen.
https://fail0verflow.com/blog/2015/console-hacking-2015-line...
That's not what the EFF meant though.
Sure you can get MS Office on pirate bay, but 1) most people don't know how to use torrents and 2) can't install the cracked version (or worse authenticate with that fake sever).
But if MS didn't have DRM on the DVD version people would just pass it around to their friends and familes.
DRM means that you need permission to have interoperability. If you are starting a new product from zero market share, if you were allowed to achieve interop by just putting the effort into writing code, you could make something awesome without anyone's permission and gain some market share if users want to your what you made.
If you have no market share, a DRM-requiring service might not see your platform/device/whatever as worth supporting. And if users want the service to work before they want to use your product, then you don't get to build the market share to make your bizdev case and DRM means you don't get to engineer around bizdev.
i.e. If you try to screenshot the movie, or redirect the audio into a file, you won't be allowed. The video and audio quality may be downgraded if you attach non-HDCP (a DRM system for local video and audio) outputs to your laptop.
Sometimes Netflix will simply refuse to stream anything if it isn't sure that the path from the video decoder to the monitor's screen is secure. e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/3j0vck/whats_hdcp_an...
You don't have permission from Netflix to prevent this. If you're in the US or UK - and many other jurisdictions - it is illegal for you to do so, even if it's very clearly within your fair use (or equivalent) rights.
In the future, it's likely that DRM will extended to add and detect watermarks to restricted video and audio output, requiring you (and those around you) to cede full use of any other devices with microphones and cameras that might happen to capture that output.
Design a DRM that can't be defeated when the users can run it under any debugger or virtual environment.
DRM is different because it's a deliberate attempt to make a non-general computer. One that refuses to execute certain perfectly valid programs.
Window and OSX will happily grant the owner the highest level of privileges and let you read or flip any bit in the system. DRM is about creating a privilege level that the owner cannot access.
> Window and OSX will happily grant the owner the highest level of privileges and let you read or flip any bit in the system.
Not true. At the very least, you cannot muck with kernel memory, and OS X also prevents you from modifying a bunch of files on disk that are crucial for the operation of the system even if you have root access (this is called System Integrity Protection).
You most certainly can. Anyone who has written a device driver has done it.
> this is called System Integrity Protection
That can be disabled during boot.
And yes, SIP can be disabled, but OS X isn't granting you the permission do that, the recovery partition is. Once you've booted into OS X you cannot modify SIP. So again, it's more akin to modifying the machine itself.
I don't think I've seen these commercials, because I'm not sure what this means.
Buying DRMed software is a fool's errand. If I want to keep it without being chained to servers that will go away, I break the law. See https://xkcd.com/488/ : Piracy is the correct answer for DRM works.
Better yet, purchase non-DRM works.
EDIT: How odd. High karma on al these posts (and the last few days), and still rate-limited. Perhaps my popular opinions are a bit too ... controversial, especially with SaaS and API opinions?
I was thinking of that today as I had to download (for the 6th time since I started) a Kindle book I'm reading to my Android.
I'm another 1-2 downloads away from going on a torrent site and grabbing a DRM free copy that will actually stay on my local storage, be read on an app that does not take 30 seconds to boot, and not require large downloads with every open.
The natural evolution of that is to buy a copy on Amazon to support the author and industry, then download a free copy somewhere so you can actually read it in peace.
Meanwhile, DRM is the reason I've only ever bought one Audible audio book, and buy DVDs rather than "buy" downloadable video, for example. DVDs have the same consideration for me: As long as the protection is mostly ineffective and everyone knows it is mostly ineffective, they can continue to pretend to protect them all they way.
What we "need" to show how bad DRM are is the bankruptcy of something like Amazon or even Google, and look at the impact that will make if all of those servers were wiped.
1) Microsoft kills MSN Music in 2008, removing access from users who purchased albums.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/04/drm-su...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PlaysForSure
2) Amazon removes access to purchased Disney streaming videos for Christmas season:
https://torrentfreak.com/amazon-pulls-access-to-purchased-ch...
https://boingboing.net/2013/12/15/amazon-takes-away-access-t...
The industry has moved to more of a subscription model which helps soften the blow when something disappears.
All because we allowed something this big to own so much of our life and still be private, hidden. Suddenly Europe doesn't have a web search engine (it was 90% of europeans who use Google, isn't it?). Suddenly websites all over the world stop working because they used some CDN.
I was too young when people really talked and dreamt about everyone owning his own server, hostname. But I do believe in self-reliance, and DRMs are one of the blocks on the road to that goal.
People shouldn't have to rely on Amazon's existence to be able to read the copy of Dickens they bought from Amazon. Because in 50 years, I'll still be alive, but there's a high chance Amazon won't, because most companies don't last 70 years. And as all things eventually end, we have to know and anticipate that fact. DRMs think about the very short term, while we should already be thinking about the long term.
The same will happen to large-scale mass manufacturing plants, small scale manufacturing, Automotive, logistics and communication.
If this was, say, Cambodia, they would have been crushed under the weight of competing markets, but we have international trade agreements, essentially allowing certain American laws to apply internationally and the clout to enforce them.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-ho...
I'm a pirate. I have little compunctions about downloading whatever-have-you. Part is convenience, part is I've been burned before, part is I want to spend money on tangibles, part is literally just 'fuck you drm'.
Is it wrong? Well, it's certainly a tort. I'm not doing it for some morally superior good. I'm doing it for myself and my family.
We can curl in bed, and watch XYZ movie. And if it stinks, it gets the delete. I don't have to deal with any number of factors from screaming kids to DRM; I just double-click and it plays in VLC. I was watching MASH on netflix..... until they removed it from the live collections, 8th season in. Am I buying it? Nope. Downloading.
If anything, the biggest draw to me is open source stuffs. I can get and give it, and use it for my files. There's no reason for lock-in, so they play nice.
Edit: And yes, I do pay for Netflix. Bang for the buck, it ~is~ easier than finding links online. Even if I can't store and download locally, it's great for watching filler fluff I don't want a copy of. Media I want to have, I just download anyways.
The only benefit to DRM for pirates is that it makes more people interested in consuming pirated works, and to the extent that there are network effects that's a benefit, but I suspect the number people turning to piracy because they can't get non DRMed content is minimal.
Even on HN, where discussion is usually quite reasonable, there are people in this thread openly admitting to piracy. The top post as I write this argues that trying to protect the rights granted by law through technical measures should mean giving up those rights altogether. There is very little respect shown towards the people who are creating new content, and even less remorse about ripping them off.
It's hardly surprising that when people are so unrepentant about these things, the people actually doing the work will take steps to protect themselves. It's sad that it's come to this, but too many selfish people have spoiled it for everyone now. I think it's inevitable that for the next few years at least, we'll see content providers increasingly locking their works up either through devices where you don't have full access even if you bought it or through keeping critical parts of the system online where customers can't copy or control it.
For some of us, piracy isn't a morally acceptable alternative to paying for a legitimate copy of a work, but DRM still sucks and often makes what we do get worse than what a pirate would get. I hope there will at least continue to be enough of us around who will make a point of supporting DRM-free alternatives that they continue to be available, but I fear we will be a small minority and so will those willing to distribute their work DRM-free.
>It's sad that it's come to this, but too many selfish people have spoiled it for everyone now.
This statement applies both ways.
Human culture is a necessity. Humans are social animals. If my friends and family literally talk about Game of Thrones or Star Wars every day, do you think I'm just going to voluntarily exclude myself from my own community in order to protect the wealth of some small cabal halfway across the world? Of course not. That's not a tide you want to fight against, no matter how much you might want to trivialize the costs.
If something is so good that your friends and family literally talk about it every day and you'd feel left out if you didn't participate, is it asking too much to actually buy it and support those who make it? A show like GoT has thousands of people involved in making it, many of them working on it full time for months. Paying for it legitimately is not just paying for "some small cabal halfway across the world".
If recent rumours are to be believed, even the mighty GoT is now facing an abbreviated ending because while it's been successful it's also been extremely expensive to make. This suggests that despite the optimistic spin the show's producers have often put on being so widely pirated, it still isn't getting enough actual financial support to keep going with full 10-episode seasons, which would be a real shame for all the fans who do pay for it.
Perhaps this is what should stop. I don't want big corporations determining my culture for me. And if they do, perhaps they should accept being pirated.
The MP3 codec is not free, yet (in the US, until 2018)
In the rest of the world without silly software patents, it is free!
If we could end copyright, I'd be happy with DRM wherever people could manage it. Ending DRM feels to me like ending riddles. Buying a locked box isn't morally bad - the badness comes when the government threatens to drive you to prison with guns and sticks for trying to open the box that you bought, or helping someone else open the box that they bought.
Yes, all copyright.
However, I can still say, as a consumer, DRM is a bad practice and I would always take a DRM-free alternative to it.
A lot of bad things are artsy and clever. The demise of DRM should be more of a consumer advocacy thing than a legal battle anyway, IMHO.
Is this hypocritical?
Spotify is saying "You may download this, but this program under someone else's control will forcefully delete this data from your machine"
My machine is my own. If I wish to grant other users access to the machine or data on it, cool. That's my choice. If I buy a program to do a task, good. When your program starts taking orders from "nameless faceless someone else", we have problems.
Locked in APIs are just as much as a scourge. When you use them, you're locking yourself into an ecosystem that will go away. It's not a matter of if, but when. I'm less hesitant when these APIs used are standards compliant (where I can go 'down the street' and plug in their credential info)... But that's not where money is.
Lockin is where the money is. And I'll fight it tooth and nail. I already am doing the fight against bad IoT.
And the content you are streaming through 'nameless faceless someone else' is not your own. You pay to get access to it. Are you saying that because you install a program on your machine, you should have complete control over what it can and can't do to the content it provides?
By hook or by crook, yes.
I've admitted that I'm a pirate. Look at my comments and you'll find it. If it's convenient enough I'll buy. I'm not under spending money on media.
And I do have complete control what the program can and cannot do. It's called a debugger. The encrypted files and keys are right there. It's nothing more than a bad obfuscation technique.
Why do you feel they shouldn't?
I believe that software on my computer shouldn't have restrictions that I don't know about, take actions that I don't know about, etc. But if someone else wants to run some super-DRM app, I don't think that my opinions of what's best for them should limit what they can run on their machine.
In short, I want complete control over what runs on my computer and the chance to reject programs that don't work the way I want them to. I don't think that I have the right to change their intended behavior (although, to be honest, I will when it suits my purposes).
1. Do I have the right to run, inspect, modify, or do whatever to a binary running on my machine? Absolutely. Running Linux, I can inspect down to the kernel, if I so choose. But I can hook onto any program I want, and watch any program I choose. If I want to modify memory, I can. Root really means root.
2. So who owns the machine if someone else's program can tell you "You can't do this." ? That's not following what I want, therefore I can only imply that I'm not the owner. I'm all for signed hardware and protections, but things like the TPM give security and ownership to someone that's not me. I'd be for it if I had the private key of that chip.
3. So a computer that doesn't follow the user's requirements... what does that look like? It looks like a Tivo, iPhone, some Androids, Windows 10, and other locked down hardware. Yes, you may have bought it, but you don't own it. Worse yet, is instead of DRM, is that subroutines come from "the cloud" (AKA someone else's server), and streamed to the device when requested. Google shut down a platform for precisely that reason; they deactivated the API servers.
What's the way out? Free Software is a big way out, but so is Open Protocols, and Open Standards. You have a business for IoT (example)? Use MQTT/CoAP and talk via the standards and make it pretty. But also make it so I can close up shop and go elsewhere if you alienate me. Right now, that's the lockin comparable to DRM.
I don't have control over what kinds of garbage someone else puts into their program, but I have control over whether or not I run that on my computer. Technically I have the ability to view memory, run it in a debugger, put in shim libraries to capture data, etc, but in most cases where control is a real issue, it's easier to just avoid the troublesome software in favor of an alternative.
For things I want to own forever, I buy them in mp3 format, or on Google Play and download the resulting mp3s.
Is DRM required for streaming music? Definitely not.
Is DRM required to make money out of streaming music? Debatable.
Putting it on a comparable service, look at GOG.com and Steam. They are both digital game distributor services. Before GOG.com people thought DRM was the only way to make a viable business out of selling digital copies of videogames, as presented by Valve. Then GOG came along and they said "nope, we hate DRM, we're gonna sell digital games without it". Now, is their system viable? Well they've been around for quite a while, I don't know if their money comes directly from game sales or other sources (their parent company also owns CDProjekt which makes Triple A games like The Witcher) but they are still in the business after all these years.
Technically? No, it isn't required. But it seems pretty necessary if you want to have deals with major labels and publishers. There already exists a musical equivalent of GOG. Bandcamp [0]. Music sales are DRM free, you can choose your file format and quality, and you can stream any artist DRM-free on the website or app. However, you won't find the latest Taylor Swift or Kanye release for sale on Bandcamp or anywhere without DRM.
You can't look at the GOG.com on its own because its unclear if the non-DRM "benefits" of a site of GOG.com are being subsidized by Steam.
If Steam was vaporized tomorrow, would GOG.com be profitable enough to support the salaries of not just GOG.com, but the developers, producers, designers, and QA testers of the game studios? If not, it's not viable. Is it? I'm not sure because Steam is the main bread winner.
Is that enough to support main game publishers and developers? I have no idea but that's not the point I was trying to make. The point I'm making is that it's obviously profitable for the people working at GOG.
Why does it matter if Steam disappears? Do you think people would just stop buying games altogether without Steam? People use Steam because of the platform it provides, not because of the DRM. If people wanted to just pirate games they could get the GOG version off a torrent site since that is already DRM-free, it's not like Steam's DRM is stopping anybody from distributing pirated copies.
Most of the point of the DRM for Spotify and Netflix is just so you don't sign up for a week and download the parts of the catalog you like and then quit. That's why spotify uses DRM and itunes doesn't.
It's the fact that it's often done so poorly and clumsily that creates the problem.
If it has DRM, you don't own it, you are leasing it.
Agree or not with the use of DRM, I object to buttons that say "Buy Now" instead of "Lease Now" on web-sites.
Imagine an alternate universe where government and huge corporations started using data encryption on its records in the 80's, as a way of defeating the FOIA and other demands for transparency. There is a public hue and cry, and with righteous indignation, people start thinking of "encryption as evil." To help prevent the repeat of such high profile abuses by large organizations, people work to ban data encryption.
That's not how history played out, however. In real life in the 90's, due to the PC revolution, ordinary people outside of academia started to become aware of the potential benefits of encryption over computer networks. There is a fundamental asymmetry of power between large institutions and individuals. What is a public good in the hands of the public can be horrible when it allows organizations to exercise dangerous degrees of centralized control. So it is with DRM. DRM restricting access by individuals to the software we fairly bought and to our shared cultural experiences is horrible. However, DRM protecting individual data against the depredations of companies and other institutions would be a tremendous pubic good.
Imagine a world where companies could no longer say about your personal data, "It got out somehow. Who knows? There's nothing anyone can do about that sort of thing. Privacy is dead." DRM won't be foolproof. Nothing like that can be. (Which is precisely why it's unsuitable for centralized control, in a particular way that it causes lobbying money to request stupid legislation.) However, it will greatly increase the cost and legal risk of companies doing bad things with our personal data. The same asymmetry that makes DRM horrible makes it absolutely wonderful when you reverse it by 180 degrees! That asymmetry is this: Any given company, no matter how large, can't ever match the level of knowledge and man-hours that can be mustered by the internet at large. This precise economic asymmetry that makes DRM an unworkable idea that incentivizes oppression also makes DRM the perfect tool for helping the public to keep large organizations in line. One whistle-blower, one hacker's discovery, and that errant company can be prosecuted under the DMCA. (1)
Why aren't we requiring companies that handle vast amounts of private data to use DRM -- Digital Rights Management -- to protect the rights of individual human beings? After all, the rights of individual Homo sapiens should be the priority.
(1) -- Occasionally, some people will have their information breached, and their information could be disseminated beyond control. However, the bulk of the populace would still be protected.
It's not that I'm expanding the definition. It's that an uninformed public has narrowed it, much as happened with "meme."
Yeah, and what this article completely glosses over is that as the creator of *.mp3s by 6StringMercenary, I own the digital media, by law[1], and I should have a say in how it's distributed, copied, or exploited, legally speaking. In a lot of cases, the music that's being "purchased" has never been owned by the person holding the LP, the cassette or the CD. They own a licensed copy. There's a fundamental, important difference.
This article does absolutely nothing to rectify that the internet doesn't automatically own my creations as soon as I put them out there. I'm allowed control, legally, and I don't think it's fair - appropriate, moral, or ethical - to try and strip those rights away from me. Nowhere is this even touched upon as a parameter of this "NO DRM EVER" postulation.
Just because the EFF thinks its business model of begging for money is a good one doesn't mean other pariticipants in society and commerce feel the model is appropriate for other endeavors. I get they have a mission, and at times we see eye to eye. Other times, like this one, I think they're woefully un-prepared for the implication of the position they espouse to take.
[1] This does not include unlicensed remix projects, works-for-hire, or other nuanced undertakings outside the scope of this discussion
It's not so black or white, and DRM, which prevents my own computer from doing as I've instructed, is most certainly on the worse extreme end of the spectrum.
Fundamentally speaking, YouTube's ContentID matching system is a form of DRM and I'd really, really like to see your argument of why it should not be allowed.
You're right, it's not so black and white, and arguing with me about Fair Use will get you nowhere. I'm an advocate of Fair Use and the four factors. An educator by training and have spent time in the profession. You're being disingenuous bringing it up in a strictly commercial dialogue, and it just shows you have a perverted sense of priorities because you can't actually address the issue I brought at first:
Can the EFF present a viable alternative before simply tearing down an imperfect system?
So far, they can't, you can't, and I think it's going to take a lot more than just 10 years on the subject to get it figured out.
As for a "viable alternative", the single most profitable online store sells DRM-free music. How can you argue that's not viable?