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Comment by MayeulC | Hacker News Reader

Sorry for the obligatory anti-DRM content, but I have to defend my right from this poor management scheme.

Stay off my loan, DRM. I unchecked this box myself when installing Firefox on Windows as well (Where it seems enabled by default).

Seriously, I have no words to describe the hoops content providers want us to get trough, so that we can play our "legally owned" (well, it technically is closer to a lease nowadays) content.

Moreover, if it works on Firefox/Linux, how can they prevent someone grabbing the video from X and the audio from Alsa? What is the usefulness of DRM in the first place, in this case?

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"Moreover, if it works on Firefox/Linux, how can they prevent someone grabbing the video from X and the audio from Alsa?"

Well, that's exactly what they want to remove. HDMI for example forces all companies that use it to "respect intellectual property" removing the option of copying without errors.

If the companies don't do it, the permission to use HDMI gets voided, so everybody has to do it.

With Linux and Firefox they want to add firmware and special hardware so Linux could "manage the video" but not see it.

For example an nvidia graphic card uses a firmware that is closed source, even with noveaou project. In their perfect world a Linux program could give orders like "draw this frame on the screen" without actually being able to access the frame. Of course the screen also has DRM.

With new CPU processors DRM and secret firmwares even OSes are being installed in the chip. This DRM has total control of your machine including all memory peripherals and so on.

They are actually making this DRM mandatory so they can spy on users and report "illegal practices" automatically. Microsoft is already sending home all your watching media metadata.

Most video is also compressed so if you take single frames or audio buffers and compress it again you lose a lot of quality. That is because for example DCT blocks positions will change.

> This DRM has total control of your machine including all memory peripherals and so on.

The foundational premise is false. You can build a machine that follows DRM, what you can't do is know if you're talking to that machine or some other machine controlled by pirates who extracted the keys from the that machine. Nor can you stop them from extracting the keys when they have physical control.

But the futile attempts are certainly expensive for everyone.

Though much less expensive for the pirates, who don't have to follow the rules and so don't suffer the consequences when they're inconsistent, inconvenient, unreasonable or bureaucratic.

While I too oppose DRM, I find it less objectionable on a Subscription service like Netflix because there no assumption of ownership. I do not own the content on Netflix I did not buy it, I am renting a access licenses to a library of content for a monthly fee.

Now DRM on BluRay, DVD, Digital Downloads, Games, etc that do have an assumption of ownership because I pay a onetime fee with the expectation of accessing that content in a non-time limited way. Those types of things should never have DRM

Technically, it's like getting a DVD from a library for a day — you can still make a private copy (Privatkopie) under copyright law.

Whose copyright law? Certainly not in the US.

I guess you are referring to German copyright law. But I don't think even there it's legal to make a copy of you are just renting the movie.

It is, as long as it’s for personal use, and you don’t have to break DRM on movies or music (this last part was added due to the WIPO treaties requiring that).

Only as long as you don't circumvent DRM, which in practice voids the whole Privatkopie thing because even CSS is counted as "wirksamer Kopierschutz" (effective copy protection), which is kind of a joke.

That’s not completely correct. "As long as you don’t circumvent DRM on movies or music".

DRM on games, software, books, etc is legally not protected, at all.

And the DRM clause for movies wasn’t in German law originally either, but it was forced into it via an international treaty, and the US demanded this, and threatened with embargoes otherwise. Even North Korea signed this treaty. (The WIPO treaties).

DRM is kind of a blunt tool though. When you rent content, you are still allowed to reproduce parts of it for academic work, for reviews and commentary, and for other derivative works. Current DRM schemes try to block all of that.

For me, DRM seems pointless because I have very little motive these days to actually copy the streams. When I was a kid, I used to tape songs off the radio. My kids have access to things like Pandora and Spotify and they have absolutely no desire to do something like that. Make everything reasonably available and the desire to pirate is diminished.

Bingo. The real reason for DRM to exist is to maintain the old systems of distribution zones and price differentiation.

A system that came into place in the analog era, thanks to differences in broadcast signals. Something that VHS recreated verbatim, and thus a NTFC movie had to be converted to a PAL movie etc.

>Now DRM on BluRay, DVD, Digital Downloads, Games, etc that do have an assumption of ownership because I pay a onetime fee with the expectation of accessing that content in a non-time limited way. Those types of things should never have DRM

Oh man, I still remember when Microsoft tried to pull "steam" on their xOne - backlash was insane and they backed out. I wonder why do PC gamers let Steam, Origin, Battle.net, other crapware apps walk all over them with DRM. Buy a console, buy a game - you do not like it - sell the disk on ebay.

I was an avid Steam hater (hey, and Microsoft hater before that. It seems I disliked quite a lot when I was younger).

But Steam seems decent enough today. For me it's a content delivery service. The benefits are

- A single store for your games (what Amazon tries to be for the ~rest~?)

- Automatic, mostly seamless updates in the background¹

- A community. You cannot reach me on Facebook. I don't have SnapChat, Instagram, WhatsApp, Signal, whatever. You can reach me on Steam though²..

- Discover new stuff (recommendations)

DRM is something that Steam offers, but it doesn't require it for all I know. You can get DRM free games and download/manage those via Steam.

I have no use for these plastic discs (I .. don't have a drive for those) and they do not solve the 'The first thing post-launch is a big update to fix core game issues' tendency in the gaming industry.

1: Steam Games that just .. start a Launcher that then proceeds to update the game are highly annoying, because waiting for said update is usually a non-issue today

2: I prefer Mail and experiment with Telegram (nice, obvious issues) and Matrix/Riot (probably what I'll push on my friends and family a couple UX iterations down the road). But this statement is true/no hyperbole: My friends do contact me via Steam for quick IM sessions.

- A single store for your games (what Amazon tries to be for the ~rest~?)

No, that's xBox/PS store. On my PC I have: Steam, Battle.net, Origin, Epic Games Launcher, Glyph aaaand Windows Store for Gears of War 4/Forza Horizon 3. Achievements and friends are scattered through all these crapware programs.

PC gaming is a mess.

> I do not own the content on Netflix I did not buy it, I am renting a access licenses to a library of content for a monthly fee.

You don't own the content when you buy a disc either. You own a copy.

Suppose you go out and buy a CD or DVD, make some fair use copies for whatever legitimate purposes you imagine, then when you're done you destroy the copies and sell the original disc on eBay.

Please explain why this is morally different than subscribing to Netflix and making fair use copies of the stream under the same circumstances.

Does U.S. fair use require you to destroy the fair use copies when you're no longer in posession of the original? I don't think so, I think you could even return it to the store, keep the backups and be perfectly legal. Perhaps intent matters?

> Does U.S. fair use require you to destroy the fair use copies when you're no longer in posession of the original? I don't think so, I think you could even return it to the store, keep the backups and be perfectly legal.

The point is to not argue about such things. Never mind what is and isn't fair use, imagine the strongest possible case for fair use that you can. Something that definitely is. Now in that case suppose the source is a Netflix stream rather than some physical medium.

Why is that supposed to change anything? How is DRM OK in one case and not the other? There is no case where it doesn't prohibit you from doing something you have a right to do.

I don't support DRM, I'm just wondering if I can buy music I like, rip them, and donate the CD's to my sorority. They need to keep copies of all CD's they play in the building as a protection against our local copyright groups BREIN and BUMA/STEMRA, otherwise they'd have to pay a monthly fee based on the total area music is played in.

I think any restriction placed on general purpose computers ends up an assault on the whole thing. I agree with Cory Doctorow's thoughts [0] on this and it being an issue of human v. property rights.

[0] https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

You are renting it, but you, the consumer is paying the price (inconvenience of not watching it on any device). That's madness. It's not like the pirates will be unable to find a downloadable version. This anti-consumer mentality is madness: all it does is alienate your customer.

>Moreover, if it works on Firefox/Linux, how can they prevent someone grabbing the video from X and the audio from Alsa? What is the usefulness of DRM in the first place, in this case?

This is such an important flaw in all DRM. At some point all this digital wonderment has to be turned in to light and noise. This is the weakest point in the chain and it only takes one person with a decent re-recording setup to create a copy and then distribute it for any DRM to be bypassed. A £50 mic setup in a home studio will allow a good enough copy of most pop music to be made. Even if the hardware was in on the DRM game (looking at you Apple), my ears and eyes are not.

Just wait until a special brain implant is required in order to listen to DRM'd music :)

Don't... don't give them ideas... They come up with such crappy ideas on their own, we don't need this horror suggested to them.

Why expect this won't be demanded functionality in any brain-computer interface that supports media playback? The technology isn't there yet; when it arrives, the rentiers will be there to meet it.

That's nothing new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

DRM is not there to make it impossible, but to make it inconvenient, to copy the things, so as long as it is "harder" with DRM than without it will persist.

Agreed. They don't need to make it impossible, they just need to make it inconvenient enough so for most users, copying stuff out of DRM isn't worth the hassle.

This cuts both ways. It's more convenient to watch a movie from a file on a NAS than it is to watch a DVD, especially if the DVD has unskipable ads or is coded for the wrong region.

> It's more convenient to watch a movie from a file on a NAS than it is to watch a DVD, especially if the DVD has unskipable ads or is coded for the wrong region.

Absolutely. One of the reasons for Netflix success is that it is so simple to use compared to alternatives. Open, click, watch.

Yes, but the question is do you even need the DRM or is the 'copy hassle' sufficient? You only need one person willing and able to subvert the DRM to make and then distribute an unrestricted version. Individuals don't need to 'unDRM' content themselves it's out there if they want and know how to get it.

I think that what DRM provides is the illusion of control. This illusion is good enough to allow Netflix and similar companies to gain access to other peoples content upon which they build a very convenient system for media consumption by anybody who can use a TV.

Sure, but again, for most people Netflix is cheap enough and simple enough that they won't even bother looking for torrents or other "illegal" versions. That in itself takes some time and know-how that the average consumer just doesn't have or want to bother with.

> They don't need to make it impossible, they just need to make it inconvenient enough so for most users, copying stuff out of DRM isn't worth the hassle.

I disagree. It merely requires one clever person to crack it and then it's available to anyone over BitTorrent within hours. Any functioning DRM scheme must make it practically impossible for everyone.

Funny thing is, it's 10 times harder to get the DRM'd version than the clean version.

The problem is that, at least for stuff like music and video, the "harder" part is an illusion for most popular stuff given the sheer size of the demography watching. Out of so many people there is bound to be quite a few who decides to do this right away anyway. Especially as the methods given can essentially be automated once you got the setup.

This means that DRM is, by all accounts, completely and utterly useless for the given media. Meanwhile people who desires to legitimately consume the content are hit by the side-effects of draconian DRM due to no fault of their own. It becomes easier to consume the pirated rather than the actual content, making the pirated content a superior product. Money doesn't even factor into this equation.

Be nice and play ball, or you'll be subjected to a set-top-box appliance again.

  (it puts the lotion on its skin
   or it gets the hose again.)

I was trying to watch rick and morty on linux the other day. popcorn time was the easiest route to take. I did the free 7 days of hulu. but cancelled immediately because their flash player couldnt make it more than 30 seconds without crashing. I eventually settled on Amazon Video (which I had to spoof being chrome on windows to get it to allow HD). I really dislike that my wife can't watch the videos I purchased on amazon video even though we have a linked account.

So the only place I could find that would actually give me the content in exchange for money, wont even let other people in my household watch it.

The only downside to piracy at that point was any ethical/moral/legal issues. But those wont stop people for long if the issues with other methods become too unbearable.

Exactly, and the problem with DRM then becomes that, outside making the pirated content a superior product, it outright antagonizes the legitimate consumers.

In short money is poured into making the product less desirable by making it harder to acquire and consume legally.

Of course this is all lamenting how utterly bonkers DRM is conceptually. It still leaves the problem of pirates unaddressed. To survive in the digital age we need a debate about how to make a business model where this problem is a fact of reality rather than putting on blinders and saying it can be prevented.

That is one very annoying aspect of Amazon's media services that I discovered when I configured my Echo with the linked account that doesn't have the prime media entitlement. I would have been a-okay with it only allowing one account at a time to play music but not even that. So you either have to pony up for two payments or share and that has its own set of annoyances. Least of which is our generally very different taste in music. Thankfully they added Spotify support not long after so the problem resolved itself.

:-)

You just reminded me of this classic. Hope the younger readers enjoy...

"DRM Helmets: An idea whose time has come"

http://archive.oreilly.com/1540.html

DRM isn't here for ("against") the consumer; it's done to control the media playback device vendors (screens, tivos, ...). There's a great essay on this which I can't find right now but it comes down to: even with flawed drm, content providers have control over the media devices market. Planned obsolence of playback media, etc etc.

Once you look at drm from this perspective, it suddenly makes a lot more sense. A good counter example to the incompetence-over-malice rule of thumb.

Edit: this, btw, is also why you can't meaningfully "opt out" of DRM. It isn't about you.

(Edit 2: I now realise that without proof this is nothing more than a conspiracy theory, and being plausible just makes it more susceptible to confirmation bias.. if someone has the actual essay that might shed some light on this :p )

> Even if the hardware was in on the DRM game (looking at you Apple), my ears and eyes are not.

Until they start selling the iEye. People will buy it.

Just to add some anecdotal pain... I recently bought my first audio book from Audible. I didn't realise it was a proprietary DRM'd format which has no sensible playback on Linux. So rather than spend time hacking together something to rip it, I ended up torrent'ing an mp3 of the book I'd just bought.

It's entirely put me off buying anything else from Audible :-/

Same here. I know they have DRM but it says it plays on "all devices". It actually includes an impressive number of mp3 players, but a notable omission turned out to be Linux.

Then I discovered ffmpeg can decode the files and turned back to my girlfriend who has wanted to share an audible account for a while now.

... which is when I discovered there isn't just Audible, there's Audible US ($15=14eur), Audible UK (8 pounds=9.50eur), Audible DE (10 euros) and others, all of which have different offerings of course. The German one has English stuff, but less. The English ones obviously have hardly any German audio books. My girlfriend is German but we speak English to each other and most stuff we'd read is originally American. Which do we get now, US, UK or DE?

Can't we "just have audio books"? And as m4b/mp3 please, we both want to load it into Smart Audio Book Player which has some features on Android that Audible's player doesn't. Wasn't the whole point of getting Audible to get access to audio books without having to buy and rip each individually?

What a mess.

Oh and for those who are considering Audible without planning on converting them into mp3s, note that the Android app wants to:

- read accounts from the device

- read your contacts

- record audio

- see your phone number

- view WiFi connections

- view network connections

- prevent the device from sleeping (=battery killer and unnecessary for uninterrupted playback with screen off)

... I just want to listen to audio books.

I've also found audio books on Audible that they won't sell me because I live in the wrong region (US). I wanted to give them money for a product they carry, but they can't/won't accept it.

What is the usefulness of DRM in the first place, in this case?

It gives the content owners enough peace of mind that they're not going to be denied sales of their content in the future that they're willing to rent their assets to Netflix for streaming across the internet. Whether DRM works perfectly or not isn't actually very relevant here. All that's necessary is that the content owners believe it works well enough to protect the future of their businesses.

The practical alternative to DRM-in-the-browser is not DRM-free distribution; it's either physical media (with DRM) or native apps for every device (with DRM). My opinion is that I'd rather have DRM in my browser (along side open alternatives) than have the pain that comes with either of those choices.

> well enough to protect the future of their businesses.

I'd even say the expect platforms like Netflix to 'do what they can', even if it's not enough to prevent pirating. At least that's what was communicated to me when I asked and worked on a similar platform.

I think the fact that it's streaming is actually taking one of the main arguments against drm away: If I own it, I shouldn't be hindered by drm to do with it whatever I want.

Still all DRM in the end is futile and can be reduced to a cat -and-mouse game.

Modern cryptography isn't mathematically impossible to break either; you just need to put a high amount of computational resources into breaking it. And even that is only presumably; nobody has proven yet that NP-complete problems (on whose hardness its robustness rests) cannot be solved in polynomial time.

Despite all this, nobody seems to claim that cryptography is 'futile'. Sometimes mere infeasibility is enough.

Modern cryptography is typically in the class where, barring some mathematical breakthrough (a la the P/NP thing), it would take many times more compute resources than the Earth has for longer than the Earth will likely exist to break.

Modern DRM is typically in the class where you can either spend at most a few days with a debugger and a code editor, or buy a $20 knockoff device to break it.

These are not really comparable.

> (...) it would take many times more compute resources than the Earth has for longer than the Earth will likely exist to break.

Claims like these are often misleading as they assume that i) malicious parties' capabilities, ii) what is and isn't possible, and iii) implementation correctness, are all static known factors. Cryptography is more akin to putting a lock on a fence - it's going to keep most people out or perhaps deter prying eyes, but it's all probabilistic in the end and depends on who's doing the prying.

DRM is fundamentally broken, compared to cryptography, in that by necessity everyone has access to the keys and the content has to be decrypted to be consumed. This makes DRM a client-side security issue with some pretty bad premises.

It is not a question of theory, but practice, DRM gets systematically broken all the time because of this.

For cryptography there's a huge gap between designing and using cryptography on the one hand and breaking it on the other hand. The amount of computational resources needed for breaking it can exceed what is possible with all the energy of this universe, while encryption is still feasible with today's technology.

With DRM it's usually the other way around. The attacker always has the encrypted data, the key and decryption routine. Otherwise playback wouldn't work. The only defenses are obfuscation and anti-debugging, which are basically security by obscurity. As soon as someone understands your scheme it's broken for good and you have to come up with something new.

Just like with cryptography you're trying to make it as hard as possible for attackers, but with DRM it will always be around the same magnitude of difficulty as for yourself.

The difference is that for DRM to be effective, it requires the DRM vendor to have full and exclusive control over some portion of your hardware. If this is not the case (and it should never be), it's breakable with resources akin to "one cracker and a Pentium IV".

Crypto OTOH can be completely impractical to break. Plenty of codes around that would take even the NSA millions of years to crack, baring new mathematical or computing (e.g. quantum) breakthroughs.

> Seriously, I have no words to describe the hoops content providers want us to get trough, so that we can play our "legally owned" (well, it technically is closer to a lease nowadays) content.

Usually it is the content owner not the provider putting in terms that requires DRM schemes for playing their content on the internet. And once you have the requirement for some content you usually require it for everything so you won't confuse users if they only could play some content.

> Usually it is the content owner not the provider putting in terms that requires DRM schemes for playing their content on the internet.

But at the end it's the customer who decides. As long as there are people who still subscribe to watching un-movies (DRMed streams), the studios can say to Netflix "see, our requirements for DRM don't hinder customer adaption". If on the other hand people would cancel their Netflix account becuase of DRM (and state the reason) and even began to cancel friendships to people who still subscribe to DRMed services, the whole situation would be quite different: As a first step probably Netflix would probably introduce a Netflex-NoDRM subscription, which only gives access to few, but DRM-free movies and would try to regain the customers who canceled their subscription because of DRM. Now it's a market decision: If lots of people switch to Netflix-NoDRM (despite less movies), Netflix will get very convincing arguments for negotiations with the rights holders (since this will probbaly not happen spontaneously, I suggested to cancel friendships to people as long as they still subscribe to the DRMed subscription to increase the social pressure for NoDRM a lot).

Well, it's exactly why the situation is what it is. "If only millions of people could each, individually, make a huge personal sacrifice, things would be different" is true, in the sense that if things like that ever happened, we probably wouldn't recognize the resulting society.

Humans don't coordinate like this. It's our weak spot. To fight DRM, we need to make DRM-free solutions better than DRMed ones, in the same way piracy is better than copy protection - more convenient, faster, hassle-free.

EDIT:

To clarify apparent misunderstanding: what I mean is that people don't suddenly, spontaneously coordinate in large groups. It always requires an external influence that will align the default, short-term human thinking with the goals of the group at large. That influence can either push people into coordination (e.g. governments enforcing laws), or pull them (charismatic leaders). But without that influence, coordination generally doesn't happen - it doesn't work "by itself".

> Humans don't coordinate like this.

I don't think this statement is true. Rather state: "Humans don't coordinate like this by itself". If there is an external event/charismatic leader this can easily happen: For example when Steve Jobs presented a new iGadget, there was a lot coordination between humans. Or when BitKeeper suddently decided to withdraw free use, suddenly there was a mass migration of programmers to develop DVCSs and to move from central ones (in particular SVN) to distributed ones. What is missing in the war against DRM is an external event and/or charismatic leader.

Yeah, "by itself" is what I meant.

> Humans don't coordinate like this.

Except, they do. That's what Unions do in job negotiations, what consumer associations do to fight companies, and why government-enforced consumer protection laws exist.

No, they don't, as you explained - in all the cases there needs to be a central coordinating authority to make it worth it to change the default behaviour.

I wonder if some kind of anti-DRM petition against it could be useful and effective at countering the various lobbies that actively try to pass pro-DRM laws.

I have yet to find a pro-DRM consumer; in general, people defend it when it's in their interest. ie, DRM for no one but me.

> I have yet to find a pro-DRM consumer

Every person who buys something that is DRMed is a pro-DRM consumer. Markets don't care about soap-box oratories, but only about money (this also means that if you want to know what someone really stands for, just follow their money trail).

That's bullshit, because it assumes binary choice. People may hate DRM, but still prefer DRM to nothing at all (or to perceived risk of legal problems). Hell, they may not even know that DRM is a thing - as I suspect is the case with e.g. most of the Netflix subscribers.

It's like saying one doesn't care about healthy food, because one's buying the cheapest stuff in the cheapest store. But the real reason for this "revealed preference" is that one is poor, and has other necessities to spend money on.

Improved pay or conditions is considered more important than whether Netflix uses DRM.

With Netflix it is explicitly a lease. That's the sort of scenario when DRM is now acceptable.

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