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Comment by Toenex | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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 )

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

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.

> 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.

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