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Comment by tskaiser | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.)

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