DRM will not have any impact on that. Someone will come along, and make a video-grabbing utility that bypasses the DRM. Also, many of the content is already available via bittorrent.
DRM is pointless. But perhaps you are right about "browser vendors refusing to cooperate" not being the best possible approach. However, do you know what is?
For video, people don't download it and take it with them (typically), they either play from their computer or from a set top box or smart TV. So there is no market forces that would give the movie studios any incentive to do non-DRM.
Ironically, this scenario just got more unlikely, thanks to EME now being a standard and thus available for everyone... Hooray for web standards!
We got away from it with audio in part because a typical audio product such as a music single or short audiobook can viably be produced and sold DRM-free at a price so low that it's hardly worth anyone looking for it elsewhere even if they could find it literally for free. Unfortunately, the same economics don't work in most other markets.
I said kinda of because not all sign with big three and further more there are so many independent artists out there releasing to YouTube or Apple iTune or Soundcloud on their own).
(Disclaimer: work in a music company)
Did we? Look at Apple Music, Spotify, and other subscription music services. They all have DRM.
And Amazon. And Google Play music. And band-camp. Etc etc.
In fact, I don't know a single place on the entire internet which still sells DRMed music. Such a thing simply ceased to exist.
Imagine if we could make the same happen for video. That would be real nice.
Download should be DRM free for free for vidéo that's true but don't blame Netflix for using DRM on a streaming service as every music streaming service does that too.
Indeed I think studios could reduce pirating to baseline (people who can't afford anyway) in a split second should they understand that people are willing to pay for a fair priced streaming service like Netflix. They just need to open up their catalogs like music majors finally did as an average wallet can hardly sustain a dozen different subscriptions in order to have a decent movie catalog.
They all just switched to DRMed streaming services.
Technicalities aside: Also I like to think that buying albums (even if I stream them later on) makes the artist more money. And I want to support the artists I appreciate as much as I can.
As a very frequent music buyer, I'd say the situation is very comfortable and user-friendly and I'd wish to see the same for video content.
Guess which industry watched how that happened REALLY REALLY closely?
The music industry was falling apart by the time they gave up on DRM, the video industry is still very strong and had time to learn where all the mistakes were made that lead to DRM free content.
They got in bed with Apple, and at first they were happy with that -- Apple showed that offering a legal way to download music would succeed, so long as it was A) convenient, B) had a suitably large catalog and C) was priced in a way customers saw as fair.
And the result was Apple became a major player in the market, to the point that the record labels started getting scared of what Apple could now force them to do. So they needed to give Apple a competitor. Except... Apple wasn't about to license its Apple-specific DRM scheme to that competitor, and wasn't going to install the competitor's DRM scheme on Apple devices. Which left them with no way to introduce a serious competitor other than to go DRM-free so purchased music would be playable on all the popular devices, including Apple's. Thus, Amazon got to start selling DRM-free music (and eventually Apple got to sell it too).
I suspect sooner or later the book industry will have to go DRM-free to break Amazon's ebook stranglehold, in much the same way.
But video... is different. There isn't a monopolish player in the online video market. There are multiple competing services, some doing purchase and some doing temporary rental and some doing streaming and some doing combinations of multiple options, and there's nobody emerging with power to dictate to movie/TV studios the way Apple emerged in music or Amazon did in ebooks. Which suggests DRM on video is going to be with us for a while no matter what.
And video is one area where I have some sympathy for attempts to control access: the video market is quite young compared to music or books, and has had the short-term rental as a key segment of its market for roughly as long as it's existed. And this makes some sense, as video content tends to have less long-term re-use value: listening to a song multiple times, and re-reading a book multiple times, both seem to be much more common than watching a movie multiple times. So providing a reduced-price option which limits the number of times or amount of time of watching makes business sense. I'm unsure how to reconcile that with hardcore anti-DRM positions, since some type of access control is necessary to enable a rental market.
I wonder about this, because the fact is that I really LIKE Amazon's system. It doesn't matter where music comes from, I listen to it over and over and usually listen to each song totally.
But with books, it takes more than 3 minutes to read. The fact that all my stuff (Kindle App, Kindle, website) know my place and sync all that stuff is very handy. It's the main reason I use Kindle over physical books.
If you load non-DRMed eBooks onto Kindle my understanding is you don't get that functionality for them and I'm guessing no one would have the power to force Amazon to implement that feature. The end result is that Amazon's DRMed books may be more appealing to me than DRM free options from other places.
As for breaking their monopoly.... Apple tried and the government smacked them down for it.
...which is crazy, especially for HD video. Why use the bandwidth every time you want to watch something when storage is so much cheaper?
I've always rented the movies I've watched because I know I won't watch them again, so the savings is win on the whole.
I guess there's something to be said for TV shows, as people often watch those over. I generally don't watch TV series, the exception being a couple Netflix series that friends have begged me to watch, so I don't have too much of an opinion there.
Fun story: Not very long ago, I bought a copy of a documentary using the latter model.
Another person with whom I was going to watch the documentary had visited their site and seen what movie services it was on. I trusted that info at first without checking the documentary's own site. I got very annoyed about the movie services having the title geoblocked in my country (even when a movie service had presence here and in a neighboring country and the rights for both countries are typically sold as a bundle and the neighboring country had it available!).
Then I looked at the site of the documentary myself. And indeed, for the price of the Blu-Ray version, I could buy a full-HD .mp4 without DRM to download.
So I paid and downloaded the .mp4 plus .mp4s for all the Blu-Ray extras. And I downloaded a .srt file for the subtitles.
The Linux box I had connected to my TV couldn't do full HD well in software but could via VAAPI. However, the player that supported VAAPI was supposed to support .srt but didn't actually support at least this .srt file.
In the end, we watched it by pluggin in a more performant Windows laptop doing the whole thing in software.
Conclusion: This is what we always said we wanted. However, when it was there, I didn't expect it to be there and assumed I had to find the title on one of the big-name services instead of navigating to the documentary's own site. The UX of getting stuff to work was less smooth than with the locked-down streaming services.
What I don't do anymore is to download video or music and then just keep it around on a hard disk just in case I want to watch it again. At least in my case storage is actually far more expensive than bandwidth, both in monetary value and time spent maintaining things.
When digital music downloads started record companies demanded DRM. They agreed to a model with iTunes of $0.99 per song. They chafed against this model and wanted pricing tiers. Jobs was willing to give them this but the price was to go DRM free.
Jobs could get away with this for two reasons. First, he was Steve Jobs. Second, the record industry had unwittingly created a virtual music download monopoly in iTunes.
I personally use Spotify because streaming is incredibly convenient and there isn't much you can buy but can't stream. I use Netflix and Ahbo Now for the same reason.
I'd never "buy" DRMed content so music would be fine. Video not so much. I personally don't have as much of an issue with DRM on streaming content.
"The music industry didn't go DRM free because they hated DRM; they went DRM free because they were fearful of the leverage Apple was gaining with their iTunes + FairPlay + iPod combination. Apple’s DRM created this lock, and it became so successful that the music industry went with the lesser of two evils (songs locked to Apple’s iPod monopoly vs. the distribution of DRM-free music) and chose to distribute DRM-free music...
http://fortune.com/2014/12/14/re-thinking-steve-jobs-thought...
You say "Jobs was willing to give them this but the price was to go DRM free", but why would he do that if DRM was good for Apple, it's what locked this market to iPods? Doesn't make sense to me. The music industry had to go DRM free (with Amazon, for example) because that was the only alternative way to sell music that would play on iPods.
Here goes a ~10yo tidbit from SJ [0]. Whether you take it at face value, see it as a PR trick, or anything in between is up to you.
> Apple was able to negotiate landmark usage rights at the time, which include allowing users to play their DRM protected music on up to 5 computers and on an unlimited number of iPods. Obtaining such rights from the music companies was unprecedented at the time, and even today is unmatched by most other digital music services. However, a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store.
> [...] only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.
> The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.
> Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080107121341/http://www.apple....
I really wonder how they could have been so stupid.
If this is so, why would Netflix have JUST added the download feature last quarter? Obviously there's some demand for storage-based playback.
The point of enforcing DRM is not to prevent piracy, but rather to flex their market clout and demonstrate control. As long as they put up moderate barriers to ripping, and as long as they have legal sanction to suppress productized piracy, the steady stream of new must-have content allows them to throw their weight around. Licensing streaming without DRM is a slippery slope that decreases the perceived value of their content. Small distributors will do it because they need to make whatever money they can, big distributors will never do it because it damages their brand.
Protecting media copyright isn't a black or white thing like crypto. It's about compromises to drive behavior and consumer spending with convenience.
1. People who have access to the content can usually see it over and over again (when they have a subscription to a service like Netflix). DRM will do nothing here.
2. People who don't have access to the content can't even see the DRM'ed version of the file, so DRM will do nothing here either.
3. People who want to pirate (illegally distribute) the content have advanced tools and knowledge to circumvent DRM, so DRM is of no use here again.
For instance, I didn't have access to netflix content, and then I signed up for a netflix account and paid them money, and now I do have access.
So you're saying people could move to another jurisdiction to be able to watch their favorite show on Netflix? Yeah, that truly sounds like freedom to me. Or am I misinterpretating you?
It's also true that some people don't live in such places. But that doesn't matter. You said that DRM serves no purpose. For some it may not. But for some people it does.
Sure it will. It will stop people writing a script to download as much as they can get away with in a single month and then cancelling since they have enough content to keep them going for several more months without paying for them.
3. People who want to pirate (illegally distribute) the content have advanced tools and knowledge to circumvent DRM, so DRM is of no use here again.
That is a big assumption, and in many cases not a correct one. The major online DRM systems today are fairly robust, and if anyone has a crack for some of them, they're keeping their cards very close to their chests. The leaks of major movies that you find on torrent sites and the like are usually from other sources.
And yes, the value of much of my time is effectively zero. The same is true for most people.
Also, some modern watermarking techniques can survive conversions like this, so if anyone is making a habit of recording content from a service using watermarking and redistributing it on a scale that justifies taking serious action, it'll be pretty easy to prove who it was when the lawsuit comes up.
How many compromised netflix accounts do you think are floating around? At some point the bits have to actually go to a display device as well, which can always be tapped.
However, you don't just get to conveniently avoid taking any responsibility when there are videos being distributed that are specifically linked to an account you signed up for that clearly said you couldn't redistribute the content you got through it, just because there's some vaguely possible alternative that might have once happened somewhere maybe.
Really? How would you do that, exactly?
If you're looking online and find camcorder copies of videos that were served to a specific customer at a specific time, as confirmed by the watermarking, and your server logs show that that stream was sent to the customer's usual IP address at the time in question, what are the odds that they were the victim of a carefully crafted hack of the kind you're implying, and not just someone who set up a camcorder to record from their own account?
Wireless isn't very secure, you're mileage may vary on the encryption mechanism but here is a guide to hacking WPA networks (with WEP it takes seconds):
http://www.hackingtutorials.org/wifi-hacking-tutorials/how-t...
From there you can try a range of known exploits and gain admin access to a PC, after that it's game over, they can run what they want, when the want. There is no careful crafting necessary, the process can be largely automated.
We aren't talking camcorder copies, but exact digital replicas from the netflix stream.
In any case, merely compromising WiFi won't get you someone's Netflix account. The Netflix data itself, including the credentials, are all encrypted.
As for taking over someone's PC, that's far beyond the average pirate, and you're talking about serious criminal offences on top of mere copyright infringement at that point.
And even then, we're not necessarily talking about being able to make exact copies of the stream. The whole point of hardware-backed DRM schemes is that just because you can run software on the PC, that doesn't mean you can access the unencrypted data stream.
So again, how exactly were you planning to do this? What you're talking about is far beyond the average script kiddie or casual pirate.
Remember, we were talking about convincing a court that it was more likely that someone did all of this and that was how a watermarked copy of protected content got out than that the person whose account was used to download that content then somehow shared it. A slight possibility that professional pirates who are also expert crackers chose that particular customer to pick on and left no evidence having done so isn't likely to be very convincing.
WPA2 is reasonably secure, but most home instances aren't set up well. They often have WPS enabled or a guessable password. Plus weaker set ups are still easy to find. Once you're on, redirect Netflix to a site to grab their info, record the stream from a computer outside their house. This is needlessly complex for what is needed, find a compromised Netflix(+email?), record.
You keep coming up with these claims about how easy this is, yet you also keep missing basic technical points about the system actually works. As I've said before, if there is actual evidence that someone's account was compromised then they can produce that as part of their defence in court. However, if content that is watermarked to a specific account turns up all over the Internet, that is evidence suggesting that the person in question has infringed copyright, and that does need a real defence if the rightsholder chooses to take legal action accordingly.
And you're still ignoring the major parts. What someone actually needs to do is much easier than all this, and Netflix has already lost if they end up in court with an innocent person.
If you want me to prove accounts have been compromised, look at all the account breaches over the past few years, think of how many reuse passwords.
Currently the burden of evidence is far too low. Something being done with my account, or even my machine is not evidence that I've done anything wrong.
> However, you don't just get to conveniently avoid taking any responsibility when there are videos being distributed that are specifically linked to an account you signed up for that clearly said you couldn't redistribute the content you got through it
How are we supposed to take responsibility for the actions of others? Should we be liable for crimes committed due to the insecurity of home networks? If so the computer industry has much bigger problems than DRM.
Yes, it is. It may not be absolute proof, but it most certainly is strong evidence.
How are we supposed to take responsibility for the actions of others?
Hopefully, you don't have to. But you also don't get to just invent some hypothetical bogeyman and use that as an excuse to ignore real evidence.
Perhaps. But this person can always claim that it was done by an external hacker. In fact, it can be done by an "external" hacker, and it will be if these guys are smart.
But the people who go through the trouble of that are exactly the people who wouldn't mind downloading pirated copies in the first place.
2b. People who don't have access to the content, but want to watch it for free.
You mean grabbing a DRM-free (i.e. pirated) copy so that I can watch it at my leasure and on devices of my choosing, even if I have access to it via other legit means?