DRM Is Toxic to Culture
meshedinsights.com
meshedinsights.com
IMO, DRM extends a presumption of scarcity. Hunters share their meat, whereas farmers guard their harvest. For the hunter, the kill is a short term abundance of value; if it isn't shared, it will spoil. For the farmer, the harvest is a long term store of value. Scavengers exploit the asymmetry of effort in which to obtain that value.
Once value became easy to copy, the symmetry of effort has shifted. As a result, culture is shifting with it. Freely copied recorded music shifted the value back to live concerts. Back to a short term abundance of value. When was the last time you posted on Twitter or FB? These are freshly hunted moments. Wait too long and that muse will spoil.
Overall, I get what you're saying and I don't disagree with the premise (though I'm ambivalent about the conclusion), but the word "shifted" doesn't usually mean "eradicated"--most live concerts net vanishingly little money and that's a real impact on creators. Whether that's a net societal good or not can be argued about, but "shifted", IMO, paints a misleading picture.
(Not rhetorical questions, I'm genuinely interested.)
The funny thing is, for a vast majority of bands there's almost no sense to sell their recorded music (in a digital form), only to give the fans the feeling of making a contribution.
[Addendum] For a perspective on independent musicians, here's Steve Albini: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-...
There is a vast qualitative difference between the output of ten thousand amateurs and one highly trained and exceptionally talented artist (working in whatever medium.)
This an immensely unfashionable idea. But the real problem with DRM isn't that it does or does not enable copying, but that it presupposes that artistic output is a commodity that can be copied.
In fact artistic output - considered as the cultural influence of an entire career, and not as a series of copyable files or performances - is not fungible.
Not all content creators are equal. If you want quality as opposed to quantity, you need to set up a feedback function that makes some effort to reward and support quality, based on a more sophisticated metric than a lowest-common-denominator unit sales count in a mass market.
This is even more true of science. Ten thousand PhDs do not add up to one Newton or Einstein.
And politics. Ten thousand mediocre politicians do not add up to one Nelson Mandela or Gandhi.
By the time everyone is having the DRM or no-DRM argument they've already missed the point - which is that commodifying cultural output as "content" for industrial distribution mechanisms (including live tours) is to misunderstand how culture propagates and evolves.
And if you can't invent a system that finds and rewards talent - without reducing every transaction to the vapid foolishness of markets - then your culture, science, politics, art, and general joy in invention will stagnate and eventually disappear.
DRM is barely a footnote here. It's nowhere close to being the main problem.
But does it? I thought one of the bigger arguments studios use is that art is not a commodity, hence licensing (enforced by DRM) and copyrights and please pay us.
> This is even more true of science. Ten thousand PhDs do not add up to one Newton or Einstein.
> And politics. Ten thousand mediocre politicians do not add up to one Nelson Mandela or Gandhi.
I'm less and less convinced of that. "Breakthrough discoveries" in sciences seem to be very incremental steps. That's, I think, the reason so many of those achievements were made simultaneously by different people in different parts of the world. When scientific knowledge reaches a given level, some discoveries become ripe for the taking, and they get plucked by whichever smart guy manages to figure it out first. I suspect the similar may be true of politics - even though history lessons tend to focus on individuals, it seems to me that big events were always much more about the environment than any individual decision.
That is to say, if anything, science is much bigger a commodity than creative arts - by very virtue of being constrained by reality. All practically useful maps of the same territory will look alike, after all.
> DRM is barely a footnote here. It's nowhere close to being the main problem.
I'm having trouble seeing what is the main problem you think about. If I try to do a root cause analysis of DRM, I always end up concluding the main problem is that content creators have to create content for a living - i.e. if creative work were to be entirely decoupled from monetary interests, more people would have access to more and better cultural works.
Scarcity on the production side is different and real, but I'm more optimistic. The primary problem seems to be allowing high quality creators to survive full time.
Increasingly, it seems to me that people do want to reward other people for stuff that they care about. To return to the song sharing example, I've now been exposed to a creator I might care about, and decide to support in some way.
However, this is very different to people wanting to pay rights-holders groups (in money, surveillance capabilities, or attention) for stuff that they're not sure if they care about yet.
The brightest future I can imagine involves platforms which facilitate transactions (designed by the creator) and discovery, while having no stake in the IP itself. And it seems possible.
However, there is an idea there. HN user https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=maxxxxx made a very astute observation as to why so many "industries" (rich people that control companies) are so adamant about ramming DRM down everyone's throats:
Copyright and IP (and probably real estate) are pretty much the only way for capitalists to make money the more things like internet, 3D printing, AI, robotics and so on are available to the masses. To me it's the only way to keep the current power structures intact so for a lot of powerful people copyright laws are probably the most important laws. They don't need the state for personal protection (they can pay for security guards instead of police) but they need the state for protecting their livelihood.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12514611
The system you propose to invent is redistribution of wealth and socialism: free education for those that want to advance their abilities, and universal basic income to allow them the time to express those abilities. Liberating knowledge from rent-seeking should be the prerogative of everyone that wants to improve the human condition and advance humanity.
> Copyright and IP (and probably real estate) are pretty much the only way for capitalists to make money the more things like internet, 3D printing, AI, robotics and so on are available to the masses
I tried to warn the capitalists, but they were too busy counting their $s from tracking you with AI and replacing your job with robots.
> Liberating knowledge from rent-seeking should be the prerogative of everyone that wants to improve the human condition and advance humanity.
A discussion of "knowledge" is important, but DRM is 99% about entertainment.
This only holds true if you start with the assumption that the output of those driven only by passion of the art is insufficient in either quantity or quality and must be supplemented with additional output driven by capitalism.
I know I don't know which is the "better" system, but I do believe a sincere discussion must be had along that spectrum ought to happen.
Isn't that obvious? "Passion for the art" is utterly incapable of creating something like a Pixar movie, which requires millions of dollars in compute costs.
This doesn't mean capitalism is the only funding source: maybe the government funds them, or crowdfunding, etc. But it should be obvious that modern appetites demand content that cannot be produced by a few passionate-but-broke individuals.
In the Marxian sense, artistic output is a commodity, however every subsequent copy is a commodity with very little value, depending on the value of the copying machine etc.
This is a long-term choice that I think both creators and consumers can make, but it probably won't happen as long as AT&T can make money off selling 4K copies of all Time Warner movies again, and as long as Disney never lets the copyright on Mickey Mouse expire. Copyright also has an important part to play in culture.
Social media is much better, and the cultural pay-off is much better in that what I create isn't being locked down and is available through APIs. Have you followed a twitter hashtag recently? People are as creative as ever. This does have it's own challenges as we saw in the last election. No substitutes for media literacy and good content...
But yes, it's definitely the case that the cultural idea that humans and corporations have the right to own a copyright for a length of time greater than the duration of any human life means that for 99.99% of all works, the effective duration of copyright truly is forever, which reinforces the idea that copyright should be forever. And if it's forever and it's "property" why shouldn't strong, user-hostile DRM exist? It's the barbed-wire, severe-tire-damage, border-wall of electronic media.
If intellectual property rights cease to exist, then there's no longer any legal basis to enforce the GPL and similar licenses and the Free Software ecosystem would collapse. Are you sure you want that?
EDIT: Replaced "open source" with "Free Software". My thanks to other posters for the correction. Yes, BSD-style open source would still survive.
I'm not sure what "share publicly" has to do with anything. GPL doesn't apply until you do share the software, and even then doesn't require you to do anything publicly.
Why is this? Because software is different from literature and visual arts. In a copyright-free world, once you copy a work of literature you have the whole work at your disposal to copy, modify and redistribute however you see fit. For music it's a bit different because you may need to reverse-engineer the music sheet, for example, but there's a lot you can do with just the recording of a piece of music.
With software, the only thing you could do is copying it, or try and modify the binary, because you still don't have the source code. Sure, you can reverse-engineer it (which is already legal in some situations in certain jurisdictions), but the software wouldn't be free in today's understanding of what many consider free software (i.e., software that respects the four freedoms outlined by the fsf). This means, you get your copy of, e.g., AutoCAD, but it would still be hard for you to modify it, because, despite the absence of copyright, you'd still have no way of getting source code to work on (unless someone leaks it).
So I'd say that, at least, absence of copyright wouldn't help with software. It will just create a situation where those who want to incorporate your source code into their products without publishing their source code will be able to do just that, and you'd have no recourse.
Right. And you can already refuse to accept a job if all the code you produce isn't open sourced. Good luck with that on most companies, though.
That being said, right to repair goes hand in hand with the abolition of IP to resolve these edge cases. The problem of not providing the manual to your distributed invention goes far beyond just intellectual property, and is largely an independent issue, but good right to repair legislation is all encompassing, and is a consumer protection that naturally fits with IP-less software as well.
I don't know about that. Most significant software packages require ongoing maintenance (bug fixes, security patches, compatibility with other software) and add new features over time. A one-time leak certainly would be damaging but not necessarily fatal since most businesses want to have assured support and upgrades.
And not to get sued into the ground.
After the leak, anyone can.
Prices would adapt to the reality, and the original vendor would have a hard time demanding the rates they are used to when suddenly faced with competition. Especially competition that kept changes open, which instills more confidence in consumers of the software.
You might as well be claiming that making private home ownership illegal would strengthen property rights.
In business, property rights seem to be seen primarily, if not only, as a money-making asset - if you own something then you can license it and thus make money from it.
It works well for media companies, which is why I feel their primary business is moving property rights and licenses around, with any end-user benefit being a side effect.
No sane person would agree to such state of affairs but somehow now because our books are digital it's all off a sudden okay with almost everyone?
In the case of DRM, many people have been talking about this problem for a long time. It's not a matter of consumers not listening, it's a matter of alternatives not developing in the market.
DRM in video games is a lesser problem as alternatives did develop. Steam, the #1 platform, doesn't enforce DRM. GOG and Humble Bundle have been running their platforms on mostly DRM-free games.
Who do you fault for alternatives not developing/not catching on in the ebooks/video world? Consumers for making the wrong choices? Companies for not trying hard enough? Governments for not regulating consumer rights?
Do you know the time limits for how long your games can run in Steam's offline mode?
You claim that DRM happens in this particular library. OK, and the practical consequences of that are...?
This DRM scheme is probably not very solid, though, as I recall replacement versions of steam_api.dll bundled with some bootleg titles.
So ... you should only take advice from people who put in extra effort to specifically reach you?
> constantly takes absolutist stances
The concept of an absolutist stance as an accusation is nonsense, as it's orthogonal to whether it's right. If you are not willing to compromise on slavery, you are taking an absolutist stance. So should people have fought for only partial slavery in order to not harm what they defended?
> Governments for not regulating consumer rights?
How about governments not destroying consumer rights by making it illegal to understand how your own computer works?
Meanwhile, absolutism, while not a proof, is a pretty powerful heuristic in the messy real world of economic policy. And yes, this is also a human rights issue, but mostly in the same way that a food or housing shortage is a human rights issue: the roots are economic.
Slavery in particular is a red herring. In almost any other question, compromise is the way to go, so bringing up the extreme case of slavery adds more heat than light.
And those are the people who have plenty of resources to tailor their message to you because they are funded by some marketing department and therefore are easiest to digest?
> Meanwhile, absolutism, while not a proof, is a pretty powerful heuristic in the messy real world of economic policy.
A heuristic for what exactly? That you shouldn't consider an argument at all?
> And yes, this is also a human rights issue, but mostly in the same way that a food or housing shortage is a human rights issue: the roots are economic.
I am not sure I understand this point, and maybe you can explain, but I think DRM is much closer to privacy and control over your own life as far as its human rights aspects go than to lack of resources.
> Slavery in particular is a red herring. In almost any other question, compromise is the way to go, so bringing up the extreme case of slavery adds more heat than light.
I disagree. Because the concept of "almost any other question" doesn't really make sense. How do you partition the world into distinct questions that you then somehow count to determine what percentage needs a compromise as the answer?
The questions that you actually ask yourself are not useful for this, because you don't ever ask the questions where the status quo is something that you find acceptable and where everyone else agrees with you. But for anything that you think is perfectly fine in this world, you could easily construct a hypothetical world in which our current status quo would be deemed absolutist. So, arguably, everything that you are ok with as it is is actually an absolutist position and not a compromise. Whether something is considered absolutist has absolutely nothing to do with the merits of the demand itself, but only with how far out it is from the current mainstream consensus. As soon as the consensus shifts, there is nothing absolutist about it anymore.
Also, you can trivially transform any absolutist demand into a compromise by simply replacing it with a completely crazy demand. I, for example, advocate for killing everyone who has ever said a positive word about DRM. But I would be willing to compromise to only outlaw DRM for the future, so I am not an absolutist, right?
Also, how is it even relevant that it is in almost every other question when you are trying to determine whether it is in the case of this specific question?
No.
> A heuristic for what exactly? That you shouldn't consider an argument at all?
No.
> How do you partition the world into distinct questions that you then somehow count to determine what percentage needs a compromise as the answer?
Sample the ones that come up in practice. We're all friends here, or should be, so it doesn't need to be perfectly formal.
> you don't ever ask the questions where the status quo is something that you find acceptable and where everyone else agrees with you
You sure know a lot about me. Oh wait, no you don't. I do my best to question things, which is all you can ask.
> Also, you can trivially transform any absolutist demand into a compromise by simply replacing it with a completely crazy demand.
Yes, lots of terrible things happen when you argue in bad faith. This isn't even the worst one.
> Also, how is it even relevant that it is in almost every other question when you are trying to determine whether it is in the case of this specific question?
Not much, which is another good reason not to bring up slavery. It's not relevant, which is basically all I was trying to say about it.
But?
> You sure know a lot about me. Oh wait, no you don't. I do my best to question things, which is all you can ask.
Which is besides the point. Whether it's all I can ask or not, it doesn't give you a useful answer. And yes, I am pretty sure I know about you that you are a human being, and therefore, general human psychology most likely applies, nothing more, nothing less.
Have you ever asked yourself whether it is a good compromise that your left thumb has not been removed when you were a child because of your hair color?
You haven't, right?
You haven't because it's just a completely crazy idea that there would never be any reason for you to consider it. One of presumably at the very least millions of equally crazy ideas that you could make up that you have never thought of, because, why would you? That is, except for the completely crazy idea that one should remove part of the genitals of children because of their gender. You probably have thought about that one, right?
And that is my point: The things that you have thought about are in no way a meaningfully representative sample of the set of all facts about how society operates, simply as a result of basic human psychology.
> Yes, lots of terrible things happen when you argue in bad faith. This isn't even the worst one.
Yeah, it's even worse when people reject arguments as "absolutist", you can't really get much more bad faith than that.
> Not much, which is another good reason not to bring up slavery. It's not relevant, which is basically all I was trying to say about it.
Well, except it is. That is, not slavery itself is relevant, but what is relevant is the way how people thought and argued about slavery before it became the consensus that slavery is bad. And if you agree that they were wrong about slavery being a good thing, then maybe it would be a good idea to understand how their thinking went wrong at the time. To understand how they convinced themselves that slavery was the right thing to do. Because if the method of reasoning that they used lead them to the conclusion that slavery was a good idea, then that probably means that their method of reasoning was unreliable, right?
So, if we can understand how they arrived at their conclusion, we can maybe use that understanding to see whether there are any conclusions that we arrive at today using the same kind of reasoning, and to then examine whether those conclusions maybe are also unreliable, and possibly wrong.
Whether slavery was in any way comparable to whatever conclusion we are examining now is completely irrelevant to this. The point is not to determine whether something is as bad as slavery. The point is to determine whether the method we use to conclude that something is right is the same that people used to conlude that slavery was right. And the reason why slavery is used as the reference for this is not because it was terrible, the reason is that it's something that is familiar. People nowadays generally have some understanding of how people back then justified slavery. Noone knows how the unfair distribution of bread in the year 1537 in some spanish village was justified, so it's a useless reference point, even if it might be a closer analogue to whatever we are discussing now.
If this debate were taking place just prior to the civil war, there would be significant debate over whether slaves had human rights, and many making the economic case for slavery.
RMS is trying to tell you the same thing right now: that DRM is a tool that takes away some basic human rights, and instead of taking a moment to think about it, you simply dismiss it out of hand merely because you can see an economic case for it.
So take a few moments to consider the worst possible outcomes of adopting DRM, and whether history will regard the economic case for DRM as harshly as it regards the economic case for slavery.
Also, you yourself haven't made an argument that DRM is anywhere near as bad a problem as slavery was. It's nowhere close, and to imply otherwise is to cheapen the suffering of slaves in America. Is that enough of an argument that it's a red herring?
This judgment was made with perfect hindsight in one case, and no hindsight in the other, so the conclusion is immediately suspect.
Like I said, consider the worst possible nightmare for DRM, and then judge whether the comparison is actually fair.
Finally, whether RMS is the best source on it is itself a red herring. If he makes a reasonable case for a nightmare outcome, his perspective is absolutely worth considering when weighing the pros and cons of DRM, regardless of how absolutist you think he is.
What I completely don't understand is how people seem to derive from that that he owes them a certain style of communication before they agree with the content of his arguments, even though they seem to somehow understand the problem, and that the problem affects them just as much as him.
No matter how much of a nutjob or asshole or whatever else someone appears to be (or possibly is), that's not a reasonable reason for rejecting their argument once you have understood it, against all odds, especially so when they are arguing for something that is in your interest.
I think the problem is the content itself, not its delivery. RMS seems unable to separate the good arguments from the stupid ones. For example, don't have kids because of overpopulation (good argument), and also don't have kids because parents have to do whatever someone with money tells them to do instead of what's right (breathtakingly stupid argument).
The life RMS has chosen to live is inspiring on some level, but has also warped his perspective, and therefore his arguments often miss the mark.
I used to feel the same way quite a long time ago before I sat back and asked myself "what is the root cause of my distaste for his method of communicating his ideals?" I found that it was because I hadn't fully grasped his views on an emotional level. This argument that "even though RMS was right, the way he said it was reason not to listen to him" falls back to an appeal to emotion -- the fact he has very strong convictions is not relevant to the discussion of whether his arguments are valid.
But to explain why he is so absolutist, look at things from his point of view. From his view, all proprietary software is an injustice with no exceptions. Any attempt to take away user freedom is similarly an injustice. Now, if you fully accepted that view, how would you act as RMS? Would you make concessions on your sense of morality and ethics? Personally, I wouldn't and I don't.
> In the case of DRM, many people have been talking about this problem for a long time.
And RMS has been talking about the more general problem of user freedom since the very beginning. Not sure what your point here is. RMS is the single reason why we have the free software movement, and that movement came from a philosophical view that is fundamentally inseparable from the other pro-user-freedom sub-movements.
> Steam, the #1 platform, doesn't enforce DRM.
That's blatantly false. steam_api.dll implements DRM.
> Who do you fault for alternatives not developing/not catching on in the ebooks/video world? Consumers for making the wrong choices? Companies for not trying hard enough? Governments for not regulating consumer rights?
Governments pandering to publishers for several decades in strengthening the power of copyright through WIPO and similar treaties. Those publishers then had an enormous amount of power over artists. Combine this with the propaganda campaign by those publishers of "intellectual property"[1] to indoctrinate people into thinking that the ethics of property are at all applicable to things that aren't property.
So, at the end of the day, it's the fault of publishers making the government write laws that then unfairly strengthens the publishers' grip on the industry (where the industry is basically any artistic industry), and then using that control to convince the public that the status-quo is entirely justified and not unethical.
By the way, publishers mistreat artists all the time. So literally the only people that benefit from this system is publishers, not the people who actually make the things that you enjoy.
It's optional for the developer in most cases (apparently writing code without it can be harder if you want to interface with Steam's APIs[1]), but not for the user.
Not to mention that the majority of developers do use Steam's DRM, so it's a bit of a moot point. Even if they don't force developers to use it, they are hardly an "alternative".
> there is no drm free content on iTunes.
That is absolutely false -- all music on iTunes is DRM-free. That may have been true before 2009, but it is not true today. In 2007 Steve Jobs wrote an open letter about Apple's use of DRM and announced they would stop doing it, and in 2009 they had signed all of the necessary agreements with publishers to make all iTunes music DRM-free[2]. It is believed this was in reaction to an anti-trust lawsuit that started in 2005 (that eventually ruled in Apple's favour in 2014 partly because of their decision to no longer use DRM).
Since 2009, iTunes allows you to download any music you've ever purchased as a DRM-free mp3 (which is now patent-encumbered as well). Apple Music is an unfortunate reversal to that previous position (it uses DRM), and interestingly came out the year after the lawsuit was finished.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1v3dej/im_an_indie... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPlay
A neighborhood library lending books out to people, under this DRM-mentality scheme, would be illegal, because everyone should have to buy their own copy of the books, not borrow from others.
How did the libraries get by this? Do they agree with the publisher to pay a premium price for the book, seeing as they'll lend it out? Or were the publishers OK with this model because it meant more exposure of their content to users, who may in turn want to own their own copy?
I think the answer is, libraries predate publishing industry. They existed much longer than print. Governments worldwide managed to secure the role of libraries while publishers were still figuring out their business model. OTOH, audio and video recording, and all the digital media, popped up when publishers already knew how to make money with creative works - hence they managed to secure their moat quicker than society could respond.
By making the DRM-protected purchase the easiest, most frictionless method of initial acquisition, consumers are encouraged (often without realizing the risks) to buy DRM protected content, simply by being presented with an opportunity to do so.
I think the only thing we can really do to solve this problem is what we've been doing: educate our fellows, shout it from the rooftops, and work to make consumers aware of the rights they're giving up when they purchase content protected by DRM.
It is still not wholly your own property. It depends on the mires of the draconian copyright system, but there are things I can buy and then duplicate - if I buy a generic pill of a drug, I am fully within my right to use that pill to produce more pills like it, and nobody can sue me for infringing their IP.
Probably the scariest thing is that probably none of us can even reasonably conceive of how the world would be without this spectre hanging over everything. It influences our brain development extraordinarily fundamentally to contextualize that nothing we interact with is truly our own to learn from, because someone else almost always owns the idea behind it.
Is that true or can you just not sell the copies?
"You cannot take passages from that book and reuse them as your own, unless given permission by the author."
Again, pretty sure that's only when selling things.
The difference, of course, is that it is very hard/impossible to break the restrictions set by DRM, whereas the restrictions set by leases are hard to enforce.
The problem that I see is that the language around DRM needs to change - you aren't buying that Kindle book, you are renting it from Amazon under a digitally-enforced lease.
So DRM is protecting property - it's just not protecting consumers' property, since they effectively don't actually own the media in the first place.
But the reality is that there is no such thing as "owning" a copyrightable work of expression like Bob Dylan's lyrics. Instead, some people have temporary legal control over who may copy those lyrics and for what purpose. There is no moral or legal sense in which someone else "owns" those words on the page in front of me and I am not in any way "leasing" or "borrowing" the words. However, they may still try to restrict what I can do with those words.
So DRM is about technologically limiting others' rights, usually in some way above and beyond legal limitations. For example, if you buy a DVD, you legally have the right to make copies for personal use, or e.g. use 30 seconds of footage in your own work of art. But DRM may prevent you from exercising those rights.
However, I completely agree that it is misleading of companies to use the word "buy" when what you're acquiring remains under their control, not yours.
I think we are on the same page about the questionable moral standing of copyright for digital artifacts.
No, it doesn't. Copyright has concepts such as fair use. DRM does not enforce fair use.
Not even remotely.
At best, copyright law sets conceptually equivalent restrictions on licensed works as leases set on rented property.
DRM sets conceptually equivalent restrictions on infested media as a gun-wielding robot that's installed in rented property with cameras in every corner that feed into the robot and with all of that remote-controlled by the landlord would set restrictions on your use of the rented property. Oh, and also, it's a criminal offense to try to do anything that would hinder the robot in doing its job.
> So DRM is protecting property
Just as a ban on private home ownership would be protecting property, yes. But not of the people that the propaganda is directed at.
I've gotta say that 10 years on HN has taught me not to trust the general opinions of hackers on legal matters and copyright especially, because few of them are interested in familiarizing themselves with the history and economic developments of the subject, which makes discussion about it almost impossible.
In other words, you might be surprised at what would be enforceable legally if all cases could be fully worked out; it would likely be better than you expected in some regards and worse in others. DRM enforcement isn't isomorphic to legal enforceability, but it's a reasonably good approximation.
I am not arguing in defense of the copyright system we have, which I would like to drastically change. I'm just saying that I think you're underestimating the legal complexities. This isn't your fault; I feel our legal institutions are failing partly because they have become so ridiculously complex and impenetrable to most people.
I actually meant legally, not practically, that's why I wrote "legally". As in, you could not convince a judge to decide in your favour.
> DRM enforcement isn't isomorphic to legal enforceability, but it's a reasonably good approximation.
Nope, it's absolutely not.
How would you legally prevent someone from diagnosing and fixing their own tractor if there were no DRM to do it for you?
A good place to start the analysis would be an assumption that all software is freely copyable, so suddenly nobody wants to pay for any of it other than for bespoke purposes. Consider how projects like NumPy and so on are only now getting funding after becoming so widely used that people are dependent on them and it takes a threat to retire from further work on it to make people put their hands in their pockets.
If you're against copyright, then you need to be for something like a basic income and universal service availability, to create the conditions in which creativity has an opportunity to flourish free of market pressures. Otherwise you're just saying you want media to be free as in beer. The biggest barrier to creativity is not the inability to iterate on existing work. People already do that, it's fun and some of the results are great, but innovation is more complex than that.
What made you think that I objected to copyright?
I think the comparison is entirely fitting if you remember that in this model you (the consumer) don't own the property and therefore DRM is not about protecting your rights either.
Viewed from the perspective of a non-owner, the effects of DRM look quite similar to the effects of physical property protection.
People are working on fields, in factories and in offices they don't own, with equivalent they don't own and produce things they don't own. They live in space they don't own and increasingly use transportation they don't own. I don't find it hard to imagine at all they'll also consume entertainment and knowledge they don't own.
Continuing the private home ownership example, the landlords would certainly see it as a bold defense of (their) property.
I'd point out that generally copyright protects only executions of an idea, not the idea itself. This is pretty much on what for example the existence of GNU and Linux hinge on; they implement the idea of UNIX despite AT&T claiming copyright on UNIX.
Patents, on the other hand, do extend to ideas, and are completely different story.
Upon searching, every book store told me, I would need to install some Adobe stuff on my computer to read the file. I am neither a fan of Adobe nor of the idea of being locked in to an application to view a book. After realizing that there is no other digital way, I simply bought the printed version and waited the two days it took to ship.
It's a very frustrating situation for someone who just wants to read something.
Apparently this makes me a pirate, despite having paid for the product and not having any intention of releasing it.
To check the ethical box, I would've just used the pirated e-book version immediately and ordered a hard-copy.
I basically have to choose my golden cage. That's frustrating.
Just buy the book, do whatever Adobe wants, then run DeDRM [0] on it and enjoy your DRM free ePub.
Since the advent of permanent copyright there is no more commons. The commons stopped in 1923. Disney will continue to buy the US government into guaranteeing there is no common heritage of America for as long as they are able.
It will be interesting to see how, in a thousand years, (hopefully) scholars of the time will reflect on how systemic the damage was to American society to artificially constrain creativity so fundamentally and for so long. It is human nature to take your experiences and reinterpret them in new ways. That is how creativity is defined. But copyright and IP, especially in perpetuity, prevent that, all for what is claimed to be the protection of profits by the original creators, even for decades after the creators are dead.
The current multi-billion media conglomerates grew at times when being able to copy a piece of content from TV was encoded in the LAW. Content providers earned billions of dollars at times when you could press REC on your VCR and ("THE HORROR" now every content provider shill screams) rewatch the show many times and (GASP) give the tape to your friends to watch too!
What exactly was so horrible at being able to rewatch, store and borrow a movie to a friend that now seems to completely incomprehensible to people here on HN and outside? What kind of irreversible damage is done by existence of torrents when WB, Netflix and other content providers earn record profits?
Why are we even debating DRM as something that has a right to exist and helps anyone?
EDIT: Ergh, sorry for the tone, by DRM is something that really touches my nerves a bit.
TV and Movie industry spent considerable effort tackling exactly that type of home taping. You might want to have a look at Disney, who wanted to have "single use" video tapes that would need to be sent back to a factory to be rewound, or special DVDs that were sent in sealed packs and would oxidise to uselessness within 24 hours of being opened.
It's not that they're trying to stop mass distribution, they're trying to prevent you from rewatching content later (shows regularly disappear from Netflix and similar services), prevent you from showing them or sharing to their friends (does any service let you share a show from an ipad to another ipad?) or even let you watch anything when you're offline (how many services let you download their full catalog for later watching?).
I still agree with you, though; times change, and nobody "deserves" business-model protection. The legacy copyright industries already get massive state subsidies through the legal enforcement of artificial monopolies - degrading everyone's computing to prop them up further is insane.
Isn't that kind of irrelevant though?
Whether a business still makes money is not an argument as to whether torrenting their stuff would be OK.
A physical business (e.g. clothes store) might make millions even though people steal stuff, but we wouldn't consider that as making stealing OK.
(And I don't care for the "copying is not stealing" argument. It might or it might not be, but I'm making an analogy here, and the core of it is: whether a business is still coming out on top, making money, etc, doesn't mean another practice against them is OK).
A similar example: warranties. In EU at least, we demand that companies invest money to make their hardware work at least 24 months without issues. Even though this costs corporations money and they'd probably prefer your TV to die in 24 hours because that would increase their revenue flow. It benefits the society at large and makes life better for everyone at the expense of some cash flow of businesses.
I see DRM as the same kind of issue - it actively ruins cultural experience of society at large, forces locked down devices on people, demands that culture must not be experienced repeatedly and forces people to become renters of content. I'd prefer businesses to lose some profits due to piracy instead of having to tolerate all the horse shit DRM pushes on us. And my talk about profits is all about that - even though piracy exists, businesses still can generate huge profits. As such I argue that thus DRM isn't necessary at all considering all horrible consequences it brings.
But it should be in whether or not we spend lots of resources in helping them to increase their profits further.
> A physical business (e.g. clothes store) might make millions even though people steal stuff, but we wouldn't consider that as making stealing OK.
But at the same time we also don't attempt to prevent all theft, right? I mean, we absolutely could take tax money and have police officers strip you naked whenever you leave some store to make sure that thefts don't happen. We don't. Why not?
Those DMCA takedowns, for example, need to be processed by hosting platforms and ISPs, so they have to pay people for doing so, and that's then necessarily part of the price that you pay for ISP service, or that, I dunno, youtube video makers get less revenue from their videos.
Just because the state doesn't spend tax money on it, doesn't mean it doesn't consume public resources.
And much more insidious are the opportunity costs, because they are more or less invisible: For example, the DMCA makes it a criminal offense to circumvent any technology that was intended to "protect copyright" or something to that effect. Now, there might be the opportunity for who knows what kind of technical innovation if that wasn't illegal. People could possibly build all kinds of nifty devices that allow you to use media in new ways or circumstances that would be perfectly legal as far as copyright is concerned--but people don't because that would be criminal. How much value for society is thus not created as a side effect of this ban? That value is also part of what we spend on enforcing copyright.
Or how about security holes in DRM software? As it's illegal to reverse-engineer DRM software, security researchers don't touch DRM software. But essentially all software that security researchers have ever looked at does have vulnerabilities. So, who knows how many people have been hacked via vulnerabilities in DRM software? How many people's data was stolen that way? Maybe people were the victim of identity theft due to vulnerabilities in DRM software? All of that also would be part of the resources that we spend on this.
Or what about when John Deere holds the data hostage that the tractors that they supposedly sold to farmers collects? And people aren't even allowed to swap out the tractor's software for their own due to DRM and the above criminalization of circumventing it?
You have to consider all the negative consequences that the existence of those rules has, because that all comes out of our collective wealth in order to prop up their business model.
Is that true though?
Because laws against theft (physical theft of actual products I mean, let's not get into whether "copying" is theft here) are a business-model protection too.
As are most business laws (e.g. contract law).
Why pay at a restaurant when you can just walk out and run for it? Isn't making it illegal a "business model protection"?
So what makes some business models (selling physical stuff) more protectable?
Mandates that computers must respect special rules based on legal definitions are laws that tell me how my machines must operate and how you must build machines. They are arbitrary restrictions the degrade capabilities (make the machines less valuable) solely for the purpose of enabling a few industries to be lazy and not figure out how to be relevant in a changing world.
If you want to go down that path, you're going to be "picking winners and losers" - something I hear we are supposed to dislike. Which business models "deserve" protections?
- Do long-haul truckers "deserve" to keep working in the face of self-driving trucks?
- Do corner groceries "deserve" protection from Whole Foods/Amazon or Walmart's logistics innovations?
> So what makes some business models [...] more protectable?
As a descriptive matter, it appears that that's closely related to one's investment in lobbying.
I'd say that should not be up to the availability of the relevant technology to decide, but up to society.
Just because we can obliterate or replace something doesn't automatically mean we should, or that it would be better for us if we did.
So I'm perfectly OK with society picking winners and losers, and not OK with a jungle race where "invisible hands" and market forces (including the one's people forget, like lobbies, monopolies and under the table deals) decide.
Uh, I specifically called out lobbies and monopolies.
And in theory I agree with you. In practice, "society" doesn't serve that role. The "invisible hands" are exactly the actors doing the picking.
Don't get me wrong - I love me some theory, it is so much cleaner than the real world. But we don't get to live there.
Is that because it's impossible and unpractical, or because we are conditioned for the current situation?
Same story with DRM - yes, piracy IS illegal. But DRM as a response is hugely disproportionate to damage done, causes huge issues to LEGITIMATE buyers. What DRM proponents defend is attacking paying customers with restrictions, lockdowns and costs to hunt a rather small profit loss (the relative smallness of lost sales due to piracy have been repeatedly demonstrated in these last years).
Stores don't do invasive things because it doesn't make business sense, not because the legal system particularly enjoins them.
Like if I opened a candy shop that required agreeing to an NDA for entry, what law do you think would make me let people in without signing the NDA? It might not be enforced, but there isn't anything that would stop me from requiring the signature for entry (other than it being silly).
Many movie pirates aren't aware of the laws (eg. kids)
I don't particularly care about entering into a debate about what kind of abuse of people US laws allows.
The disproportionate effect DRM has on paying customers doesn't seem to be obscure or difficult to think about though.
Analogies generally don't serve this debate well. Saying DRM is like physically invasive security to your person is just as ridiculous as Studios' claims that piracy is the same as theft. Both attempt to communicate real issues, but are ridiculously inaccurate.
There has been criticism of the prevalent model too (e.g. from the "property is theft" type to money-less sharing communities etc).
Consider this thought experiment: we invented Star Trek replicators and made them as expensive as computers or microwave ovens. Retail business would, and IMO rightfully should, literally stop existing that very moment. Trying to restrict replicating everyday object would be wrong, and would go against the very nature of replicator-enabled reality.
This is to show that laws should align with the reality they exist in, instead of making lives of the many worse to make lives of the few a bit easier.
I don't see why it would be inherently "wrong". Wrong is for humans to decide.
Consider this alternate though experiment: we invented a device giving people the ability to murder anyone in the world without anybody having proof of who did it. Would it be wrong trying to restrict that machine's sales and use, and would it go against the very nature of killing-without-evidence-machine-enabled reality?
Because it prevents people from creating wealth for themselves in order to make sure that other people can profit from selling to them, thus creating a privilege that hurts the common good. Aka "protection of a business model".
> Wrong is for humans to decide.
So ... you are not human?
In your example, it wouldn't be wrong, because this machine enables severe violation of one of the fundamental things people agree on - the wish of individuals to live, and live without fear of getting killed. On one level up, for humans as social animals, there are pretty universal concepts of fairness, that seem to include personal property rights (communism tried to do away with that, and it created a disaster) and the desire for reward for one's work. Societies tend to enshrine those desires in laws. We also have desires for sharing and social expectations that it's good for people with surplus to share with people who have less than they need. Moreover, the concept of helping those in need is also pretty fundamental as humans go.
I bring it up because your example with murder-machine deals with a different set of concepts than the replication machine.
The replicator example was meant to show that retail business model doesn't make sense when there's zero marginal cost of producing and distributing a good past the very first item - retail stops bringing any value to customers. Trying to artificially limit replicators to save retail would be wrong, both by going against the fundamental concepts of society and by making something trivial and good much more difficult to perform.
By the same line of thinking, it's worth considering whether DRM and IP laws aren't protecting some business models that don't make sense anymore, and by this causing damage to society.
Food is a scarce[1] resource. Concepts like "property" and "theft" relate specifically to managing scarcity. Taking food deprives the owner of their meal, because we cannot make perfect copies of baryonic matter. After Shannon introduced the idea of "digital communication" that allowed information to be copied indefinitely without errors, the bit was no longer scarce.
Note: I didn't say anything about how the information was created in the first place. The creation of data - which requires work/energy - should not be conflated with copying existing data. The method used by the restaurant to create or acquire a recipe doesn't create the scarcity that is inherent to the food that implements that recipe.
It really isn't comparable to a directly copyable digital form.
If you like the 1970s way, prop your phone up on a table and use the camera to record a movie off of Netflix. You will have a much better result than we did with VHS tape in the 1970s. You can probably find a filter to crap up the video to look like VHS.
The core issue is if a company can make 501 million instead of 500 million they have zero incentives to make less money. Which is why cable companies scrimp on backhaul even when it's a rounding error on their costs. And why companies are so focused on DRM etc.
I recently got an Amazon Fire stick, attached to a projector, after many years without any kind of television. Naturally, a projector hitting a 100+ inch screen magnifies any flaws in compression or image quality, so you want to play back good quality media. Amazon generally serves up just about acceptable image quality (I'd say they're about 1 standard deviation worse than Netflix in encode quality), but the prices are just ridiculously high - they're about 10 times more than I'd be willing to pay. As a result, I don't watch anything that isn't available via Netflix or Prime, and haven't bought or rented any other content. I'd spend low thousands GBP on media - I have in other form factors - but not if it nets me only 200 hours or so of content. The prices are just ridiculously high.
Cable runs around 1k/year or more and has advertising, which used to be a fairly normal thing upper middle class people bought. Split that into into individual purchases and your likely spending far less. You just happen to notice that your spending money where subscriptions are a background thing.
Also, don't forget Netflix DVD is still an option.
1k/y or 83$/month is on the low side for just TV. A 200$ a month cable bill was actually fairly common a few years ago once you have multiple DVR's and premium channels etc.
Note this is really deceptive and even then it quickly hit's over 83$/month before getting HBO, or equipment, or fees, or taxes. https://www.verizon.com/home/fiostv/
Physical media is considerably less expensive than digital media, and has a secondary market. I wouldn't bother with renting physical media ever again.
Imo there's a price corrective missing for digital media.
Aside from that, I think you're arguing that it's a matter of scale, parent argues that it's the same thing.
A similar, modern example might be a slow, error prone cellular connection where a user copies 1 movie a day to their friends at tremendous cost to their cell bill.
You're forgetting that VCRs and other analog tape-based media had generational losses; every copy made degraded the quality noticeably and put wear on the tape which, from the studios' perspective, kept copying under control. That isn't so for digital recordings.
Beyond that, one can't be against DRM and for GPL enforcement at the same time and remain logically consistent. Both hinge on the owners being able to enforce certain rights granted by law on intellectual property. (Note that I'm not defending DRM here, just pointing out the facts.)
So, one can only be for the enforcement of laws against homicide if one is in favor of capital punishment? Is that roughly the point that you are making?
One can absolutely do that. Technical restraints and legal remedies are not the same thing, and it's completely consistent to say that DRM should be unavailable to both proprietary and free works while legal remedies should be available to both.
"legal remedies should be available to both" was tried for media; that was the era where the studios were suing individuals for copyright violations. Needless to say, that proved to be impractical for a variety of reasons.
Unless your intent is to draft laws that specifically don't work for causes you don't like and works only for causes you do, i.e. negotiating in bad faith, you're going to have to admit that the existence of IP rights implies that that other IP rightsholders are permitted to build some mechanism that works to enforce their rights.
And, again, note I'm not defending DRM. I find it just as annoying and inconvenient as everyone else.
Anyway, in practical terms, GPL and BSD license terms are violated all the time, and only a handful of the most egregious examples ever see a courtroom. I don't see how that's categorically different from the situation of works with other licenses.
Yes. And not one bit more. Show me a DRM system that would never overstep the legal boundaries of their legally enforcable rights, and your argument maybe makes some sense.
In fact, there’s a good argument that DRM is neither necessary nor effective: the former as demonstrated by the music industry, the latter as demonstrated by the movie industry (where the availability of new releases on torrent sites is a matter of course, as it has been for many years). True, it’s more complicated than that, as both technical and market factors greatly affect the utility of DRM in any specific situation. But as a general principle…
Yes, but you couldn't give the content to everybody in the world. And you had to waste 1 hour or so in real-time to make a copy (which was degraded anyway).
What do you think DRM is actively doing? Or is there another point you wanted to make?
No, you didn't. You either watched while recording, or just started recording, went to do something else and came back in an hour. Either way, the time wasn't wasted.
The gist of my argument was about the scalability of today's piracy vs the old time VHS piracy. And that doesn't change just because you could "watch the show you copied" too so "that time wasn't wasted".
The "watched while recording" part only makes sense for a show you already wanted to watch. And you just got one copy out of it. And the "do something else" part still takes a few minutes.
On top of those you still needed the physical giving of the tape to the other person, PLUS to cover the non-insignificant cost of the tape. And lets not even get about how much selection you could produce or store at your home.
In contrast, today you can download and share 10,000s of shows without having watched any of them and without wanting to watch them in the fist place, in just the time it takes to make an upload or share a link. And not just to one person, but to the WHOLE internet.
Only the original pirate needs to do any real-time capture (and that's only for some special cases, like camera captures of movies or VCRed shows -- more often than not, they can just rip something in a few minutes).
And even them, after the capture can immediately share the digital copy with BILLIONS of people, instead of the just one person you got in the VHS days.
There's really no comparison.
If you buy a external drive with less than 1TB you pay 7€ extra taxes.
I also don't see why did you bring torrenting into the debate - do you consider me sharing am movie to my friend from my iPad to his a crime? Is that the same as torrenting? Or why am I prevented from doing that due to DRM?
Not exactly the same for anyone whose work normally costs $50 or $5,000 because it's more expensive to produce or has a more specialised market.
Where the official sources beat the torrents is on convenience. Spotify and Apple whatever are easy to use and busy people will pay.
A similar effect is possible with TV shows and films. I have Amazon prime, and Netflix. Prime costs me £79 a year, Netflix costs me £7.99 a month I think. Now I have a Youview box. I can watch Netflix on it but not Prime. For prime I have to buy another device or use my laptop. I wanted to see what the 'Game of Thrones' fuss was about, neither has it (amazon charges per episode actually). NowTV from Sky does, so I got a trial subscription, but the NowTV app on the Youview box only works for films, not TV shows (!), and the NowTV pc app doesn't work on Linux.
So I pay for three services and still can't watch due to petty rights issues. I could watch them all on Kodi for free of course, but that would be wrong (even though I have paid for them elsewhere).
In summary, if they refuse to get with the 21st Century they will sell less shows. If they allowed easier access to the shows they would beat piracy with convenience. DRM just makes it harder. Don't get me started on HDMI DRM
Every little bit you make copying harder results in fewer people copying.
Cntrl C Cntrl V makes it so my mom can pirate. And she did during the Napster days. But she can't figure out BitTorrent on her own. Well, she could, but there is a learning curve, and most people aren't interested in it.
They don't have to make it impossible. They just have to make it annoying.
Easy piracy destroyed the music industry. The other media industries are rightfully suspicious.
I think propagandizing piracy has had a lot more to do with its decline than ease of use. Try using popcorn time. It is incredibly easy.
Easy piracy destroyed the music industry.
While I agree with the rest of your post, I think that comparing these two is not quite accurate. DRM-free content should, I think, be compared to ad-free content; and blocking ads should probably be compared to stripping DRM. (For the record, I'm not making any moral judgement here; I do the first two as much as possible, and the last two all the time.) My point is that the consumption of DRM-free content shows the seller that you approve of it, and encourages the production of more; whereas the use of an ad blocker doesn't (or at least doesn't seem to, in any direct way) discourage the use of ads.
If producers and consumers wanted, the same could happen for movies. If creators and consumers wanted, copyright and patents could be reformed to stop the gouging of culture, creativity, and entrepreneurship for short-term profit.
Why should I have a problem with paying Apple for DRM free music from iTunes and paying for a subscription to DRMd music for Apple Music?
I haven't pirated music since the iTunes Store opened in 2003. Even from 2003-2008 when it was DRM encumbered, there was a simple built in way to remove the DRM -- burn it to a CD and rip it.
I also don't have a problem paying to rent a movie from Apple/Amazon, but I would never "buy" a movie from Apple/Amazon with restrictive DRM. I also wouldn't have thought about buying a physical disk without an easy way to rip it to my Plex Server and use in the way I see fit.
Personally, I'm not sure what to think about it. On the one hand, one could argue that everything becoming a service is a sign of a maturing society. On the other hand, it makes individuals less autonomous, and society more fragile. Currently I lean more towards thinking that service-oriented economy is a problem, and in particular that SaaS and DRM are cancer.
Really, I think the problem is not so much the decreasing autonomy of the individual, but rather the increasing concentration of power. In a modern society, you are already massively dependent on other people, in a normal day you get into contact with the direct result of the work of thousands of people (as in: not just people who had the idea to bake a bread, but actually people who contributed to the specific bread that you are eating now), and I think that's perfectly fine. What is problematic is if a small group of individuals/companies get a massive amount of centralized control over a large part of the population.
For example, if I get hold of a textbook about baking bread, and go to my farm to produce crops for the bread and then bake it myself, using only the things my soil provides for me, I'm still using the accumulated knowledge and experience of thousands of people. If I decide to buy the same bread from someone else, I'm adding more accumulated human touch into the mix. In this way, there's a difference between services of contemporary people and the sum of accumulated human experience I can access. The second one is additive, and I believe society progresses as fast as it can add to it. Here, DRM directly slows humanity down.
That said, I agree - we're not too autonomous anyway, and modern lifestyle is directly dependent on being plugged into the socioeconomic machine. Still, economy was meant for man, not man for the economy; I'm worrying about how much economic interests restrict us for no other reason than lining someone's pocket. Technology enables individuals to do cool ways, to build the world around themselves as they see fit, but then comes the business models that start restricting these abilities in order to squeeze more money out of people.
How is * aaS anything more than the specialization of labor?
I am the architect responsible for design and maintenance of an in house software platform with a very small staff. We run everything on AWS and use as many of Amazon's services as we are contractionally allowed to - messaging, hosting, logging, security, etc. and outsource other non specialized software to other companies -- mail, source control (github), project management (Version One), time tracking, expense reporting, etc. It's much better than the bad old days where you had to maintain all of your own servers and host everything in house. It lets me concentrate my efforts on my team's core competencies - the platform we are trying to build.
Almost anytime we have a choice between supporting it in house or paying someone else to do it, we lean toward paying someone else to do if it meets our contractual requirements.
For example, my local library buys a set number of digital licenses for ebooks, so there's a waitlist system for ebooks and each digital copy is time gated to a certain number of days before becoming unusable. In that time, though, you can read the ebook offline once downloaded through the library's app. Annoying sometimes, but overall seems reasonable.
How would that example translate to a non-DRM version while making sure that the library isn't distributing an unbounded number of licenses to customers?
Simple. Play it on any device I own, now and in the future.
None of the drm formats sold 20 years ago live on today. Had my collection been based on those, and not open formats, it would be dead now.
What makes you think today's DRM will have a different fate?
Play it on my linux machine?
Copy it to a different medium for my own personal use?
Inspect it for security vulnerabilities?
Build and sell a device that allows you to split the video signal into multiple parts so I can watch it on multiple screens arranged into one large screen?
Buy a device that allows me to inject home automation information onto the display on which I am watching it?
Do you need more?
How about the highly experimental, expensive, poor-user-interface, precursors to whatever the next truly innovative killer app will be? We don't know what the really important use cases will be; we don't even know[1] which events or innovations are in the general direction of the next killer app.
The very idea that some ideas - aka information, intellectual works, or (bleh) "content" - can be owned is already offensive enough. For DRM to make any kind of sense you first have to presume you can enumerate the ways an idea will be used. If we knew that, we could skip most R&D.
Instead of trying artificially re-create scarcity, the Silicon Valley startup culture should be worried about of DRM fencing off next-decade's products.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29#Co...
These are all things that the law says I have the Right to do, yet DRM providers frequently violate these rights.
But to treat the question charitably, here's one use case: I want to view the media on whatever devices I happen to own. That is, I want to e.g. start reading a e-book on my PC, continue on my Kindle, and then finish it on my smartwatch. Or my laser projector. Or my fishbowl. Also maybe I think the book's font is simply ugly, and I want to change it. Oh, and my Internet connection is pretty shitty, because I live in a developing nation and/or US rural area, so I'd love to be able to do all of that off-line at times[0].
That was a basic use case. To step it up, imagine I'm doing research. I want to do notes and cross-referencing, and I want to efficiently move around the text. Regular DRM-ed formats tend to make that nigh-impossible[1].
> How would that example translate to a non-DRM version while making sure that the library isn't distributing an unbounded number of licenses to customers?
It wouldn't, because DRM is by definition designed to limit you to only a very narrow way of consuming a piece of digital media. Any kind of additional flexibility will make it possible to "distribute an unbound number of licenses" for free.
Here's the fundamental conflict - as a consumer, I want to buy/rent a piece of content, as narrowly constrained as possible. In particular, I want the publisher to stop messing with the way I use it and the format I chose to consume. OTOH, publishers have exactly opposite interests - they want to have as much control over my consumption as possible, whether to make more money, to protect against copying, or both.
--
[0] - Related, it's kind of ridiculous to have to stream a book from the Internet all the time. DRM does encourage some pretty shitty engineering decisions.
[1] - Consider just how much economic damage is being done to society by using DRM to make media usable for lowest common denominator of consumers, while making it much more difficult to use in a specialized way for interesting or important work. It's a huge waste, to take a general-purpose computer and use its power to restrict its own functions.
So the use case is simple: play the music they licensed.
For 2) why is that an intermediary's responsibility? Can you photocopy a book from the library or book store, copy a CD, strip macrovision from a VHS cassette and record it on a second deck, or hand write a copy of sheet music? Sure. Does it violate the license. Maybe, maybe not. Get get the courts involved.
Relatedly, what about the right of first sale? All changes for DRM'd media have benefitted copyright holders. There needs to be a return to balance. (Having to own DHCP enabled products increases cost to the consumer, BD+ makes it difficult for most to backup blu-rays, SACD audio cannot be transported digitally, unencrypted, etc.).
DRM (and crazy long copyright extensions) hinders preservation at both the personal and societal levels. Copyrights intention was a limited monopoly in exchange for eventual free access to culturally relevant works. It no longer serves that purpose.
I much prefer a donations based model where anyone can read whatever they like, and then donate to the author if they feel inclined.
Firefox gives you the option to disable DRM in the settings. Chrome also has it but it is buried deeply in advanced settings. Safari does not seem to have it at all.
Strangely, I couldn't find any of these reports available for free download and in the public domain...
Also those armed policemen in Paris aren't there to shoot fare evaders...
That's a strawman. People should be paid for their work, but that doesn't give them the right to impose extralegal restrictions on how I use their work through technology.
If you think that DRM is about piracy, you're living in a fantasy world. Almost all DRMd content - movies, books, music, news - is readily available through illegal or alternative channels with the DRM stripped out. What IS true is that DRM enables several consumer-hostile revenue models for content producers. For example, unskippable ads at the beginning of Blu-Ray releases.
No, but I bet if you pay for them you get them as PDFs, unencrypted, which you can view on a vast breadth of devices and OSes and applications, annotate/modify, clip parts out of, convert to other formats, and otherwise manipulate as you please, with no arbitrary technological restrictions getting in the way. (Compare to, say, Adobe Digital Editions wrapped PDFs, which can only be read in designated apps and limit you to the capabilities of those apps.)
How does the arbitrariness of those technological restrictions differ from the arbitrariness of the legal restrictions which I'm sure the author would insist upon, should you decide to republish their work? To me they are the same thing - mechanisms for saying "you might've bought this but the original owner still has a say in what you do with it".
The world IMHO is a better place because there are mechanisms by why IP creators can be paid. Yes there is poorly written DRM (Sony, we're looking at you) but that is a problem of execution, not one of concept.
So you mean that there are Rootkits that are written in a good way?
One of those is decided by a democratic process, the other is dictated by one party.
> but that is a problem of execution, not one of concept.
Actually, it is a problem of the concept. It is asking for computers to be robbed of their defining characteristic, and to be put under dictatorial control.
See also Cory Doctorow's talks on the topic, like maybe this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI (he gave this and similar talks in many places, you can find quite a few of them on youtube, I have no clue whether this particular one is good)
Even Kodi assumes by (sane) defaults that the user does not want to save their own particular copy of the relevant media on their own particular device.
Imagining a future where grandchildren can't inherit the digital libraries stored on their family devices is early-2000's futurism that somehow skips completely over the year 2017 where the greater bulk of these future grandparents are streaming everything.
The author failed to understand the actual cultural issue driving the two approaches: In Germany you don't need a gate to have people pay the ticket, most people will do it anyway. In Paris, most people won't pay and just ride for free, and tragedy of the commons ensues.
So by his own argument, DRM is a product of the culture of a people.
Indeed, but the problem with not making any effort to enforce restrictions technically is that typically you then aren't enforcing your legitimate rights.
The metro analogy was interesting. If the system in Germany works, it is because people are honest and pay for what they are using without physical compulsion.
Sadly, if you try to start a business creating original content and making it available online in the same spirit of trust, you will quickly learn that many people in the world are not so honest.
You will also learn that unlike a citywide metro system, it is all too easy for someone of less noble intentions to not only take your content for themselves without paying but also set up their own redistribution channels and steal your customers and your revenues.
A third lesson you will learn is that a lot of people may quite innocently assume that if they can do something then it's allowed, particularly if they speak a different language and don't necessarily understand the deal being offered. DRM can be quite effective at deterring this sort of casual and often unintentional infringement.
And DRM prevents that how exactly?
> A third lesson you will learn is that a lot of people may quite innocently assume that if they can do something then it's allowed
I would take this as a hint that it probably should be allowed then. If lots of people innocently assume that something is perfectly legal, the way of tyranny is to build a police state, the way of democracy is to make it legal.
It depends on the form of DRM and its effects.
One practical scenario is that most of the revenue from a new work may be generated in the early days. This is often the case with things like computer games, pop music, and big ticket movies. If DRM delays those trying to set up copycat channels, even by a few days or weeks, much of that revenue may already have been collected.
Another is that fingerprinting techniques may allow for things like automatic takedowns on the major hosting services, or identification of the source of a major leak so full legal action can be taken against the right targets.
I would take this as a hint that it probably should be allowed then.
It's not that simple. To give an obvious example that upset a lot of people, Google added a video download icon in Chrome a few months ago, right there in the controls alongside changing the volume and so on. A lot of people running small web sites that provided video content saw a spike in people who were sharing that content in violation of their terms, and it turned out that many people assumed the download button was a new feature on the site without realising that it was Chrome that had changed. This caused big problems for web developers working in this area, and a lot of complaints to Google about actively encouraging people to violate copyrights. And simply changing the way videos were served so Chrome couldn't provide that facility in the same way then fixed the problem again.
If lots of people innocently assume that something is perfectly legal, the way of tyranny is to build a police state, the way of democracy is to make it legal.
Democracy only works when the population is properly informed and understands the implications. That's hardly the case in the sort of situation I mentioned above.
And so we install draconian enforcement technology in everyone's home ... in order to make people more informed on the issue?
It's easy to snipe from the cheap seats, so let me ask you some questions now instead. Do you believe that financial models other than a complete, permanent purchase of a copy of a work are useful? And if so, how would you propose to set up a realistic rental/library/PPV scheme for digital content without relying on anything that could be called DRM?
DRM is a draconian measure, by necessity.
> Most modern DRM is almost completely transparent to legitimate users
What do you mean by that and how is it relevant?
> Do you believe that financial models other than a complete, permanent purchase of a copy of a work are useful?
Maybe.
> And if so, how would you propose to set up a realistic rental/library/PPV scheme for digital content without relying on anything that could be called DRM?
By just leaving out the DRM?
I once thought as you do. Then I ran a business that invested significant money, some of it my own, in making original content. We really tried to avoid going down the DRM path, because I didn't like the idea of risking inconveniencing any legitimate customers. Today, in light of the experience doing that, I am much, much less sympathetic to claims that DRM doesn't do anything or should be abolished or whatever.
The degree to which some people will just blatantly rip you off and even lie to your face about it afterwards is staggering. The arguments that if people are going to copy your stuff then they're going to get it somewhere else anyway so taking steps to make it harder have no benefits are simply wrong. There is nothing hypothetical about this. It is not conjecture or thought experiment. It is based on cold, hard data and experience with real money at risk.
Incidentally, in the entire history of that business, as far as I'm aware we've never received a single complaint from a legitimate user that any of our safeguards was interfering with their normal enjoyment of the content. There have been one or two cases we couldn't absolutely prove but were pretty sure about, and otherwise basically 100% of people who complained about not being able to do something turned out to be trying to violate our terms and getting upset when our safeguards stopped them. BTW, in case you think we're just being paranoid, we have literally had people asking us why they couldn't access our material with well-known ripping software, to give one example of how blatant the abuse can be.
However, I wonder about this:
> BTW, in case you think we're just being paranoid, we have literally had people asking us why they couldn't access our material with well-known ripping software, to give one example of how blatant the abuse can be.
What exactly is abuse about this? I mean, I get from what you are saying that you don't like it, but how is it abusive to use some tool to convert some content that you paid for into a format/transfer it into an environment of your own choice that you want to use it in? If your terms said that you couldn't do that, I would rather consider your terms abusive.
The objection to rippers is that we were effectively operating on a form of rental model. If someone is paying a lower price to rent your stuff, you can't let them rip all of it and keep it permanently anyway, and this was explicitly contrary to our terms. Obviously so was sharing it on major hosting services and even trying to monetize it, which sadly wasn't unheard of either.
Now, did they ask for help with how to keep it permanently or with ripping it to their own device? You are constantly confusing those. If I paid for some content rental, I sure as hell would expect that I can put a copy of it on my laptop to watch/listen/read while offline on the train, and I would expect support for that.
Still without meaning to be rude, I'm really not interested in discussing our position on that one in any more detail. What we offer is openly described, reasonable, and clearly stated before anyone commits to anything. We get overwhelmingly positive feedback within our target market and very few complaints. We tried playing nice about protecting our work -- far nicer than most people in this business, and probably for far longer too. But people abused it, and then straight-up lied to our faces to try to get us to release the locks and let them do it some more.
So now when someone tries to rip us off, we don't play so nice any more. None of our legitimate customers care, because they don't even notice. However, we do get to still have a business and pay the bills. As a bonus, we also waste far less time dealing with the kind of toxic "customer" who thinks a few dollars earns them 24/7 customer service to explain why they can't set up oursite.com.somecountry and resell all our stuff or give it away with their ads all over the place.
As I said, it's easy to snipe from the cheap seats, and it's easy to feel entitled as a customer. It looks a little different when it's you and your colleagues who gave up their jobs, sold their houses, didn't take holidays for years, and so on, and then a group of people carefully exploited your trusting nature to threaten everything you've built.
What I've shared in this discussion is just the real world experience of people who tried to be optimistic and trusting in the kind of way that others here seem to want, allowing the kinds of behaviour that others here seem to think don't cause any harm. The experience was not good, and operating on that basis proved to be unsustainable. That might upset people here who don't like the outcome we observed, but those are the facts, and to be honest I'm tiring of trying to explain this in the face of open hostility in comments and downvotes. If you want to learn the same lessons for yourself rather than taking my word for it, no-one is stopping you; the price of admission is explained in the previous paragraph.
I disagree, please provides examples of commonly used and almost completely transparent DRM. I'll start with a counterpoint: a user on Chrome (not exactly a minority), Firefox or Opera can't watch Netflix with a resolution over 720p.
I use several major business software packages. I run the program. It loads and I use it.
I put a DVD or Blu-ray into my player. I play the disc. I watch the movie.
I'm not a big gamer myself these days, but I've rarely heard anyone complain about Steam's DRM in years.
That's a whole lot like you are completely free to do whatever you want to do, as long as it's what we told you to do, isn't it?
Well, since that's fundamentally what copyright is about... yes. What were you expecting?
I mean, unless I completely misunderstood you, you justified DRM by saying that it was ok because it doesn't get in your way ("it's transparent"). And now you are essentially saying that if it did get in your way, that would also be ok, because that's the purpose of DRM. Or in other words: Whether it does get in your way is completely irrelevant as to whether or not you think DRM is acceptable. So, what was your argument, then?
With the extra qualifier that what you're doing is actually permitted/legal, yes, that's essentially my point. That condition rather changes the meaning, though. Indeed, the difference it makes is essentially the point of having DRM in the first place.
Now, the question is: What do you mean by "permitted/legal"? Permitted by general copyright law, or permitted by the part of the DMCA that specifically makes it illegal to circumvent or share information about how to circumvent DRM?
Without knowing which DRM they use, this example is irrelevant.
I put a DVD or Blu-ray into my player. I play the disc. I watch the movie.
This is a classic WORKSFORME. New Blu-rays are released with new versions of the DRM, which don't work with older players unless they're connected to the Internet to update their firmware - and if it exists.
Search for "can't play avatar blueray" and you'll find many people for whom it's not even close to transparent.
I'm not a big gamer myself these days, but I've rarely heard anyone complain about Steam's DRM in years.
If you beat them for a while, eventually people stop complaining. I don't know about you, but growing up, not being able to lend games between friends was unthinkable. Steam robs new players of this communal experience, excluding poorer kids from social groups because they can't play the games everyone else has.
It's not just not transparent; I find it vile.
Counterpoint: gog.com
Moreover, I have yet to see a movie that wasn't available on an illegal streaming/downloading site the day it was released on Blu-Ray, DRM or not.
And in terms of things being available immediately, the economics of mainstream movies are quite different. There's a whole world of niche content out there that doesn't generate gazillions of dollars and that won't be leaked when it's barely reached theatres. For smaller operators, deterring casual infringement even to a moderate degree can literally be the difference between making enough money to continue operating and going out of business.
How is this at all an accurate analogy for DRM?
Bonus question if you succeeded: did you break any laws doing so?
Bonus answer: I probably broke laws making my morning coffee.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6611240-three-felonies-a...
[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...
Denuvo still has a place (if it stays effective) in reducing the number of day-one pirates, which is its main selling point at this time. On Steam, interested players have a choice to put money down on release (with the potential to refund), or wait an indeterminate number of days (weeks?) to download the cracked version. This uncertainty period has a conversion rate that Denuvo clients balance against the costs of the DRM.
But yeah, the stuff produced by copyright mafia/Big Entertainment/Hollywood/whatever is far, far from the only culture that exists.
A lot of culture is happening on DRM-free places like YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, DeviantART, Tumblr, itch.io, etc.
Especially YouTube. It's huge. And it's full of people who download other videos and remix them in interesting ways.