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.
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
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.
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?
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).
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.
Many movie pirates aren't aware of the laws (eg. kids)
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
What do you think DRM is actively doing? Or is there another point you wanted to make?
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?).
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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…
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.
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?
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.
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.