It could be easy to view but hard to save and distribute. Why can't it? Or do you really think these people have no idea what they're taking about?
There's no way around that. You can't magically change the universe so that content that's viewed can't be captured. It HAS to be converted to analog somewhere. That signal can always be captured and converted back to a digital form that's no longer embedded with DRM.
Best case: you make it marginally more difficult for a mom&pop computer user to copy your content. Anyone with a lick of understanding and 100 dollars to buy some hardware will be able to get it without any problem.
Worst case: you introduce all sorts of unnecessary security holes with poorly written software, that can't be audited (legally speaking), and does absolutely nothing to slow the availability of the content online and for free.
> Not really. If it's available to view, it's available. Full stop. Best case: you make it marginally more difficult for a mom&pop computer user to copy your content. Anyone with a lick of understanding and 100 dollars to buy some hardware will be able to get it without any problem.
You literally just agreed with my point though.
The proof in the pudding is that every TV show and film is instantly available online to anyone who can work a BitTorrent client.
Your second point, Denouvo is for video games and is a very different ballpark - it turns out storing code to lock things down is a lot easier in an executable vs in a video. DRM is certainly more effective in games (although the evidence is it causes way more problems for legitimate users, and Humble Bundle et al have proven that users prefer legitimate options when they are easy and affordable).
My point was that DRM doesn't stop anyone torrenting the content - it only takes one person to break it, which will happen. It does mean some people won't be able to watch the content legally, which will push them away from the legal option.
The only thing DRM really stops is the "let me give you a copy" friend-to-friend copying, which is the equivalent of sharing a VHS copy back in the day. Is stopping that really worth pushing people away from your legal option?
Fundamentally, I can read or write to any byte in my computer's memory. That includes whatever is coming out of the piece of code that reads in the protected file and then passes it to the video decoder or the display.
Until we have computers that can read and write bytes in such a way that not even a user with full privileges on their own machine can access them (keeping in mind, this user can control the kernel and even the hypervisor), this can't be made to work.
The people pushing for DRM, in my experience, really do have no idea what they are talking about. They tend to be industry lawyer types. People who do understand DRM are usually aware that what they are implementing can be broken, but their VP told them to do it anyway so they can make a deal with content distributors.
Also, the DMCA forbids circumventing copyright measures, so they like to have that as a legal tool as well. As long as they tried something, they can go after anyone disabling it, using the legal system.
Apparently ME is somehow used on the DRM path but really it's kinda irrelevant — the whole point of modern movie DRM is that the video frames get decrypted on your display.
They've been trying to accomplish this for many years now, to no avail. This is a nontrivial problem.
> They've been trying to accomplish this for many years now, to no avail.
Any evidence that they haven't had any success whatsoever in making it harder to save/distribute?
For the casual law-abiding user, it succeeds in making it harder to save/distribute. For everyone else, it's only a matter of time before the DRM is broken.
But even if some content is popular, DRM certainly prevents people like me from saving a copy, since I'm not one to go on piracy sites and the only reason I want a copy is so I don't have to get authorization from someone every time I want to play something I already paid for. It might be a dumb business decision since I'd already pay for it before getting a copy anyway, but maybe they think that still makes business sense even if I'd pay for it. Regardless of that it still seems to be working as intended.
And casual users might be law-abiding in the USA, but not everywhere :)