Sure, but why? Do the rightsholders believe that these mechanisms are effective at making them money somehow? How correct are they - are these mechanisms effective at stopping some amount of casual piracy and converting that into purchases?
Piracy can't be stopped but thats not what they want to hear.
Piracy can be greatly reduced by distributing the content via Netflix but thats not what they want to hear.
and:
>Piracy can be greatly reduced by distributing the content via Netflix
Aren't you guys saying different things? One is saying people already pirate on netflix, and the other is saying netflix removes the need for piracy.
If you're saying the same thing, I would interpret it to mean that piracy is greatly reduced on netflix, but not entirely eliminated. But if that be the case, would that not be evidence of netflix' anti-piracy measures working?
It's inconvenient to free up 50 GB of hard disk space to torrent of a 4k netflix rip you found off some shady torrent site. It's much more convenient to just give netflix a few bucks a month. That inconvenience comes from law enforcement action against pirate sites and many users having trouble managing their hard drive space. Not from DRM.
Anything that is on Netflix I watch. I can’t watch amazon prime on my Apple TV because their region system is broken (yes, if an amazon employee is reading this, please fix having prime in multiple countries) so battlestar galactica and other shows in their catalogue aren’t available come from other sources.
Are there scenarios where typical consumers turn to piracy? Sure, aboslutely. They generally do that when a convenient legal way isn't an option (e.g. region locks screwing them over.)
my wife - a non-tech person, really - falls in to this camp. she's turned to torrenting things because the experience of streaming is just... slow. and bad. and stuttery. oh, and we still get ads on things (hulu, for one). She figured out how to find free streams for soccer matches - when we paid for "real" streams, they still had ads taking up 20% of the screen. And still somewhat jittery/stuttery (but - those 2 minute car ads at the start of the stream were never jittery).
yeah, the 'free' stuff experience isn't always great, but when the paid experiences are still kinda crappy, what's the point of paying?
What's truly sad is how so many people find this preferable to paying for the official services. It speaks volumes to the quality of their streaming services. A huge number of people don't even have the choice to pay for the content to begin with: many of the of companies that complain about copyright infringement don't even offer their services outside of the United States. They ignore entire markets and complain when people find a way via unofficial means. It's really hard to feel any sympathy for the copyright industry.
If they were better at their jobs, better at delivering to consumers what consumers want, they wouldn't have to worry about DRM, piracy, control of consumer behavior or any of this nonsense.
I was even pirating shows I had access for free on Amazon prime... that just tells you how bad the platforms are, it's not about money.
Statement 2: If your content is available on a reasonably priced and performant streaming platform or is otherwise “low friction” the number of people who will choose to consume the pirated content instead of paying drops off dramatically.
The problem for publishers is that there’s so many different knobs that finding what brings in the most revenue is pretty much a crapshoot.
If you look at the cost of downloading a full, original quality Blu-Ray rip, then burning that to a dual-layer BD-R disc, you're looking at an hour to torrent plus up to $10 for a dual-layer recordable disc. Compare that to a store-bought copy that's $7.88 and comes with both Blu-Ray and DVD copies, and it's no contest.
Make that store-bought copy $49.95 (thanks, Marvel) and it makes piracy attractive. Add terrible DRM on top and you GUARANTEE piracy, because you're being hostile to people that have actually bought your movie.
If DRM had never been invented, piracy would only be about 5% worse, and your paying customers wouldn't be cursing your existence... but the media companies are too stupid to realize that.
The media companies do not care whether their paying customers love them or hate them. What they do care about, though, is when there is 5% less of them.
Remember, big corporations do not just want money - they want all the money (and more).
No. It's evidence that just having the content available on Netflix will reduce piracy. It is a bit less effective than it could be because Netflix doesn't run on literally everything, mostly because of anti-piracy protections, but it does run on nearly everything, so it's effective.
Netflix is a convenient enough service that makes it easy for people to watch what they want to watch. Most people will just pay for it without thinking twice. It's easy enough that most people won't even consider infringing. Netflix's value isn't just in the content it serves, it's also in the fact it frees people from the non-trivial effort required to "pirate". Private torrent trackers have an economy of their own.
Making it impossible to infringe is extremely difficult. Movies and music are really just information. Extremely big numbers. It's trivial to make copies of this stuff and send those copies over the network. In previous centuries, you needed to be a major industry player and own big machines like printing presses in order to infringe on someone's copyright at scale. In the 21st century it's as easy as copy paste or forgetting to close the torrent client. People might not even realize they are doing it.
This is why a fragmented streaming market will push people towards copyright infringement. Instead of pooling their intellectual property and creating one single perfect streaming service with all the content, they are making it difficult and expensive for the consumer by competing with each other. At some point, people are going to wonder if there's a better way. That's when they'll find "piracy".
I just rented Spiderman on Amazon streaming for like $6, about the same as I remember video rental used to be. I'm certain I could have pirated it if Amazon streaming had not worked on Linux. It was slightly easier and slightly more ethical feeling to rent it from Amazon, so I did.
I have seen a bit of a pattern where content distributors start out by cranking the DRM to 11 and then year over year get less and less worried about it. I guess they realize over time that the DRM isn't stopping anything, who knows, maybe they're using it to provide a PR argument that they're trying their best to push some other agenda.
But I think they know that it's the distribution method rather than the encryption that influences buying decisions unless they magically stop all casual piracy. Be at least as easy as casual piracy?
[0] https://www.baen.com/t-drm
[1] https://www.tor.com/2013/04/29/tor-books-uk-drm-free-one-yea...
Some of their back-catalogue is available for free on-line, such as David Weber's Empire from the Ashes. Complete trilogy:
http://www.baencd.freedoors.org/Books/Empire%20From%20the%20...
(hard sci-fi)
Basically the foundations upon which capitalism stands are cracked and have always been craked. Regulation is what usually fills out those cracks to prevent the entire thing from crumbling.
Or correct.
---
Every time you find a problem with capitalism, stop and look again: you will find state intervention in the market, which is the opposite of capitalism. (Free trade between the involved parties, without the intervention of others.)
In this case, the problem starts at the root: copyright is by definition a state intervention in the market. It cannot exist in a free market, because it mandates that someone prevents you from using your own resources as you see fit (namely, copying a DVD you own on a computer you own, using electricity you're paying for).
Kinsella's "Against Intellectual Property" is probably the best resource point out the contradiction between Imaginary Property and the free market.
Of course, if one entity has a monopoly over the legitimate use of force in an area, you're in trouble.
However, for a couple of years after 1990 we actually had quite a lot of security companies that were competing peacefully in the same areas (Romanian police being absolutely irrelevant at a local level, with the reorganization of the state that was taking place). Of course, once the state got re-established "properly" that was quickly ended.
It can be stopped. All they have to do is destroy the computing and internet freedom we all enjoy today. Can't do subversive things like copy a file if they don't let us run our software. Governments around the world are also trying to erode these same freedoms by pushing encryption regulation.
In the context of visual/audio (re: the topic), no. Even disallowing encryption will not save companies from simple steganography.
That's one of those "good luck" scenarios. Building your own homebrew computer, or your own OS is a hobby for many. If you push the people behind them, and make a market for them, you'll make them popular.
The internet itself is complex, but not so complex that determined actors cannot build their own mesh networks.
And whilst governments are trying to erode encryption everywhere, it won't work in the end. They may be able to take secure encryption out of the hands of civilians, maybe. But they can't take it from the pirates.
And as for the incoming "no one would be that determined" argument, cracking chips to let consoles play pirated games have existed for a long time, and the average person did actually seek them out... And found them everywhere. If you make people build the infrastructure... They will.
DRM in the browser was step one. No Widevine, or whatever crapware is needed, no Netflix. Next came the limit on higher resolutions. You want Full HD? Stop using a free operating system. You want 4k? Get Internet Explorer, or better yet, get our app on one of the approved operating systems.
The next step is probably to diminish the browser experience even further until enough users have switched to the 'app'. The only reason is control.
It won't drive us away from a personal computer running whatever modern OS we want, but it is slowly creating a majority of people for whom computing exclusively means a managed device with a pre-approved operating system running vetted proprietary applications.
There was a brilliant moment where entertainment was all going to converge. You'd have your PC with terabytes of storage, stick a tuner card and an Ethernet cable in the back, run the sound out to your thousand-watt 20-channel amplifer, and display it all on your 70-inch flat screen. Broadcast TV, Netflix, Disney Plus, etc, would all just be desktop icons, right next to Steam and Excel. We were hurtling down that road in the mid-2000s (remember WinXP Media Centre Edition?) and suddenly it all jumped the track.
Seemed to happen pretty close to when Digital TV stumbled its way into the US market, or roughly the perfect time for it to really take hold (the classic "record a show on VHS" paradigm was suddenly killed off, and the ever-mutating subchannel lineups makes a smarter electronic program guide and recording functionality more appealing). I sort of blame the cable industry-- apparently it was virtually impossible to get a digital-cable-compatible tuner card for many years-- you had to buy from a narrow band of prebuilt PCs with the cards preinstalled, and even now the companies will scream blue murder over having to supply CableCards (if they even do anymore).
The PC is a do-anything device. Eventually, given the media industry's tastes, it will be the 'do anything except watch name-brand entertainment products' device. I don't think they can undermine general-purpose computing as a concept- there's too many other business cases that rely on being able to run random unsigned software or connect to arbitrary weird hardware.
Instead, Disney and Sony will push hard for various consumption-first or -only devices-- smart TVs, consoles, locked down phones/tablets. I'm sort of surprised they aren't already going for the subsidy model-- get a "free" PS5/Xbox 3π/"smart" television if you'll sign up for years of a content subscription service to feed it.
People will end up having both and being annoyed that they can't converge things.
Any victory against copyright infringement will come from competing directly against it. The copyright holders are too busy competing with each other and fragmenting the market instead of building something that's actually equal to or better than "piracy". It's pretty sad how a bunch of "pirates" manage to provide a better product than corporations valued at tens of billions of dollars.
Anyway, anecdotal story, take with (many) grains of salt.
Yes. Contrary to popular opinion among the geek crowd who tend to be very hostile to DRM, the people using it are not in fact completely ignorant and stupid. I write this as someone who used to believe similar things myself in my younger days, but who has now seen both sides of the coin and has moderated some of those views in light of that experience.
One thing that a lot of people don't seem to realise is that piracy often isn't about the price, but rather the convenience. If it's easier to find a ripped copy of something online, for example because it's not available in a certain region from legal sources, then people who want that content will go looking and they'll find the illegal sources. If it is available from legal sources, then to some extent DRM doesn't have to stop someone from being able to find a pirate copy, it just has to make it more inconvenient than finding a legitimate one. Given that any pirate content found online comes with a certain degree of risk, from malicious payloads pretending to be something else, poor quality or incomplete content that frustrates the person who gets it, and in some cases from honey traps that can result in legal action, this isn't entirely unrealistic.
One specific but very important instance of this, briefly mentioned already elsewhere in this discussion, is that if DRM can delay the widespread availability of some popular new work via pirate channels for a few weeks or even just a few days, that can make a huge difference to profitability. There have been AAA games where the DRM has been cracked but not for several months, and that might have saved the developers and legitimate distributors many millions of dollars.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is lots of content that is going to be many orders of magnitude less profitable even with a good run, simply because it's aimed at relatively small markets: niche music genres, software for running some specific type of shop or leisure facility, a documentary programme about an obscure interest, and so on. There is much less desire from the kinds of people who would be able to crack substantial DRM schemes to spend time on these things, so even simple measures can be quite effective in preventing that content from being trivially findable online, thus preserving the limited market for these kinds of products.
And finally, there is the simple but still relevant issue that some people genuinely don't realise piracy isn't legal or that what they're doing is piracy. "If it's on the Internet, it's free, right?" Even the most basic DRM schemes mean people probably have to do something that is clearly not the intended way of getting hold of the content, and that itself can be a useful deterrent for the "unwillfully ignorant" crowd.