Red Dead Redemption 2 DRM still has not been cracked (316 days)

I've no doubt that from a technical point of view, both DRM and the efforts to crack it are fascinating and interesting.

What I don't understand is this: consumers don't crack DRM; crackers and warez groups do. Once cracked, DRM is as good as nothing and it's low effort for an everyday gamer to get and play pirated games.

So this antipiracy "buffer" is only for crackers. For gamers it's just as if the game had a delayed release date.

For legit customers, the DRM is often intrusive and, because it's so complex and fiddly, often breaks in bizarre ways, giving rise to the paradoxical situation that the legit game is harder to use than the pirated game!

Only legitimate buyers lose.

https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/movfuscator https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/REpsych

Who's paying for anti-DRM work?

Being able to play a game in 10 years, play it offline, or sell it would always be surprising to me. So I wouldn't assume those things to be possible when I buy it.

That obviously makes fewer products worth buying, which saves me money. But quite often both for games and othewr media I come to the conclusion "Yes, I'm happy to pay $60 to play this for 2 weeks even if I never play it again". So long as that's the calculation, there is rarely any disappointment.

Also you can get a second hand ps4 pretty cheap nowadays relative to it's hardware and power consumption - could make a decent home server if you chucked some variety of linux on there (is there much support for the hardware?)

I imagine there are other people like me, where the pirating actually drives sales. But yeah, to the people who don’t make tons of money, it’s often the only way they’ll ever play the game.

CFAA and DMCA are quite nasty in this regard. It gets significantly worse if, in the course of your inspection/EULA violation/whatever, you have to interact with any third party DRM [online] services for authn/authz. Then you bring even more crime into scope.

Ianal, but I'm fairly certain the answer is 'yes' to every single question, even individually (the act of cracking and the act of publishing it might even be two separate crimes)

EFF: > The anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, 17 U.S.C. 1201, prohibit circumvention of “technological protection measures” that effectively control access to copyrighted works. The law also prohibits trafficking in tools that are primarily designed for circumvention, have only limited commercially significant purpose other than circumvention or are marketed for circumvention. While section 1201 can arguably apply to any security researcher, those studying digital rights management (DRM) of music, movies or other creative content are most likely to face section 1201 claims, since Congress intended to protect these copyrighted works when it passed the statute. Researchers looking for vulnerabilities in authentication handshakes, code signing, code obfuscation, and protocol encryption also have to worry about section 1201 because vendors have argued that these also qualify as “technical protection measures” covered by the DMCA.

This is just absolutely 100% factually inaccurate. There are huge swaths of legislation specifically to spell out the fact that this is not the case. Please refer to the other sub-threads, particularly the information about arrests being made!

> Modifying (Removing DRM on) a piece of software that you yourself have bought is perfectly legal.

Not likely. At least not for any practical use cases.

The point of removing "rights management" would typically be to grant yourself rights that the copyright holder did not wish to grant you. IANAL, however if you were to remove DRM, but then continue to use the software in a manner that is in line with what the rights-holder intended, then you may be okay. Although, the laws themselves indicate that facilitating removal of DRM is in itself illegal, so I wouldn't count on it.

If you were to distribute any tooling, or even technical information about the removal of the DRM, then you're in clear violation. In fact, the stringency of these laws is how the case in the aforementioned Gizmodo article even came to be. Some rights-holders believed that simply mentioning the existence of DRM removal software was a violation of these laws. Fortunately, the courts ruled otherwise, but that's a far cry from publishing technical information explaining how to remove the DRM itself.

From the WIPO Copyright Treaty:

> Article 12 Obligations concerning Rights Management Information

(1) Contracting Parties shall provide adequate and effective legal remedies against any person knowingly performing any of the following acts knowing, or with respect to civil remedies having reasonable grounds to know, that it will induce, enable, facilitate or conceal an infringement of any right covered by this Treaty or the Berne Convention:

        (i) to remove or alter any electronic rights management information without authority;

        (ii) to distribute, import for distribution, broadcast or communicate to the public, without authority, works or copies of works knowing that electronic rights management information has been removed or altered without authority.

The WIPO Copyright Treaty has been implemented all around the globe. In the US these laws are largely incorporated as part of the DMCA. The DMCA has provisions for fair use and the right to repair exemptions. However, these exemptions aren't even part of the legislation. Instead, every three years the copyright office reviews the exemptions, adding, removing and extending exemptions as they see fit. What's legal in the US now, may not be in three years time.

Article 10 of WIPO Copyright Treaty allows "Contracting Parties" (signatories of the treaty) to incorporate certain exemptions in their legislation. However, it's not at all clear that this section even applies to Article 12. The US have provided exemptions, "because they can". Other countries around the globe are not so lucky.

Take Australia for example, the WIPO Copyright Treaty was simply implemented as amendments to Australia's Copyright Act in 2000. Australia has no exemptions, nor any special processes to introduce them.

It adds overhead at the very least, and many games, Triple As included, have had game breaking faults due to shoddy DRM implementations.

While this isn't evidence that DRM is useless, it also isn't evidence that it is useful. That evidence would come from sales numbers if they are significantly higher than another comparable work that wasn't DRM'ed as it would prove that the DRM is actually convincing people to pay for something they normally wouldn't.

Piracy is not just a "freeloader" problem. I've been to a few poorer countries where piracy is absolutely normal not because they don't want to pay per-se, but because they just don't have the means to do so or are prevented from doing so by technical or commercial reasons like lack of adequate payment infrastructure or region-locking; in which case you are still better off letting them enjoy the creative work for free and hope to gain the benefits in some other way (like them buying your future software when they can finally afford it, or producing good press and raising awareness around other people who can actually afford it). There's also the issue of people for who DRM actually causes problems and prevents them from enjoying work that they did actually pay for, though I personally don't see how the inconvenience of DRM is worse than the risk of running code from an untrusted, anonymous source that might be malicious).

What a lot of people don't understand is that DRM has fulfilled its purpose if unauthorized copies are staved off for a few months. Sales usually follow and exponential decay. While some titles experience unprecedented popularity later in life, most games have the overwhelming majority of sales in their first few months after release. It's unclear exactly how piracy affects sales, but assuming that some percentage of potential buyers would pirate instead of buy if illicit copies are available DRM that only delays cracking for a few months captures most of these otherwise lost sales. Phrased from the opposite perspective, most people who would wait several months after release to pirate probably wouldn't have bought the game even if it went un-cracked forever.

Again, the standard for "successful" DRM is on the order of several months. RDR2 going uncracked for close to a year is not just successful, but a resounding success.