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Comment by blandflakes | Hacker News Reader

The point is that efforts to prevent piracy, pushed by Metallica and obviously the recording companies at large, can be harmful, and it's possible to want to support artists but to prefer that they don't take measures which actively hurt consumers.

This is the same community that really hates ebook lending, and it's very much the same set of consumer-limiting control over intellectual property that curtails piracy but also makes things really inconvenient for the legitimate customer. I'm surprised but also not that people aren't able to think about this as more than a (false) dichotomy.

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Again, Metallica did not rootkit anybody. How are they hurting legitimate consumers of their work? Rootkits are not mere inconveniences, they are intentional data breaches. Obviously spreading mis-information using this particular false example is going to distort peoples' understandings of Metallica's actual stance and actions. Hacking consumers directly vs. using the court system to shut down an illegal piracy application is a very real dichotomy.

Properly implemented DRM is fine! Spotify has been a huge success, for example. Watching Netflix fully brings the convenience of streaming to legal content consumption. The only inconvenience here is that you can no longer pirate anything.

> Again, Metallica did not rootkit anybody.

And, to use a facile and touchy example, Donald Trump didn't revolt at the capital.

But fine:

> what is a very real dichotomy

Help me out here - why are the only two choices: 1. rampant piracy 2. automated systems that allow corporations to trivially take down content, legitimate or not, with generally no recourse unless you get e.g. Google's attention on twitter?

Why are people so convinced there's no middle ground here, and that everybody with an opinion that #2 is perhaps a little problematic must be totally pro-piracy?

> Properly implemented DRM is fine!

Perhaps the argument is that we don't yet live in the land of properly implemented IP controls. I didn't realize we'd reached utopia; I'll go back to buying ebooks and reusing them across whatever devices I please.

Spotify and Netflix are great examples of exactly proof that a convenient form of consumption will get paying customers, and I was certainly more willing to buy MP3s when they stopped coming with DRM attached to them. The fact these work does not somehow render the point that, well, the original article, occurs, as a result of these things, and that it's ironic that it happens to Metallica, who would probably prior to this have been pleased that an automated system takes down anything approximating Enter Sandman.

You originally stated that Metallica rootkitted people.

That's a ridiculous wholly non-analogous example. Trump clearly incited the riot, there were recordings as proof, and resultant court cases. I assume (and hope) that this is also your understanding of what actually happened with Trump.

In this case, it doesn't even come close. For example, Metallica wasn't even signed on the record label that did the rootkit. Metallica had literally no involvement any hacking of their fans' operating systems.

You're stating a different dichotomy now. The original one you proposed was whether it is possible to be against online piracy without attacking consumers' data.

I'm happy to entertain your other more reasonable arguments that you have later written as follow-ups, but your original post directly accusing Metallica of rootkits is just flat-out untrue.

> That's a ridiculous wholly non-analogous example. Trump clearly incited the riot, there were recordings as proof, and resultant court cases. In this case, it doesn't even come close.

I'm just making the point that Metallica not rootkitting anybody is in no way an argument that they are neither in favor of that drastic a measure nor that they did not encourage or provide justification for the recording industry to do the same.

> You originally stated that Metallica rootkitted people.

No, I made a leap from "lobbying for and publicly whining about piracy" to "efforts to curb that include rootkits and other less horrible inconveniences". I'm sorry if that leap felt too extreme, next time I'll make the pit stops along the lines of "things don't work offline" and "things disappear without you knowing" and "things using otherwise standard formats aren't readable on your non-blessed device".

Whether Metallica directly rootkitted anything (which was never stated, it was just juxtaposed as an example of how this POV can hurt consumers in the end) doesn't really matter. Let's pretend that nobody ever rootkitted anybody.

How is this dichotomy different? My original, according to you:

> The original one you proposed was whether it is possible to be against online piracy without attacking consumers' data.

My recent restating:

> Help me out here - why are the only two choices: 1. rampant piracy 2. automated systems that allow corporations to trivially take down content, legitimate or not, with generally no recourse unless you get e.g. Google's attention on twitter?

Hm. Option 1 is online piracy, 2 is attacking consumers' data. Sounds pretty similar? Or do I need to be really literal and exact and use the same words?

Again, I agree with these newly changed words.

Your arguments on this whole thing are completely nonsensical. None of what you’re claiming to be mad about has anything to do with Metallica. You’re basically complaining that you can’t freely use the work of artists without compensating them.

I'm not, and I'm sorry that you struggle to see anything but black and white. I'm not complaining about paying artists. The ability to pay them is 100% unrelated to the complaint that enforcement technologies can harm the consumer. I'm sorry that you're not seeing that, but I'm not sure how much more explaining can possibly help here. If you can find a sentence from me that, anywhere, says or even implies "I shouldn't have to pay for music/tv/ebooks", I'll be shocked. I'm glad you came back after your nonsensical police parallel to make this comment, though.

I wouldn't say that DRM is 'fine'. For example there is no legal way to watch my blu-ray movies on my PC, on which I use Linux. Similarly Netflix 4K doesn't work at all on Linux or even on Windows unless you are using a specific web browser.

Oh, right amazing point - it hadn't even floated to the top of my memory that I can't actually even pay anybody to watch Netflix if I'm using the wrong operating system. DRM utopia, indeed.

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