Won’t stop them from trying. The DRM folks have plenty of help from the evangelical “moral police” who want to wipe out obscenity online, even where there is no victim.
DRM is a minor annoyance and nothing more.
If we can't disable it somehow, we'll switch operating systems.
Keep in mind that we're still seeing jailbreaks for iPhones after all these years.
I admire your optimism. Unfortunately, once Apple has shown it is possible to prevent the playing of unlicensed copyrighted works, Windows and Android will have to match this or be treated as second-class platforms by the media industries.
Very few people will be willing to buy dedicated Linux computers (with custom Secure Boot keys) for watching torrented videos, and such devices will then become subject to more and more regulations, like having to pay an annual fee to the government.
Their own pro grade software that is paid for (logic, final cut) is always cracked basically day 1 of release and they've never made any attempt to tighten up authentication
Huh?! You can just buy a sound card or even a DAC for very little.
DRM is about killing the second hand market. About keeping the market segmentation between countries. About killing fair use.
It has been very succesful in all of this.
I agree it's totally useless. Just takes one person to record the output and it's done.
I strongly suspect DRM is not a way to stop someone but a security theatre serving as way to make money off the licensing and hardware. That’s why the industry does and always will require it - not because they’re stupid to believe it protects something (though it nominally does) but simply because it greases their other hand.
Also, yeah, it kills the second hand market.
1. Sharing is hard. Plenty of people legally purchase a movie, and then want to give it to their friends; DRM makes that difficult and thus generates at least some additional sales.
2. Forced obsolescence -- people who buy media legally can be forced to buy it again and again every time they buy a new entertainment device.
3. Creative business models -- in a world without DRM, you could not offer "rental" downloads, "streaming" would just be a form of "downloading," and the industry could not offer special "deals" like "family" passes that permit more than one account holder to view a purchased movie. All of these are ways to make money that could not happen in a world without DRM.
Yes, DRM is always broken after enough time -- that is not as much of a problem as you might expect. As long as the time between a DRM system being deployed and being broken is long enough that the industry makes back more than the cost of developing the DRM system, the system worked. Developing new DRM systems from time to time is just the cost of doing business, not really a problem for anyone in the industry, and as you point out it may even work to the benefit of certain participants.
I am not a big fan of DRM (in fact, I would argue that the entire movie industry needs to rethink its business model, embrace the true power of file sharing as a means of distributing movies and focusing more on using movies as a draw or value-add for other lines of business), but it is not as if the movie industry executives are a bunch of buffoons who continue to waste their money after decades of broken DRM. If DRM was not adding to the industry's profits they would have stopped bothering with it -- see e.g. the music industry, which has a somewhat different business model and which has largely given up on their DRM dreams.
Not even from a piracy standpoint, just a "I want to play this after the server/company shuts down" standpoint.
This isn't even remotely true.
Almost every game seems to have an online element and won't run at all if you aren't on the latest version.