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Comment by CharlieDigital | Hacker News Reader

> ...by their support for DRM

I'm going to be Devil's advocate here and say that DRM ostensibly protects the IP of content originators who I think we'd agree should be rewarded for investing in or creating that content.

Perhaps you have some other scheme or perspective on how content originators/creators can/could/should monetize their IP without DRM? Genuinely curious what alternative schemes are viable for protecting and rewarding content creators.

(Yes; let's all acknowledge that even with DRM, pirating still exists)

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FWIW, you can make a reasonable argument that DRM as it currently exists is not about protecting IP of content creators, but instead "giving content providers leverage against the creators of playback devices"[1]. To be sure, both reasons contribute, but the latter isn't a good one, and you can argue that W3C indirectly supported it (although, I don't understand why it's preferable for DRM to be implemented through entirely non-standard protocol as opposed to having the W3C make something of a standard for it).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29709939

As far as I can tell, piracy exists for exactly two reasons:

1. Content is priced way the fuck higher than market value.

2. Content is so encumbered that it is difficult to even get it or use it.

The way I see it is that #1 is not a problem for content creators. It is relatively rare compared to people buying content and the person who would rather download an episode of The Office rather than paying Apple $1.99 for it was unlikely to pay if that was the only option in the first place. Their alternative to piracy isn’t to spend the money. It’s to watch something else.

As for #2, it is a self-inflicted wound. There was a time when the 6th Harry Potter movie was about to come out in theaters. I wanted to do a marathon watch of the first 5 movies with my family. I had the first 4 on DVD and wanted to buy the 5th. I checked all streaming services and none had it. In fact it appeared that some removed it a month prior. I then called several nearby stores and all were sold out. A store 20 miles away had a copy for $40. After spending nearly an hour to find this out, I spent 5 minutes downloading it off a torrent site. Maybe indestructible your content will net you more money even if you have some of your content pirated.

Are either of these true?

For $17/mo, I can access an endless stream of content on Netflix. This is way cheaper than I remember my cable subscriptions used to be (if we consider the cost of Internet access as fixed in either case). Verizon is even offering to throw in Hulu, Disney+, and a bunch of other streaming services "free" if I switch to FIOS + mobile.

I can watch Netflix on my phone, tablet, PC, TV, Chromecast, Roku, Apple TV. I can watch any show, any time I want, as many seasons and episodes as I want. 24x7x365. Is it really encumbered? Aside from IP owners walling off their services, content -- as long as you pay for it -- flows more freely now than ever, IMO. If I go to an Airbnb, I can log into my Netflix account and watch all of my shows. I can log into my Amazon account and watch all of my purchased movies. (Just don't forget to log out!)

Yes; I can't watch it offline or if I'm in a location with poor Internet speeds. But that is such a small fraction of my time that it hardly registers. Yes; my right to view content I've paid for can be revoked in some circumstance I'm sure, but it's never once happened to me.

Yes, and NetFlix is a great example. Prior to the existence of NetFlix video piracy was extensive and widespread, once NetFlix appeared that piracy was greatly reduced as the "value" was there (it was more convenient to pay NetFlix than to figure out how to pirate stuff). It won't be "zero" of course but it was effective enough that content companies have emphasized that model over encrypted optical media.

> For $17/mo, I can access an endless stream of content on Netflix.

$17/month for netflix is great when you have an income. As a poor student, that’s $17 I can save.

Then pay $9.99 for Netflix Basic or $6.99 and deal with ads. If you can't afford that then there's basically no price point that makes sense because you're simply not willing or able to pay for entertainment.

Exactly, or I can have it for free on my university T3 connection, and still keep up with popular culture.

Part of the problem is that it’s not ‘content’ that you want to subscribe to, but ‘specific content’, which might be spread around 3-4 different services that all want that sweet sweet monthly fee.

Dollars to donuts, I bet content available on Netflix is pirated a lot less than content that is not. Gel restrictions, content contractors expiring, not being able to watch it on a plane, etc. all do contribute, but Netflix is fairly priced for what it has (which is far from everything) and fairly easily available.

Yes, it's encumbered. You are beholden, across all of your examples, to binary compatibility of a .so file Google refuses to distribute for any platform except x86_64 and 32-bit ARM. The fact that you have a lot of such devices does nothing for the people who want to either consume the content on other devices or develop new devices for the purpose.

Much like DVD region locking, the majority of the population doesn't care, and those who do are capable of overcoming the DRM anyway, but the latter is illegal, and leaves no room at all for people who want to comply with the law but not with Google's device mandates.

If there's a TV series I want to watch on Netflix, and I watch it in the span of 4 months, I pay $68 for that one TV series. Is that great value?

Maybe Netflix is a good value if your primary goal is to have an endless stream of content to watch and you don't really care what it is. But if you watch TV less frequently, it's absolutely terrible value. And if you want to choose what series to watch rather than which streaming service to watch, the constant switching between streaming services is terribly tedious, and another source of increased cost if your interests don't change perfectly aligned with billing periods.

Both of these points have been repeatedly proven in the marketplace.

So in no part is piracy also because some people like to get things without paying … come on let’s be honest!

Sure, but I believe it is a very small percentage of people who pirate content (which is a small fraction of people who consume content). Most people are happy to pay and not think about it. Majority of those who aren’t, pirate for the above reasons. A small percentage pirate because of other reasons.

I know someone who just wants to have copies of all movies and TV shows. He spends way more effort on keeping up his storage array and downloading things then he does enjoying the movies. But for every one of him there are 10,000 regular paying consumers. Is he worth worrying about?

I do not care. Even if DRM was magic and perfectly prevented piracy, it's not appropriate in the web. We're in a situation where it's intentionally impossible to write an open-source browser which can render any standard web page. That's not an acceptable state of affairs.

EDIT: Wow, I didn't expect "it should be legal to make an open source web browser which can render any standard web page" to be so controversial. I'm disappointed.

DRM is only unable on audio and video tags. You can still render the rest of the page. Often sites will gracefully fallback onto a lower quality version of the content if you don't support DRM. You could also just use widevine from your open source browser to play it.

I'm not sure why you are telling me this. It is correct (aside from typos), but doesn't affect what I said.

FYI, widevine is not open source.

Widevine isn't a browser. Similarly running GNU bash on Windows doesn't suddenly make GNU bash no longer open source even though it is calling out to closed source code.

An open source browser can not render standard web pages. A browser can either be open source and unable to render DRM content, or it can contain closed-source components and be able to render DRM content. Firefox + Widevine is the second kind, Firefox without Widevine is the first kind. It is illegal to make a fully open source browser which can render any standard web page.

That's missing the point, I think. The HTML spec includes elements that cannot be rendered using open source software. Yes, of course other parts of the page can be rendered (at least today) but it's absurd for them to claim that they are supporting open standards.

DRM, especially the kind used in browsers, is cracked all the time. So the claim that it 'protects IP' is false. It mainly just adds a barrier to creating compatible competing browsers/players.

Edit: Here's a worthy read for the topic:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140906214521/https://plus.goog...

I already acknowledged this; there's no such thing as perfect DRM and there can never be. There are a million and one ways to copy content, DRM be damned. But for the majority of users, there is a balance between inconvenience, quality, and cost that DRM tips the balance just enough for a part of the market.

The problem is that DRM only has to fail/be cracked once for every piece of media. If users who wanted to pirate something had to crack the DRM every single time, I'd be with you. But that doesn't happen. Instead, scene groups crack them and upload the media on torrent sites and the like, then it's just like any other pirated piece of content.

In terms of convenience DRM doesn't change a thing, because from the consumer's perspective it's all there on a torrent site, there's no way to even know if something had DRM unless you look it up specifically.

Online games include anti-cheat software. I'd argue that this is also "anti-consumer" because it forces me -- a non-cheater -- to install monitoring software. Not only that, despite this anti-cheat software, there are still cheaters in every online game!

Do you take the same view that game developers should just abandon anti-cheat because it can be cracked? Should online games just abandon anti-cheat schemes? Would that be a better experience for the gamers and the developers/publishers if we just abandoned anti-cheat because it's not perfect and there are always cheaters?

I'd say yes. Anti-cheat and anti-crack has created far too many issues for me as a legitimate customer. I prefer paying for DRM-less content and opensource software, and i'd choose to pay them over commercially protected alternatives anytime.

> Anti-cheat and anti-crack has created far too many issues for me as a legitimate customer.

Let me get this straight, though: you would rather that CoD, Fortnite, LoL, Lichess, etc. just make it open season; no anti-cheat. You believe that as a gamer, your gaming experience would be enhanced if there was no anti-cheat.

If that's your logical conclusion -- that no anti-cheat is the answer because there are always going to be some cheaters -- then I have nothing. We'll just have to agree to disagree. As a gamer, I'm happy to install anti-cheat if it can defeat the majority of casual cheaters -- even if it costs some frames or adds overhead to the startup time.

Anti-cheat is a) only neccesary for for competitive games, which is only a fraction of possible games and b) only needed there because publishers want to remain in control of the servers instead of letting the community run their own. With community-run servers the admins can kick disruptive players wether they are cheaters or not, no spyware needed. You could even require your own spyware for your server and let others play on servers that are more reasonable. And for tournaments the organizer should control the hardware and software anyway to make sure there is a level playing field.

I'd argue that anti-cheat is analogus to security-by-obscurity. It is basically a bad compromise to mitigate issues of a broken architecture.

Imagine that online banks would do login checks on client side, and you'd have to install anti-steal software before you can login. Would that be acceptable to reduce fraudalent transactions? Of course, there'll still be a signifcant amount of stolen funds, but it'd prevent most of your neighbors to login to your account.

Well, this is horrible design (and has basically happened with credit cards btw...) and you should address it at it's core, by bulding the architecture in a way that such fraudalent transactions are next-to impossible.

My point is: if cheating is so much of an issue, games should be architected in a way to avoid the ability of cheating from client-side at all, without additional monitoring required. Anti-cheat is a bad workaround to a core development problem, at the expense of the customer instead of developers.

In the case of DRM it's different. The inconvenience threshold is only about non-pirated to pirated, not "pirated (no DRM originally) to pirated (with DRM originally)"

Faulty analogy. The lack of DRM would not hamper my enjoyment of the media, as the lack of anti-cheating ware would hamper my enjoyment of a shared game. Put simply, DRM is about protecting the creator, anti-cheat is about protecting the consumer.

FWIW, I pay for nearly all the streaming apps and still get the file itself through ${other means} because I want it for offline viewing/future viewing etc just like we used to be able to with DVDs. If the streaming provider provided this file, I wouldn’t need to resort to these other means and they wouldn’t lose a customer who now already has to have an alternate pathway to get a soft copy of the file.

> The lack of DRM would not hamper my enjoyment of the media

Sure it would!

Without DRM, there would be no digital distribution the way we know it today.

But that's because the executives feel like it wouldn't, not because it actually wouldn't. Media gets torrented on launch day.

> Without DRM, there would be no digital distribution the way we know it today.

That's the point. We want digital content without DRM that is not locked to players approved by the distributor.

Genuinely curious how this could be feasible without DRM to protect the rights and IP of the content creators and studios that invest in the content.

Is there a scheme that you would propose that solves this problem?

You don't need any "scheme". DRM-free already works for the music industry. Most people don't mind paying for content if they have reasonable options for doing so.

The flaw with your theory is that it's not browser or video player sellers who are pushing for DRM. What interest does Netflix have in preventing competing browsers / players?

A major DRM scheme is Widewine, controlled by no other than Google. So you have Google which is a browser vendor, an OS vendor and DRM gatekeeper. Even if as you say Netflix is fine with competing browsers/players, as long as they use Widewine they put everyone else at the mercy of Google's decisions. This is absolutely anti-user, anti-competitive madness. Mozilla pushed back as long as possible but had to give up.

You do know that Firefox supports using Widevine too?

Not on Linux arm64 builds because Google does not provide official Widevine packages usable for that architecture. How broken is that?

> DRM ostensibly protects the IP

Ostensibly is doing a lot of work here because it literally does not. I can torrent any show or movie that is otherwise being streamed with DRM. DRM is a complete farce that serves no actual purpose but to make idiotic media executives happy.

It's a little strong to say it "literally does not" when I cannot break L1 Widevine, which uses the W3C's APIs

You might be able to torrent any show or movie in high quality with a private tracker, but it's hard to come by 4K HDR content just hanging out for free these days.

> You might be able to torrent any show or movie in high quality with a private tracker, but it's hard to come by 4K HDR content just hanging out for free these days.

Even if that's the case, that's not an issue of DRM, that's an issue of distribution.

It's also just flat out not true. Sure, some of the 4k HDR content might originate from PTP/BTN/scene/w.e., but it's readily available on e.g. RARBG.

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