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Comment by CharlieDigital | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)"

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