Movie industry demands US law requiring ISPs to block piracy websites | Hacker News Reader

Movie industry demands US law requiring ISPs to block piracy websites

arstechnica.com

68 pointsleotravis1035 comments

Slight tangent, but movie DRM is really awful. My younger brother has a developmental disability and one of his favorite things is to watch movies. He’s capable enough to use streaming services but since he grew up with dvds he really likes the tangible part of picking a movie out from the cabinet and watching it.

He’s in need of a personal computer and ideally it’ll be a Chromebook since he’s the most comfortable with that OS. However it would also be great if he could play movies on the computer for travel, or if the tv is occupied. But the difficulty of trying to play a legally purchased movie on a laptop, even not a Chromebook, makes this almost an impossible task. He _might_ be able to use VLC on ChromeOS to play some/all dvds but it’s highly unlikely he’ll be able to watch blu rays.

I’m very tempted to just rip and reburn all of his dvds and blu rays for him so that he can just play the video file off of the dvd.

Not really sure where I’m going with this but fuck DRM.

Let’s make this the top comment? Haha I love it. The love of your brother is evident and you finished with the point just so eloquently.

You triggered a memory from when I bought Avatar on blu-ray.

PC at the time had a blu-ray drive. Booted up Windows. Opened up one of the few dedicated software options I was forced to buy for blu-ray support. Disc doesn’t work properly?? Check software’s support forum and the software hadn’t been updated with the most recent DRM.

I felt burned at that point. Pirate copies already existed but I couldn’t play my legally acquired copy. So yeah, +1 on fuck DRM.

This is the problem with DRM: It is a pain for honest customers, while not preventing people who copy things.

If you want customers to pay for your thing you just need to make paying for it easier, more straightforward and more reliable than pirating it. As of now the only way they try to reach that goal is by making pirating harder.

I mostly agree, however DRM does stop laypeople from directly pirating, they have to rely on technical people to do the ripping or cracking, and also find out where to procure those copies.

The optimal DRM is something that prevents theft by lay people, but minimally inconveniences legal users. I think a good example would be how you can't just copy PS2 games with a CD burner and play them on an unmodified console.

This is reasonably accurate. Circumventing DRM is mildly complex enough that it requires someone with technical skill to do it. This means the knowledge around it gets centralized first, then disseminated to the public at large. Once that happens it gives the legal someone to threaten or litigate against, thus validating their presence within the company.

It might cost a bit, but if you had a Chromebook with an SD card, you could rip movies onto SD cards (1-2 GB should be fine, even 4GB will hold a blu-ray rip), and have it autoplay on insertion.

Hardest part would be hiding errors on yanking them out without unmounting.

Then you could rip DVD and Blu-ray to SD cards and hold them in the cases.

Oho now i wonder if you could load them up on a hard drive[1] and just trigger playback of the right file using some physical token like an RFID tag or a tiny few-MB SD card, if you can even get them these days, with the ID on it. Or a QR code waved at the camera, with the DVD case artwork on the other side.

I just found out how annoying it is to have a two-way switch using smart switches and automation rules that used to be a bulletproof connection of two £3 switch faceplates: madcap computerised complexity to acheive things that used to be trivial is the future, man!

[1] Or a Plex-like server. Doesn't even need all the UI gubbins, just a video stream address that can be inferred from the token.

It’s totally doable and as you suspect, quite hard to make as reliable as a DVD player.

Hmm what if a DVD contains an index.html which just redirects to the right place. I could build a single entry point too so I can control where the right place is if it ever changes. This could even allow you to “make DVDs” of movies that are streaming only without having to pirate and burn them.

I think the problem is that Chromebooks don't have DVD drives or any significant amount of their own storage (in which case you could store ISOs and mount them).

And SD cards are pretty expensive if you only have one movie per card, because while they're cheap per MB, they only come in huge sizes these days.[1]

A USB angle adapter and a judicious use of 3D printing and/or sugru and/or VHB tape might allow an optical "undercarriage" though!

A Framework laptop with those nifty expansion slots might permit something unconventional like some kind of key-slot/punchcard/unique-MAC-type EEPROM/RFID reader, but the OS won't be ChromeOS. And that's really getting into the "not because it easy, but because it's there" zone!

[1]: But i have just discovered that you can buy "unfinished USB sticks" that are just the little black inserts with the flash in them for £1 each for 8GB on AliExpress (cheaper than the same SD cards and less fiddly), which is big enough to get a DVD ISO or BR rip with some massaging onto! (128MB is 50p, so an indirected method would not save much money). Probably very junky chips but the write-once and read-slow use case would probably not really care much.

Yea I was thinking about this too. It’s more space efficient than the DVDs, still physical, and wouldn’t require an external drive.

>I’m very tempted to just rip and reburn all of his dvds and blu rays for him so that he can just play the video file off of the dvd.

Given all the difficulties caused by DRM idiocy that you describe, why not quit being tempted and just do it?

If ever shitty, avaricious, unreasonable, idiotic little laws that absolutely deserve to be broken existed, it's those around DRM for movies and TV shows. There's no practical reason to be squeamish about breaking them. As you say, fuck DRM, so why not apply exactly that?

Why would one even be squeamish about it! I would understand torrenting the whole bunch being something you might not wish to do (mostly since you'll be uploading and might cop a "you've been a bad boy" letter if you're very unlucky). You would be done pretty quickly though, depending on your network speed.

But ripping from disks that you own and paid for and keeping it private is like the very definition of a victimless not-even-a-crime there is going!

I rented Dune (Part 1) on YouTube and couldn't play it in HD because I was using Google Chrome (not Chromium or any derivative) on Linux, and apparently the DRM didn't like that. I can play any other YouTube HD/4K videos just fine.

It seems to me that DRM enforcement pushes by industry are welcomed among many politicians because they also make such a useful Trojan horse for much more pervasive internet controls over content, expression and basic privacy. Bureaucrats almost always love trampling such things, or anything related that limits their own ability to limit the free flow of information which might one day harm their interests, and of course major tech companies will go right along with the same because nothing helps enforce the massive siloed, moated platforms they've built like a highly restrictive, onerous regulatory landscape.

Somewhat related is the supposed "danger" around current AI, promoted in part by the very companies that are pushing AI systems out the door. And why do they make such double sided arguments? Because much like in the point above about DRM, it invites them to neatly settle into a market where their presence is increasingly surrounded by regulatory moats and controls over free experimentation with the use of technology in circumventing arbitrary limitations (a fundamental aspect of any useful technology in my view).

You'd think given the way the music industry went, they'd at least be able to look to that for inspiration about how to come up with a better business model

If only they had access to a streaming service where they could watch The Playlist

Considering the movie industry isn't something like farming them not being able to figure out how to turn a crank and print money shouldn't be the governments problem.

Perhaps if they want this than maybe we reduce copyrights to 17 years.

Do we get to demand a law that means that studios can’t retract sales and can’t prevent people from making usable backups of the things they buy? No? Weird…

the movie industry should not be externalizing their copyright enforcement costs onto others.

Yep, it's pure rent seeking.

U.S. Public demands Movie Industry nut up and shut up. ISP's should be dumb pipes. Movie industry should also stay the fuck out of colliding with playback device manufacturers. We see what you're trying to do eith HDMI 2.

People won't resort to downloading movies off the internet if they just made them available legally across the world at local prices. As a Godzilla fan, there is no way for me to watch Godzilla Minus One. It wasn't released theatrically in my country. No news of it releasing it on any streaming services either in near future. I am willing to pay if only they would take my money. The stupid studio executives should focus their energies on making movies accessible rather than lobbying for more stupid laws. But of course they won't do that because they are too short-sighted.

Predicted outcome: piracy websites will use non-US CDNs which would make them impossible to block (due to DoH making DNS-level blocks non-working and thus obsolete) without causing a lot of collateral damage. Something similar has already happened in Russia - with collateral damage levels as high as 1000:1, and with official answers from the government agency responsible for website blocking amounting to this: "we do not ask ISPs to block victim.com, it's just their inferior equipment does not support cracking SSL keys in real time."

We should pass a law that any company that tries to outsource their trademark and copyright costs onto the public loses them in reaction to this ongoing waste of money and time.

I understand this is movie industry but I will be against any trial to block piracy website. The simple fact that Anne archive and sci-hub will be a premium target for any block is too much loss to human knowledge

I wish the digital video industry would go the way that the digital music industry went.

DRM free and most content available in 1 place.

How were all the record labels able to agree on having all their content available drm-free on like itunes and amazon, and have all their content on one streaming service.

But movie and tv show studios can't come close to this concept and seem to keep becoming more and more fractured.

That won’t be the last speech they stop if they get away with this.

Really curious to see the discussion on this and this recently posted article that’s loosely related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39994804

If this were done, it’ll be just the early stages of a more normalized censorship / great firewall thing that’s one day a lot bigger than just piracy sites. We shouldn’t set even one foot in that direction.

I guess the movie industry wants the VPN companies to be massively more profitable?

VPN companies are next I'm sure.

"Consumers demand US law requiring movie industry to not remove access to 'purchased' licensed digital content when it becomes even remotely inconvenient or insufficiently profitable."

Piracy is driving me insane

If only there was anything worth watching anymore...

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