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Comment by dm33tri | Hacker News Reader

I don't even know what DRM brings to the browsers apart from breaking external monitors and blacking out screenshots

All the content behind it is still available day 0 on trackers

Because the same parties interested in DRM in browsers (and everywhere else) are slowly working on making torrenting more difficult.

They were working on that years ago. After several decades with no success I think they've mostly given up and just profit from it now.

What? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40693451

In what way do they directly profit from piracy?

Can't speak for others... but I generally pay for a few streaming services at a time. I find a lot of the UX just poor to very bad. I will favor those with shows that I watch. I still torrent the shows themselves as it's easier (for me) to do that then to deal with the various apps on my Shield (they're still there, as my SO seems to use them for random watching).

The networks can still track (to some extent) what shows are popular as torrents, and use that to inform their other advertising efforts. A break out (good) show may show indicators on torrents from word of mouth outside their network, and they can then feature that show in their banner areas.

These aren't likely "profit" directly, but they are and can be factors. Another point is loyalty from those who are able to pay, when they are able to pay. Assuming prohibitive costs are what is mainly keeping people from paying for the content.

They seed and download their own works on bittorrent, then send "scare emails" demanding payment to any ISP with IPs they connect to for forwarding to the customer. A nontrivial number of confused or scared customers pay.

There are more indirect ways, but that is certainly the direct way they financially profit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com