[*] Jellyfin & and the -arr daemons are far more usable and stable then wading through the various streaming services interfaces, so I'll download episodes even though I do actually pay for the streaming services.
[*] Jellyfin & and the -arr daemons are far more usable and stable then wading through the various streaming services interfaces, so I'll download episodes even though I do actually pay for the streaming services.
DRM is really about control. It's a technical trick that thanks to DMCA anti-reverse engineering clauses becomes a legal trick to dictate exactly who and how can play the content, much tighter than what copyright and consumer laws allow by default.
For example, without DRM you couldn't effectively sell separate licenses for computer screens and TVs, because users could just connect their computer to a TV.
DRM allows negotiating everything about distribution, up to who pays who for having a button on the TV remote.
Those who control the DRM have a veto power over everything, and have it viciously enforced internationally thanks to it being tied to copyright.
None of the hurdles stop 100% of people. But every hurdle causes some people to stop bothering.
For example, it's impossible to watch 4k content on popular streaming services if you use Linux, and even with macOS/Windows you need a specific combination of hardware + OS + browser, if a service even offers it.
So I'd put accessibility and consistency as important parts of UX that torrenting can often miss out on. For the common person who is using Windows/Chrome, macOS/Safari, or a gaming console, those parts can easily be more important.
Of course, these methods start to shine when legitimate methods are even less accessible. For instance, U.S. sports streaming is an absolute mess with multiple networks, regional blackouts, etc., on top of buggy apps, so that you sometimes can't watch a game legally for any price. People have widely picked up illegal streams as an alternative, usually preferring familiar platforms like YouTube if the streams aren't taken down quickly enough.
As far as I’ve seen, they pretty much grow on trees as far as films are concerned. TV shows are a very different story though and outside of hugely popular series are far more inconsistent.
You have to learn how to navigate an ever-dwindling list of trackers and probably a VPN, which is already too tall a hurdle for the overwhelming majority of people. Time is often worth the price of a 4K Roku and a subscription, even though that's still a technically inferior experience at the end of the day.
Piracy has two very hard problems: privacy and moderation. Moderation requires authority; authority requires trust; and trust relies on identification. I think we might be able to resolve this by replacing moderation with curation, but that's going to take a lot of ground-work that I'm too ADHD to do myself.
I suppose some monitors and TVs have "features" to cryptographically handshake with the GPU and ensure a secure link, but at some point the data must be decrypted and decoded to be displayed. This doesn't seem like much more than a speed bump for a motivated individual.
It's a cat and mouse game, but I wouldn't discount these efforts as a mere speed bump. Screen enforced DRM will make things much harder. A motivated individual with the right tools and hardware hacking know how may be able to jailbreak a screen to record stuff, but that's going to make things out of reach for most people.
There was something called Macrovision back in the VHS/DVD days that tried to defeat digital/analog conversion, and I'm sure visual techniques could be devised...
But I imagine someone with a good OLED and a good mirrorless camera (or even a cell phone nowadays) could make a pretty good 4K replication of any media that displays.
(and I agree the result would likely be subpar, but better than it's ever been at any previous point in time)
I'd imagine they do this via huge (non-consumer level) cameras as well as by professional editors and graders who spend countless hours on the process.
But that doesn't really contradict your point. I don't know. I've never seen a good screen recording but I don't download pirated films so perhaps I've never seen an instance of someone really trying to get it right.
Professional editors and color graders have to lower the dynamic range, because there is basically nothing that can get as bright as, say, the sun, and because basically no display can sustain peak brightness over the screen, which introduces an EOTF transfer curves, reducing the peak brightness and thus dynamic range.
You're right about pirated films, but that's because they're typically recorded in a run of the mill cinema while it's playing, not in controlled conditions in front of a carefully calibrated screen-camera combination taking a photograph of every frame.
With a little bit of work (display a few calibration targets and build a quick and dirty LUT to match your display) you can get really convincing results.
If we were to even assume the Column/Row drivers chips only accepted encrypted data they still have the individual traces coming out of them. The pitch of the traces is super tiny, but still possible to tap, but would be a massive pain, but still do able.
Although you can get devices that strip the encryption from an HDMI signal these days so it's kinda moot. So it's not exactly something anyone would need to do these days.
Although it can only trip on certain devices or media players (mainly Blu-ray players, including PS3 onwards), I did read an idea that suggested Cinavia being placed inside an OS's kernel in a secure enclave to make it system-wide.
This has already been shown with videogame DRM like Denuvo. It's so hard to crack that only a handful of people know how, and yet they end up racing eachother so eagerly every time a new game comes out that it's usually done in under 24 hours. Unless you can beat "so secure that only a handful of people in the world can crack it" the situation will always be the same.
Minecraft: ~185,000,000
World of Warcraft: ~7,250,000
Dragons Dogma 2: ~4000
This seems more along the lines of nobody bothers to crack games nobody wants to play.So then you're waiting for either that region to stabilize or demand for cracks to cause people somewhere else to get into the game, and in the interim you effectively have a temporary supply chain issue.
But it's hard to give credit for the ravages of war to the DRM pushers and it's not at all obvious that they've secured any kind of permanent advantage.
No it hasn’t.
> Everytime a new game comes out that it’s usable done in under 24 hours
This is not even remotely true and is not based in any kind of reality.
But cracking Denuvo takes real skill- and there's no financial reward in it. Back in the 90s bootleg DVDs and CD-ROMs had organised crime making money from it.
Cracking Denuvo as a hobby is not something a sane person would do, and the downsides if caught are higher when one is fully employed.
At least to me, a decade has passed since I left college and had spare time and energy to tackle such projects just for cred.
Hardware: makes cracking much much harder and out of reach for a lot of people. Even the people that can do it are going to be drastically slowed down due to this.
Streaming: means you can block specific device keys once you know they are compromised (the hacker managed to mod the TV to be able to record from it).
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/1hqd4p3/crack_w...
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/ieo7u4/crack_wa...
Sure, but the closer you get to the eye ball, the bigger the loophole is.
It's not common anymore, but _way_ back in the day, some releases were made *in the projection booth* with a semi-pro camera on a tripod pointed at the screen. (look for old NFO files with `TS` or `TeleSync` in them to get an idea of when this was common-ish)
The analogue loophole will remain open until there's a HDMI to optical nerve technology that we're all forced to get at birth.
This is kind of a pointless tangent, but you might not have to go that far. It's probably hard to get a recording of the Apple Vision Pro for instance.
I hadn't actually thought about that! For 99.995% of my time on this earth, "screen" meant "flat, glass, viewed from some distance". I guess it's time to spend some time thinking about what new ways to exploit the analogue loophole are...
I wonder which part would be harder: designing something to fool the "am I on a head? Where are the eye balls looking?" bits or the optics needed to re-combine the stereo?
However, the reason I think it's only "kind of" pointless... it is in fact true that as far as I know, there is no way to pirate any of the "immersive" TV shows Apple has released. You can't watch them on any other VR headset, or even watch some 2D version on a flat screen.
Which means there are videos out there in the world right now which are immune from the analog loophole, at least as far as I know. It's a very small subset of all the content that has been produced, and it will stay that way, but it does exist.
DRM won't make me pay, it'll only take your trash out of my mindspace... which is probably a blessing anyway.
Ever wondered why netflix 4k web-dls take a while for less popular shows?
Netfliy monitors these more tightly apparently and blacklist keys that are used to download. Then the group needs to buy some new device, the old one is burned.
It's quite easy to grab the encrypted media files, as they go over the wire - do this from two devices and compare what you get. (you don't need to strip the DRM to see if the two files are identical)
If that's just a total of a single day, 365 cheap netflix devices per year certainly isn't out of the question, especially with the number of people involved in the many ripping groups.
Of course you can try to play them with hardware that doesn't follow the rules. But there's a finite number of vendors, so that isn't necessarily easy.
However, the detection and enforcement can theoretically be done by any device or software that has access to the audio signal. The monitor, the GPU, the playback software, the operating system, etc. could each individually decide not to play the file, making it not work. Some of those can be bypassed in various ways, some can't. But instead of computers, there are smartphones, commercial media players/receivers, and televisions/projectors, which seem the most likely places to target for enforcement, and those would affect most people.
Nevertheless, I do wonder how real this actually is. Again from the decade-old Wikipedia article, it seems like Cinavia was meant to target both recording devices and playback devices. However, the Aurora theater shooting happened not long before the article stopped getting meaningful updates, and I wonder if public safety concerns stalled its deployment. Also, the article mentions that people were finding ways to remove or neuter the signal. I also didn't encounter any problems with what I assume to be protected media (a 4K movie and a 1080p TV show), either recording my screen with my Android phone, nor with playing it back on that phone and with VLC on my Windows computer with an nVidia graphics card.
I don't know whether streamers use it but it was widely deployed in the era when movie piracy revolved around making pirated Blurays. For instance the PS3 would silence the audio on a burned Bluray that had a theatre or TV cammed title protected by Cinavia on it.
A lot of this is about catching the fat head though. People who play videos using some hacked up VLC on Linux don't bother the studios, they're long tail and don't make a revenue impact. They're after the ordinary people who want to watch pirated stuff on a regular home cinema system.
The only beneficiaries of DRM seem to be hardware vendors, and even for them it's unclear if it's a net benefit, since it makes everything more expensive.
Also, how does criminalizing it actually help anything, since the difficulty is in the scale of it happening and the difficulty of detecting it rather than the severity of the penalties, and imposing draconian penalties on random kids only turns the public against you?
And you can't even get evidence of intent from this anyway because DRM circumvention tools don't actually come with a ski mask and a set of lockpicks. You install a tool called "video downloader" which supports a hundred sites and 10% of them have some kind of DRM which it automatically strips in the background, you may not even be aware that it's happening when you use it.
One example -- it has made creating pirated videos almost inaccessible to most people. In the past, if all other methods fail, you can always just record your screen with a common recording application. That's not possible with GPU enabled DRM, which is enough to stop a casual consumer to share a movie to their friends (even at a less ideal quality).
> have never had an issue finding what I want at the quality I want within an hour of a episode/movie being released to streaming.
That's because you are consuming mainstream/popular media. You often won't find recordings of a lot of performance art (ballet, concerts etc)* and I-am-not-going-to-name-it-content because there is a lot less demand.
* an interesting exception is that a lot of content released via Blu-ray gets decrypted, ripped and torrented.
Control publishing rights, platforms, software and hardware that is used for the consumption of said media.
The publishers control the DRM, which then needs to be licensed by television makers, software writers, and such things. Then that gives them control over how is it presented, how it is sold, how it is consumed and it forces everybody to agree to their terms.
It is a power thing. They want to have power over other businesses. DRM laws help them do that.
> How are these DRM schemes actually being defeated?
Well I don't follow DRM piracy stuff, but at a high level the people that want to consume the media must be able to decrypt it to enjoy it. So if you buy one of these DRM devices and figure out how they work then you can decrypt anything that is compatible with them.
And you only need to decrypt it once since digital media can be copied a infinite amount of times.
This is the argument for repealing them, which is why you rarely see them making it out loud.
Instead they come up with some rubbish about making it marginally more difficult (spoiler: it's still easier to pirate stuff than use legal services and the only thing actually preventing everyone from doing it is that some people want to follow the law). So it's good to knock those fake arguments down when you see them and leave no excuse to keep the bad laws that ought to be repealed.
Accepting their actual motivation like it's a legitimate reason to keep those laws is like saying the reason we should keep doing the stuff Snowden revealed is so the intelligence agencies can spy on the elected officials regulating the intelligence agencies.
If I understand incorrectly?
(Jokes aside, though, I haven't been able to figure out what IIUI stands for.)
This is not the case, unless we are talking about trade secrets, and in case of trade secrets, only applicable to board members and employees.
Of course for music DRM has proven to be pointless. People want to stream music, not buy music, and preserving media across so many media obsolenscence events has been such a pain that streaming is the only manageable solution for most people -- consumers don't want to make and manage copies anymore.
The same should apply to movies and such, but maybe not -- it's not clear yet.
This is not how corporate fiduciary duties work (courts repeatedly ruled there is no explicit responsibility to maximise profits or minimise taxes; Swedish Aktienbolaget are a notable exception there), though it is a common misinterpretation of them.
1. Disable video hardware acceleration in browser (preferably FF)
2. Open OBS studio
3. Record screen while streaming service of your choice is running.
Still works in modern OSs like Windows 10.
You're technically not circumventing the DRM decryption routines when you do this since the pixels displayed on screen have already been decrypted (just like recording cable to VCR post-decryption), so the legality of it is towards the lighter grey end compared to ripping DVDs. IANAL though.
Not to say the stronger tiers never get broken but it's a lot more involved than just recording them with OBS.
Use Microsoft edge for playback (so you get 4K HDR). Stylish as addon to remove any player hud.
Especially useful if you want to legitimately use copyrighted content but obviously can't just use a pirated version.
ViewHD 2 Port 1x2 Powered HDMI 1... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004F9LVXC?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_shar...
Where is the evidence this device strips HDCP?
I believe that's intentional (it would be illegal to import if it was advertised).
> What makes you think it will strip HDCP?
I've got 6 in use for lecture/talk recording without worrying about HDCP. Especially useful for presenters casting to chromecast or presenters using macbooks with DRM software (as blackmagic SDI converters don't support HDCP at all)
For example Macs and RedHat systems require HDCP if you've used Spotify or Apple Music since the last reboot (which applies to most speakers).
Some Chromebooks can't provide direct display out but cast to a ChromeCast instead, which also always requires HDCP.
We've also had talks on media and cultural studies which use a clip from e.g. a Netflix or Amazon Prime show as part of their talk. HDCP is almost guaranteed in this case.
If your HDMI chain signals that it can't handle HDCP, some computers will obey that (and downgrade or stop playback). But most broadcast HDMI tech can't even signal that HDCP is unavailable, so you'll get HDCP by default.
That's why every major venue, university or event has HDCP killers stockpiled. For 1080p60 that used to be cheap chinese HDMI splitters, nowadays it's mostly these Hagibis cards. If they're really fancy they'll have an HD Fury with HDCP removal license, but those cost ~$600.
And up through Dec 2023, FF and Chrome on Windows were limited to 720p. That's right, it wasn't until 2024 that Netflix on Chrome on Windows supported 1080p... That's what, 15 years after 1080p monitors became common?
https://web.archive.org/web/20231229030336/https://help.netf...
Now that streaming is commonplace it seems less necessary, but it was an essential stepping stone and an ongoing defense against piracy
Pirated content represents a relatively small and motivated community. There'll always be something like it, so the question for rightsholders is how to manage the size and visibility of that community.
People will pay you to move dirt from one side of a lot to the other side.
My guess is that when content platforms negotiate with IP holders, there is some need to show that some DRM is in place.
Stripping the more advanced forms of DRM usually relies on compromised device keys which can and will be revoked if it becomes known that they've leaked, so the details are deliberately kept very quiet. If you've ever experienced a device suddenly losing the ability to play 4K Netflix, it may have been because its keys were revoked.
Copyright defines art as a good (instead of a service), and demands everyone play along. An artist can use their copyright to monopolize both the distribution and the derivation of their work. Effectively, this places a wall between any would-be collaborators, because collaboration is derivative. In a world without copyright, you could collaborate with the work of Disney by making derivative work. With copyright, however, Disney can demand you stop that work by monopolizing its copy. By abusing this demand, Disney can entrench itself as the only Mickey-Mouse compatible corporation.
In the software world, collaboration of work requires source code redistribution. Because of this, the social incompatibility that copyright is founded upon translates into literal software incompatibility; including proprietary software platforms and libraries. For example, Microsoft Office has entrenched itself as the "industry standard" for rich text and spreadsheets by leveraging the incompatibility of its data formats. While collaboration isn't impossible, Microsoft is granted a legally-enforced anticompetitive advantage from its copyright monopoly.
NVIDIA uses the copyright monopoly of its CUDA implementation to sell more hardware. It is able to do this because the hardware and software engineers are both part of the same vertically-integrated corporation. Because of copyright, AMD's software engineers are not allowed to collaborate with the CUDA developers, and AMD drivers cannot be made CUDA compatible.
This is where the story gets to DRM: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and others are all vertically integrated hardware-media-advertising corporations. Each of them wants to abuse their respective copyright monopolies (their media businesses) to sell hardware, just like NVIDIA does with CUDA. To accomplish this, they told us the exact reverse story: Digital Rights Management.
The story of Digital Rights Management says that hardware needs to be incompatible in order to enforce the copyright monopoly. See what they did there? Now any anticompetitive advantage that we get in our hardware and advertising businesses was all just from us doing whatever it takes to support those poor starving artists!
I can hear you asking yourself, "But where is the hardware incompatibility?". That's the extra sneaky bit on top. Unlike having a clear winner and a loser like NVIDIA and AMD, hardware-media-advertising corporations are all winners. Each one of them benefits from the other using DRM. All of their moats intersect into one giant ~~swamp~~, I mean lakefront development.
Here's an example to chew on: App Stores. Both Google and Apple have their own separate incompatible app stores. Sure, it's a loss to Google when a popular app only works on iOS, but that's a two way street. The important part is that they have a moat at all: when the little guys try to make a competitive alternative, they drown. There is plenty of room for two players at this game, and the intersection of moats guarantees there will never be a third. Even when Apple's moat starts to flood Android Island, what's left standing will be worth more than a drained swamp.