Why DRM is such a fucking stupid idea

>Do you not still buy and sell licenses?

You do not buy and sell licenses. License is the verb. You license the work. License as a noun refers to the agreement document, not the product.

> seeing license is just going to confuse them.

If by "confuse" you mean "cause to be suspicious" then that's kind of the point, right?

> Do you not still buy and sell licenses?

Exactly. Which is why I said that it sellers should be required to use the wording "Buy a license", or something like that, to make sure that customers do not believe that they are buying the digital goods themselves.

> And seeing license is just going to confuse them.

And I'd be confused if I walked into a store and was asked to sign a long agreement at the checkout. It's the seller who wants to do something confusing instead of doing a simple sale. Why should he be allowed to hide this fact while giving the buyer a much worse and unexpected deal?

The reality is even more nuanced. Execs see people pirating their stuff and believe that those are truly lost sales. (and maybe some % of them are) They believe that if they can make it unpalatable/difficult enough to pirate music/movies etc... they will return to the halcyon when everything was good and they were making money hand over fist.

In truth, more people are turning away from traditional media than ever before as choices have expanded more and more. They deplore this as well, but in some cases the genie is out of the bottle (we are never going back to the days of 3-4 networks where power and profit margins were greatest), so the best they can hope to accomplish is to own all the networks and control the stores. They are winning.

I think he's referring to the "companies use DRM to punish pirates" point. Which is by itself a reasonable idea. But as it turns out most companies somehow screw it up and end up punishing the customer instead of the pirate.

>I'm not aware of 3rd party DRM on steam titles prior; open to correction here

I normally check The Big List of 3rd Party DRM on Steam [1] before I buy a game there.

I also have to note that Steam itself doesn't mandate DRM and can be used to distribute DRM-free games [2]; the DRM component is called Steamworks.

[1] http://steamdrm.flibitijibibo.com/index.php?page=DRM_Lists/T...

[2] See http://www.gog.com/forum/general/list_of_drmfree_games_on_st...

Compared with what's out there, Steam's DRM is quite reasonable. The main reason is that you can install your games as many times as you want on as many computers as you want, it just attempts to limit how many computers can access the game at the same time. It would be even more reasonable if it allowed two computers to be signed into the same account at the same time and allow two different games to be played at the same time. For now you have to set one computer to offline mode to make this work, but even then that's a decent compromise.

But the main difference with Steam is that it offers features that are beneficial to the gamer that excuses the DRM in the first place. Plus there's the fact that for the most part the DRM is hidden from the gamer, it just works.

Although, it does allow for another third-party DRM to be involved which just sucks. Especially when the extra DRM actually cancels out features of Steam such as limited number of installs. The worst is when a game is on Steam and has Windows for Live involved. GTAIV was just awful; sign into Steam, sign into Windows for Live, sign into Rockstar's Social Club to get full functionality. Now that's just stupid.

Where Steam can possibly screw their customers is if you piss off Valve for some reason then they can ban your account, which means you lose access to all of your games. But this policy exists on other similar platforms such as Origin. Personally I think this would eventually not hold up in court as I can see them removing your access to a particular game for some reason, but not the whole collection you paid for. Especially since Steam is a delivery platform; it would be as if you did a credit card chargeback on the game store that cheated you in some way and then they somehow took back every game you ever bought from them. But so far, this type of case hasn't entered into the court system as far as I know.

Lossy DRM version -> burned to disk -> Re-encode using lossy algorithm.

Same as re-saving a jpeg file as a jpeg.

Here's a more realistic thing some game publisher (or movie publisher, or music publisher) might have actually said at some point, though:

> Our market is composed 90% of selfish, penniless teenagers who will pirate everything they possibly can if there is any option of it, but who are also extremely impatient, and must be the first to own everything so they can talk about consuming it with their friends who are also consuming it.

> If we add DRM, we will create a ~2 week window where the only way to get our product is legitimately. With the social pressure from their friends to consume our product mounting, the selfish, penniless teenagers will be forced to either get part-time jobs, or coerce their parents into buying the [product] for them, because the primary option is temporarily unavailable.

> So, let's add DRM to our product. It will stop the pirates [for just long enough for us to turn a profit, which we can then use to do things that] our customers will love [us for].

Of course, this block of selfish-but-penniless-fad-following-teenagers just define the power-law "fat head" of most media companies' profitability, not the entirety of the curve. After that block has settled out (the fad has passed; everyone who was going to either purchase or pirate to join in on the fad has already made their choice), every additional day where DRM is kept on the product is just money-grubbing corporate self-interest. :)

I take it you've not been following EA's business decisions?

That's not the fault of steam that's the fault of Ubiplay and Games for Windows Live for Windows Live Games Live for Windows Live.

The dumbest thing which happens in the age of digital distribution is region-delayed releases.

This is a thing which makes absolutely no sense: the product can be delivered nearly instantaneously, I have money I am willing to pay for it, and the product is released - on identical hardware - in another part of the world.

Why can I not give you money, for said product, right now?

You can embed a private key in the TPM module of a DRM hardware player with signed boot and it will work reasonably well. This is the PS3's approach and, had they actually salted their keys, it would have remained effective.

Business-wise, DRM doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to keep honest people honest. The fact that the lock on the door to my apartment can be broken in, or picked, doesn't make the lock itself a bad idea.

You do bring up some interesting points. Restricting a program to physically secured hardware along with software protection would definitely make it extremely difficult to get the program or information outside of the way that the maker wants you to. Although I am not entirely convinced that it would be impossible. The issue is that it still must be a deterministic system. And this means that with enough money, expertise, time, precision someone could produce a situation in which they would be able extract the code and edit it. Now in most cases the amount of resources and effort that would be required to do so would probably not be worth it which would mean that it wouldn't be worth it to pirate, but i would be hesitant to say that it would be impossible to. Any deterministic system can be compromised the key is to make compromising it so difficult/expensive/time consuming that compromising it is not worth it.

Now from a practical stand point I don't know how well this would work in a consumer market, but can certainly see it being used in areas where protection of information is extremely important. It just seems a little to costly to implement on a wide scale to me, and I think consumers would see it as too invasive and resist it, so if there were alternatives in the marketplace I think a lot of people would opt for the alternative.

>in principle you could deliver it only to tamper-proof machines that self-destruct before giving up the code.

"Tamper-proof" is impossible. That's why they call it "tamper-resistant" -- someone with enough resources is going to be able to tamper with it. In theory you may be able to make tampering expensive, but now you're just back to playing the cat and mouse game, and people start showing up with timing attacks etc. that aren't as expensive as you might have hoped.

SaaS or any other cloud based service model. Storing your data somewhere else where it gets held hostage in a proprietary format is a lot of pain waiting to happen.

Dropbox and Gmail are examples of how it should be done, I have a copy, I can make more copies, they make sure its accessible from everywhere I want. If Dropbox or Gmail suddenly stops I will still have my files.