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> Steam's DRM is reasonable.

This has yet to be seen. For a while, Steam was seen as a way to keep other DRM at bay. Bioshock changed that (I'm not aware of 3rd party DRM on steam titles prior; open to correction here). Now Steam is a distribution platform which also incorporates DRM which may, or may not, result in customers getting screwed, while games distributed through Steam may choose to incorporate additional DRM. The sad truth is that we simply don't know if Steam's DRM will ultimately screw over their customers. That will be seen at some point in the future, when maintaining servers is no longer financially viable.

>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.

Yeah, that little bit about "piss off Valve, lose access to everything you bought through Steam" also translates to, "Valve goes out of business, lose access to everything you bought through Steam".

Sure, they promise that if they do shutter the business they'll unlock all purchases. But that assumes the business is closed down in an orderly fashion.

You are quite right. It's also a good strategy to stay in business, "Buy your games from us to insure we stay in business so you can continue playing the games you bought from us."

> DRM isn't a stupid idea

Let's add DRM to our product. It will stop the pirates and our customers will love it. - Said no one ever.

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. :)

Spot on, though these days the teenage years extend past 25 for many...

People do appear to completely forget why companies are atracted to DRM.

But yet smaller companies can sometimes find themselves in the situation of having the vast, vast majority of their user base as pirates.

http://smellslikedonkey.com/wordpress/?page_id=274

What I found most interesting about their situation was the conversion rate, we hear the cry all the time of I'm just traiing it, if I like it, I'll buy it well they had a 0% conversion rate, despite good reviews and the pirates playing the game for many hours, to get the high scores. One would assume they enjoyed it right?

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

DRM isn't a stupid idea

Very, very simply, here is the premise behind DRM.

1. I know a secret 2. I want to tell you the secret 3. I don't want you to tell anyone else the secret 4. I don't trust you

Perhaps now you can see why some people consider DRM a stupid idea.

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.

No, it's a wrong comparison. DRM is not only stupid, it's unethical. Comparing it to a lock on your apartment is not proper, since it totally reverses the idea. DRM is more comparable to placing a police robot in your house, in order to "prevent potential law violations". I.e. completely the opposite - privacy breaching, unethical preemptive policing.

The TPM (Trusted Platform Module) is an oxymoron. Trust is relation between two sides (users and distributors). It implies mutuality. The whole DRM concept is built on the opposite - i.e. not trusting the user, on treating users as potential criminals by default. Since users aren't trusted, there is no reason for users to trust DRM schemes, which should be treated as spyware and privacy intruding methods of control.

HN would really benefit from some sort of 'supervote' mechanism, that could be used once per thread or something. Because it takes effort to elaborate and tie truths together in a succinct way, effort that unfortunately has to be wasted on every half-assed outrage thread, with the resulting comments such as this one ending up on the same footing as the standard "no yu" and "it is what it is" ones.

Thank you.

Certain medicines which are prone to abuse have mechanisms in each pill that make it difficult to be cut up and snorted. Dynamite has chemical tracers added to it to make its use easier to trace. Photocopiers cannot duplicate currency. In all these cases products have been made more tamper proof so as to resist abuse. How is DRM different, here?

I consider photocopying control idiotic. Other use cases that you mentioned seem to deal with poisons, weapons and etc. You surely see a difference with that, or you don't? The whole issue with DRM is the level of control. Preventing crime is good. Making a totalitarian police state is not. DRM leans towards the second (invasive control which is way beyond what is ethical).

That may work for games and software where you have to copy complicated logic. However in the case of movies, music and books you can always record in some way. Once you have one DRM free recording it can be distributed and watched by anyone.

The only way to get around this would be to mandate people bought devices that refused to play DRM-free content.

The problem with the lock picking analogy is that being caught is significantly more likely and carries a heavier penalty.

Imagine the invention of a universal lockpick that was so easy that a child with 5 minutes of training could use it and readily available for free. As well as some form of cheap stealth technology that made it easy to sneak around people's houses undetected. You would expect burglary rates to go through the roof and a similar argument could be made that investing in a lock for your house is a waste of time.

Steam's DRM is reasonable.

Valve is much like Google. It works reasonably well most of the time, but if for whatever reason you end up on the wrong end of the stick you are basically hosed.

>Pirates pirate to avoid money

Often, pirates pirate a thing, not to avoid paying for it, but rather to view it on their continent of residence, to avoid region coding. There are several other good/quasi-legitimate reasons for piracy/ripping as well. I like having backup copies of things, or a media server. I don't really like having a wall of DVD's. I also hate the forced FBI warning, Interpol warning, and Stupid anti-piracy commercial. I also hate all of the other commercials too.

>companies use DRM to punish pirates

This is no punishment to pirates, the only party who is punished by DRM is the paying customer.

>DRM isn't a stupid idea, it's a stupid execution of a reasonable idea.

DRM is a misguided idea, favored by people who don't really grok the recent changes to and limitations of technology.

>Steam's DRM is reasonable. The damage to the name however, is already done. Now I avoid DRM like the plague.

Not really, it flakes out fairly often, initiating a 10-20 min process of restarting Steam and the game, which is pretty annoying for me because I try to allow myself a specific and limited amount of time for playing games. It sucks to waste that time waiting for [thing which adds no value] to align itself.

> Steam's DRM is reasonable

And what about the case when Steam itself is used by companies as platform for their DRM. I can't play Ubisoft titles without Ubiplay, can't play some titles without Games For Windows Live.

I have spent 10 minutes waiting to sign in to these services because I have a flaky connection!

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.

But they allowed it on their platform. It's like DRM on top of DRM!

I forget, are companies with invasive and arbitrary software content requirements on their app store a good thing or a bad thing? I get so confused about which one I'm supposed to despise nowadays.

Games for Windows Live is basically abandonware by Microsoft at this point. Nobody's going to get promoted if they work on it, so . . . .

>Pirates pirate to avoid money

While that is true is some cases, it's not true in all. Some pirate because they can't get it otherwise (ex. region exclusions, see Game of Thrones), some because they want to try out a game but there is no trial, and some because they don't want to deal will all the stupid ads and Don't pirate crap on DVD's now (SEE: http://bit.ly/eriKlB) as well as broken DRM management (Sony Music CD's anyone)

Companies try to hurt pirates with DRM but all they hurt are the paying customers, who do not have it easier. The recent fiasco with SimCity is a perfect example of that. Paying customers got screwed because of EA's DRM scheme.

And the long term effect of Steams DRM has yet to be proven. If Steam goes under and we lose all the games we paid for does that still qualify as reasonable or completely borked?

I get that companies want to protect their assets, but applying 19th processes to a 21st century reality is never, ever going to work.

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?

It is dumb, especially with digital distribution.

But don't forget that digital distribution is only relatively recent - it wasn't possible for many people before. (Also, content producers had a weird aversion for peer to peer distribution models, so distribution would have been expensive for them).

So part of the reason is that they're slow to change; they will change, they just haven't got round to it yet.

Another part of the reason is that Americans are rich, so they get charged more. People in country X are poor, so they get charged less. Price differentiation is a strong reason for region locking. But, as you say, it's dumb, and some content producers know it's dumb and are moving away from it.

"DRM isn't a stupid idea, it's a stupid execution of a reasonable idea." I'm sorry but this conclusion doesn't follow from everything you wrote before this. What?

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.

well sure, but he also needed to show that it's actually /possible/ to punish pirates with DRM. That there is such a thing as "reasonable DRM".

Steam's DRM may have been reasonable at some poin but it certainly isn't now. I had all kinds of issues playing my legally-purchased copy of Portal 2 thanks to the DRM, as did a number of other people.

I wouldn't say the only reason pirates pirate is to avoid paying the money. I think some of it is to avoid the DRM. It makes me think of the pirate vs buying movie image. http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/piratedvd.jpg

In the end, it seems like the paying customers are often hurt the most when it comes to DRM.

"Pirates pirate to avoid money"

...or because the officially endorsed copied will not play on their OS of choice (due to reliance on some proprietary technology), or because there is no legal copy available in their region, etc. Even without DRM-induced reasons, there are non-monetary reasons people might download unauthorized copies.

DRM is not just a stupid idea. It's unethical idea. No execution of DRM is proper. All of them are improper with various degrees of evilness and stupidity.

> This degrades quality btw

You can always use a lossless codec if you need to (such as FLAC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC).

> This degrades quality btw

How?

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

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

After having saved it to bitmap beforehand, to ensure the software can't apply lossless jpeg transformations.

It wouldn't be a problem for jpeg (though I believe it is for mp3?). In jpeg the quantisation step controls the degradation in quality - you can run it through a 2nd time with the same quantisation without losing further quality.

In theory that might be true in practice there are issues with using jpeg on a jpeg if you repeat it enough.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/a-comparison-of-jpe...

Indeed, since I posted that comment I've been looking into it further. I read on wikipedia [0] that:

The DCT based form cannot guarantee that encoder input would exactly match decoder output since the Inverse DCT is not rigorously defined

I don't get that - I thought the inverse of the DCT was just the linear combination of the components.

So...I've been playing around with it myself to see what happens (using graphicsmagick).

I converted an image to jpg (quality 70) and then bmp -> jpg again. There are definitely some minor artefacts.

I then iterated that step jpg -> bmp -> jpg (quality 70) a dozen times. These further iterations don't add any additional artefacts. So it sort of gets into a stable state.

EDIT: reading that quote from wikipedia again it looks as though it's just saying that jpeg is lossless (ie, we apply quantisation).

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_JPEG

These guys used to let you run your own images through their filter. It was great for spotting even really good shoops. http://www.errorlevelanalysis.com/

http://fotoforensics.com/ still does.

You can rip to non-lossy formats.

You can, but his example was lossy to lossy.

Right, but a his poorly constructed example might be used against his general argument that there is no way to recover the content he purchased with his hard earned money. Of course, his example of being able recover the content itself is a weak example because not everyone will have the skillset to get around DRM.

So you start with a 4MB music file with DRM and lossy compression. After stripping the DRM, you've now got a 40MB music file at the same quality. If you want to get back down to 4MB, you must lose quality.

If the source (DRM'd track) was lossy, it doesn't matter how you do it afterwards, as the quality was lost from the get go.

No shit Sherlock.

If it's lossy there's no way around it: data is already lost, wether you rip it or just listen to it.