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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

I suppose that the title assertion is to be expected. DRM only works if you don't know how it works.

~~~

I'm not sure I see anything wrong with DRM per se (this could be my fever talking), there are probably good uses I'm too dim to think about, but I do think it's unnecessary as part of the HTML specification.

There's no industry or company that has switched to DRM-free content, that I know of, that has failed or suffered because of it:

* Music is largely available DRM-free now, thanks to Amazon's MP3 store (at the least, I'm sure there are others)

* For games, Steam makes it easy to avoid SecuROM Hell

* Despite DRM, all of Netflix's original series House of Cards was available on The Pirate Bay within hours of release. This doesn't seem to hurt Netflix's wish to create more content, or police it more heavy-handedly. (Maybe they would if they could)

For that matter, I think in the modern case every single time a business went DRM free it turned out OK. Isn't that right? In all modern cases, maybe after 2006-ish, DRM-free businesses were accompanied with an easy way to get the content online, and sales did not seem to suffer because at the end of the day piracy can appear (or be) shady and people (rightfully) don't trust shady websites, even The Pirate Bay with all of its popups.

I wish we had better numbers. I would like to see a real analysis on all the reasons people don't pirate and instead buy on Steam. I wish there was a good way to convince media businesses at large.

But I guess this is all water under the bridge, and I'm preaching to the choir.

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> Music is largely available DRM-free now, thanks to Amazon's MP3 store (at the least, I'm sure there are others)

Apple should get significant credit here. It was Steve Jobs' open letter of 2007-02-06 to the big four labels calling for them to go DRM free that got the ball rolling. EMI agreed, and Apple started selling DRM-free tracks from them on 2007-05-27.

Amazon's public beta of their MP3 store launched on 2007-09-25, four months after Apple had started selling DRM-free music. Amazon was the first to get contracts in place with all four major labels for DRM-free music.

Actually I think you can also attribute it to (a) the iPod becoming massively popular and becoming synonmous with "portable music player", (b) Only Apple DRM and non-DRM-able MP3s supported on the iPod.

The iPod won the music player market, so if you tried to sell music with DRM you need to either (i) play by Apple's rules or (ii) have mundane tech users being confused when they can't play the music they bought on the what at become THE standard music player.

In 2006, during discusion of the Broadcast Flag DRM, an 82 year old senator was given an iPod and started to realise that lots of DRM wouldn't work with it. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2006/01/history-and-senator-st...

I agree with this. When I was buying physical music CDs and play it on my laptop - different CDs had different DRM formats. After a while, I had 6-7 different DRM-enabled players. I stopped playing physical CDs on my laptop after that.

True, but the Apple music beast was really created by the music industry who insisted on them using DRM in the first place.

Yes, Apple did a bait-and-switch on the music industry. First they won by playing by the rules, then they used their dominance to change the rules.

Steam can't be considered DRM free in many cases, for example because they don't let you backing up installers / packages, so if the service closes down you lose your collection. The only completely DRM-free gaming distributor is GOG. Humble Bundle and Desura are mixed.

You are right in general though. Going DRM free not only won't hurt any publisher, it will only gain respect from customers and will improve the quality of their products in a sense of improved usability, because any DRM means a crippled product (i.e. limited platforms availability, inability to make backups and etc. and etc.).

The problem is, that most legacy publishers are rarely customer focused and think that DRM helps their profits. And unprincipled distributors like Netflix are ready to oblige. But the irony is, those publishers only hurt themselves by continuing using DRM. It's mostly innovative publishers, or self published studios (and crowdfunded projects) that have common sense and avoid using DRM. Luckily some distributors are also principled enough to reject DRMed products from publishers. But such are a minority still.

Can you explain the "no backups" part? I'm sure you know about the backups you can create in Steam itself, bundling the application. What is the missing detail? Being unable to extract the data again, without Steam? Is Steam unable to restore these bundles in offline mode?

Correct. You can backup a game when offline, but steam wont allow you to restore one without being logged in.

Steam will require you to be connected to their servers once in a while at least. There's no pure offline mode.

steam is just like any other drm system for your games. it phone home and prevents you from playing without a connection to the mothership.

they just have saner fallback times than other ill talked solutions from EA. but besides its pretty eyes, its the same virus.

good luck running online games as root.

I once bought and downloaded SuperHexagon on Steam but didn't have the time to test it at home. Later on the train (I'm commuting for two hours a day) I wanted to test it. Sadly I wasn't allowed without a internet connection which was really annoying.

Sometimes the game executable doesn't actually require you to be online the first time you launch it, even though Steam does. If you launch the binary from Windows explorer, there's a chance it'll work.

Only for games that require Steam. A game bought through Steam does not necessarily require Steam. Europa Universalis III can be run without Steam running. Europa Universalis IV only requires Steam to be run once (and once for every DLC you buy, in order to activate it).

These settings are up to the game developer themselves. You are right about the offline mode, but it does not apply to all games.

Running the game and installing it aren't the same thing. Some Steam can can be probably trivially copied (the game directory), and are backup-able that way, but you never know which ones, and which require more steps for installation. Steam also doesn't mark any such details on the games before you buy them.

I purchase whatever I like on Steam and still hate DRM. They make it worth while with the sales and convenience.

My theory is that if Steam goes belly up, I can do a backup of my games, and use the same avenues pirates use to circumvent Steam. Hopefully they would release control of their games though if they went belly up.

As far as poor customer service, I suppose I have been lucky so far.

Steam is a distributor. If a certain games has the Steam DRM included or not is (though sadly not mentioned on the product page) up to the publisher/developer. On the GOG forum there is a (probably outdated) list [1] of those games.

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

DRM proliferation is conducted in three steps:

1. Publishers decide to treat all potential users as criminals, and insist on using DRM in their products.

2. Distributors accept that, and help these unethical publishers to sell those products.

3. Users accept being treated as criminals, and buy these products from distributors.

It starts from the publisher of course, but anywhere down the line, one can refuse to accept this. Distributor can refuse dealing with DRMed products from publishers. Users can refuse buying DRMed products from distributors. Any participation in that chain proliferates DRM, and one can't excuse this participation with the fact that it was initiated by the publisher.

I wasn't making a statement regarding DRM, I was just refuting that all steam games have DRM ;)

> I was just refuting that all steam games have DRM

Practically all do, I already explained above. Being unable to back up the installer is already DRM, and it's coming from Valve themselves, not from the publishers.

Always on-line DRM and such is another level of nastiness, but the above is DRM too.

You can still backup the game files after installation.

That may or may not work for reinstalling the game another time. And Steam doesn't help to make it easier, and doesn't let you find out these details before buying the game. therefore I don't consider it to be really DRM-free. The proper DRM free game is distributed as installer / archive package. Steam doesn't offer such option.

2a. Distributors that don't accept that go out of business, because none of the publishers from 1. want anything to do with them.

For example GOG is a successful DRM free distributor - they only accept DRM free games from various publishers. There are others as well (for music, e-books and etc.). It's mostly video industry which lacks DRM-free distribution options (services like this are virtually non existent worldwide: https://www.headweb.com/en/ See their DRM-free terms of purchase: https://www.headweb.com/en/100237/purchase-terms).

Supporting unethical practice can't be excused with fear of going out of business by the way. Also, publishers need distributors and users not any less than distributors and users need publishers, if not even more. Therefore voting with your wallet (on either distributor or user level) is not senseless. Except that distributors have more leverage on publishers, because of their scale, in comparison with an individual who buys only DRM-free products. Therefore distributors can be blamed more for DRM proliferation.

Unless I'm mistaken (I may be) GOG is primarily in the business of selling old games, which is why the publishers are willing to forgo DRM on the titles.

Publishers of new games (especially expensively developed new games) are more likely to fear a loss of revenue, especially in the crucial early period after release, without DRM.

GOG sells new games from those who have common sense. As I said elsewhere in this thread, it's mostly innovative, forward thinking self published studios or crowdfunded projects. GOG isn't focused on old games exclusively anymore. They are focused on DRM free games though.

I'm not really sure why bigger size of the budget should reduce the common sense of the publisher. Legacy publishers are obsessed with DRM, but DRM has nothing to do with revenue whatsoever. It doesn't reduce any piracy, and only cripples the experience for legitimate users. It's stupid from common sense business perspective, and there is an increasing amount of big budget games which come out DRM free. I view it as simply mentality issue. Legacy publishers can't understand that they should start being customer focused. New ones have no issues understanding it, therefore they don't use any DRM.

And GOG refuses to add GNU/Linux support. Considering that many GOG games run in DOSEmu anyway and some come with native Linux support this is not really understandable.

> And GOG refuses to add GNU/Linux support.

Yes, that's one of their downsides. Even their reasoning is becoming less and less sensible. They claimed they still can't figure out how to offer long term support on Linux. May be Docker can help them.

Shipping binary software for Linux is like playing a never-ending game of Space Invaders.

GOG's position is totally understandable.

No, it's not. Their position is (at least from their last status update): "we are trying to come up with a long term support methodology, and didn't find one yet". It takes them more than a year to design it. It doesn't sound reasonable to me.

Shipping binaries on Linux is nearly impossible on a long term support basis.

FatELF would of addressed at least some of these problems, but was largely rejected by the larger community of people not shipping proprietary products on Linux: https://icculus.org/fatelf/

Might Docker containers be a valid solution to this? Shipping old games is a sorta-kinda-similar problem to shipping frozen versions of web-apps.

That can work probably, since Docker claims that it doesn't impose big overhead, so it can be suitable for gaming.

You would probably find there are performance penalties in areas Docker don't really bother benchmarking or even talking about since they don't align to the design goals. I've only seen some fairly rudimentary demonstrations of VNC and X over the Network for isolating GUI apps in Docker.

Docker author here. I really doubt performance would be a problem. Namespaced linux processes access devices the same way every other process does: by getting a file descriptor to it and making syscalls against that. What we need to figure out is a portable way for a docker container to declare "I need access to the following devices". I would love to work with anyone interested to add that to the docker APIs for 1.0. I think long-term stable binary delivery is an important thing to do and I would like to help.

Ping me at solomon@docker.com about this anytime.

> For games, Steam makes it easy to avoid SecuROM Hell

Steam is not DRM-free. It's just gamer-accepted DRM.

Which seems more rooted in the overall ease-of-use and lock-in Steam creates as well as goodwill towards Valve from their games. Steam's terrible - fight them on a transaction, and you could lose your entire library.

I don't think you lose your library. From what I was told, your account is put into a no-purchase mode where you can play your games but can't purchase any new ones.

They used to ban users altogether, I think they've changed their policy. They also used to ban users if someone gifted them a game and the transaction buying the game was charged back.

It's pretty unreasonable to claim fraud (charge back) if you buy a game and then someone gifts you...

I think the problem was, I could have your account shut down by gifting you a game and charging back the purchase.

Maybe if you're a total jerk about it?... I purchased the full iD collection once for like $90+, and the next day I requested a refund because several of the old titles didn't want to run. Despite the no-refund policy, they reversed the transaction. I've heard more positive stories than negative ones.

it still only takes it happening once to you to lose your titles.

Are you in Europe? Because I'm pretty sure european law forces them to refund you in that case.

Sure, but they ignore the law. Had that with GTA 4, which didn't run fully because the integrated Microsoft-Always-Online-DRM didn't work. Got the "no refund" answer despite having a 8 year old account (at that time) and a not so small, albeit not massively large, library, and without ever having requested a refund before. I'm still angry about that and minimized my purchases there.

Edit: This also means, to the original comment, that Steam does not necessarily make it especially easy to evade SecuROM Hell or other DRM methods, as games on Steam can still have their own protection schemes. It only makes it easier insofar as those are normally marked and games have with Steam only another, better option. Maybe that was meant.

The trouble with laws like that is that they are only worth anything if you have the means to enforce your legal rights under them. If Steam -- or any other supplier or on-line service you use -- is based in one jurisdiction and you're based in another, the cost of actually taking them to court to force compliance could easily be prohibitive.

I'm a little surprised that they haven't been dinged by the card companies yet if reports of whole accounts being blocked based on one chargeback are true. Even Valve are just another retailer to the likes of Visa and Mastercard, and the card services tend to take a very hostile view of merchants who try to evade their obligations under the card service policies if something comes to their attention.

I'm also surprised there haven't been more legal cases considering the implications of SaaS, on-line media library services, software that requires phone-home activation/DRM, and the like. There are obvious ways that such systems/services could provide unfair leverage against consumers in the event of any dispute, and as you mentioned it seems very likely that they would fall foul of the law here in Europe, or at least in several national jurisdictions within Europe. The US tends to give businesses a lot more slack to play with on such matters, though.

Do you seriously not understand the situation ?

It's great that you had a good experience with your particular customer service agent. But what if you request a refund from someone who is feeling unwell that day, had a death in the family or is just feeling like being an asshole. Then you're account could be blocked with limited recourse.

In this day and age there really is limited point to DRM. Everything becomes available on Torrent sites anyway and all it ends up doing is treating legitimate, paying users as second class citizens.

You don't even have to fight them on a transaction to lose access to your library. My Steam client (on Mac) is hanging on startup every time and as a result I can't play the games I've bought and paid for. And of course Valve's customer support is doing nothing but sending canned replies.

Steam's DRM is still DRM and has all the downsides that come with it. You're exactly right that it's accepted by gamers due to Valve's cult status (which I honestly don't understand given that I only have mediocre to terrible experiences with their games and services) and the fact that people have bought huge libraries through Steam and have to defend their decisions.

Hsve you tried creating a new clean OS X account? it could be that you have a corrupted preference file, or something similar.

If Steam works on the new account you can start deleting plists.

Had this happen recently. The error logs and console output ended up not being particularly informative, so I downloaded and installed the Steam client again. Sorted out whatever kink was hanging the client at start, and the game library was still intact.

It's accepted because of things like:

- Great selection. Just about any game can be bought on Steam

- Steam sales. Amazing, unprecedented prices for games

- The DRM successfully stays pretty much out of the way for 99% of users

- Centralized game management. I don't want to have twelve different game distribution clients, each with one or two games. I would much rather have just one

- Centralized automatic updates. Less of a big deal today than years ago.

Personally as one of those pirates they are trying to stop piracy is only an issue when your content is not easily accessible the legal way or it is too expensive.

I have experienced both. For instance songs are very cheap when your monthly income over £1,500 but when your monthly income is £300 (that's the equivalent in pounds in the country i grew up in) that's a bit too much for just one song.

Same for everything else since they're all price for the US,UK,etc market.

Now that i can afford it i choose to pay for the content i like (it's my way of encouraging the people creating the things i like) even though i could still pirate it.

Then again I'm still forced to pirate some things that can't get legally.

Wish i didn't have to but it's not like their giving me a choice.

> forced

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Depends... He could live somewhere that he can't get access to legal copies of TV shows he wants to watch (Some TV shows take months, if ever, to show up locally). Or live somewhere like Australia where everything costs prohibitively more than elsewhere.

If I want a TV show - Say House of Cards - and it's not available, or it's available much later than elsewhere, or it's prohibitively more pricey... They want the show and the only reasonable way to get it... then it will "force" people who want it to Piracy.

>> "They want the show and the only reasonable way to get it... then it will "force" people who want it to Piracy."

I would very much like a Ferrari California. It's unlikely I will ever be able to afford one - it is prohibitively expensive for me. I am not being forced to steal it. I understand like a rational human being should that if I can't afford something or it isn't available to me and it isn't essential to my survival I have no right to take it. I know that physical theft analogies aren't very good when comparing to piracy but seriously - you are not being forced to do anything. You make a choice to steal it. Whether that's morally right or wrong is your decision to make.

No, I think it's more the role of the victim of the theft to decide whether it was morally wrong or not.

Otherwise, yes, this idea of being "forced" to pirate something they want but don't have easy access to seems a rather silly statement.

First, the show is being given away for free elsewhere--it is mere accident of geography that the person can't access it.

Second, stealing implies that the person being stolen from can't access it anymore--which is clearly not the case here.

Stealing is the wrong framework to use here.

You seem to have confused "wants" with "needs".

I totally agree with your statements. The only thing I pirate nowadays are basically movies because there is no easy way to purchase them. I don't really pay for music though as I use mostly Grooveshark/Soundcloud and/or listen to online radio.

And it's fucking ridiculous that you have to a saloon to watch a new movie and pay a ridiculous amount of money per person to watch a single movie.

I pirate all movies I can out of basic principal, they are not getting a dime extra from me since they continue with their harassment.

I am actually very pleased with Steam as it's an excellent service. But if I would want to play a game on let's say Origin I would definately pirate that game if it doesn't exist on Steam.

So, content providers are "harassing" you in some way by not making it easy for you to purchase their content or they want to charge what you personally feel is too much? You pirate because they "harass" you? That's a new defense of pirating for me.

Do they target you specifically with this harassment or is it just in general for the population of where you live?

You are NEVER forced to steal things that aren't essential to survival. Starving on the street and steal a loaf a bread, that's one thing. Don't want to participate in many varied ways of listen to music for free legally and so choosing to steal the next big album you want to hear, not ok, ever.

You are NEVER forced to steal bread. Don't want to participate in gathering seeds and wild fruits for free legally and choosing to steal bread, not ok, ever.

I guess "essential" has many definitions, huh...

Come on, they're not in any way comparable.

The UN declaration of human rights includes one sentence talking about the right to food, and many paragraphs talking about the right to participate in culture, community, communicate, and so on.

So if we judge by that, the right to participate in culture is more important than the right to food (or more likely, is simply more often challenged and disagreed with).

If the whole legal regime around copyright is having the effect of preventing people from participating in their culture/society, those laws are immoral and should be opposed.

Wait, are you implying that the UN has declared that stealing the results of someone's labor is justified because it's a "right"? We might as well declare anarchy and get it over with.

I also fail to see how copyright laws are preventing anyone from enjoying their culture.

It's sad times we live in when creating culture is labeled "labor", "work" and so forth... About the "stealing" part - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/06/lady-gaga-jack-whit... artists are more than happy to let anyone experience their art, it's the producers that have a problem with it.

I guess this is what you get when you allow business-minded people to define what being human is all about...

Well, I was talking mostly about food.

But if I use my culture as a basis for a song that I write and I wish to sell it to make money, then you're dang right I see it as stealing if someone takes it without my permission.

If an artist wants to share it openly, then that's excellent. But if the artist wishes to make money from their effort why is it your "right" to demand otherwise?

It's not about being business-minded, it's called having rights over your own property.

Because mostly it's not the artists who want to lock it up, and it's not the artists that stand to gain most from locking it up, it's the suits.

Ok, how is that any different?

An artist who works alone deserves your money but an artist who agrees to work with a third-party does not? Because the third-party might get a piece of the pie dictated by the contract the artist agreed to? That's an extremely weak defense of not paying for content.

Are book stores okay? Because I'm sure they make money from the books they sell that they didn't personally write. Well, that's not an exact comparison but I hope you get my point.

I have to say, I am astounded at the level of entitlement people seem to have when it comes to consuming content others worked to create. I want it, therefore it should be mine is the mantra of this type of thinking.

"It's sad times we live in when creating culture is labeled "labor", "work" and so forth."

It's sad when idle consumers come to believe they are entitled to the product of another's labor for free.

Its sad when idle business men think its labor in the first place.

That'll be 5 bucks, you read my comment. Pony up.

You don't think Mickey Mouse and other Disney properties are part of our culture? Copyright on those works would have expired ages ago, if the laws were enforced as they were written at the time. Disney continues to prevent people from participating in that part of our culture.

How do they prevent you from participating? Do they stop you at the doors of Disney World? Can you not watch Disney movies whenever you go to the theater? Oh, that's right, you just want it for free.

Although, I agree with you on the copyright laws, they shouldn't be extended like they have been. But that's an issue to complain to the people who write the laws, not the content providers who take advantage of them.

> But that's an issue to complain to the people who write the laws, not the content providers who take advantage of them.

that works when the law makers are ethical and neutral. When the "content providers" get in bed with law makers to create laws favourable to themselves, then what?

I want to participate in culture by creating a derivative work based on the disney micky mouse figure. But i m disallowed, because of the said laws, unless i paid disney some amount of money. Do you think disney deserves this money?

According to the law, yes. They absolutely deserve that money because that's what the law says. You can't choose to ignore a law because it's inconvenient for you. If you choose to ignore a law for your own benefit then that allows others to do the same for your potential detriment. That's extremely bad short-term thinking.

Your complaint is with the law, it has nothing to do with the content providers. You say but the content providers influence the law with money. In that case your complaint is with the system that writes the law. Your ire is misdirected and likely will cause nothing to change.

Of course, there's civil disobedience to consider. It would be an interesting way to combat the laws at hand but I'm not sure how to go about that in terms of media consumption. I suppose if enough people did it at the same time.

But you fall into the common problems with these type of discussion; you act as if your choices are limited. For instance, with piracy it's usually "they don't make it easy and/or cheap enough for me to buy so therefore I must steal it" which is a self-limiting range of options. It totally ignores several options such as simply not consuming the content in question and move on to something else. You present only one option in your desire to create, a derivative work based off of another's content. That's not your only option in this case.

Finally, this idea that this stuff is a part of our culture and we're locked out of it. I would say if we're locked out of it so tightly that we can't enjoy it then I wouldn't call it part of our culture. But this culture defense is new to me in these terms, it's an interesting idea. It will ultimately fail in the end but an interesting defense nonetheless.

According to the law, yes.

That's begging the question. We could change the law, but first we have to ask if we should, and in what way. That's why chii asked: Do you think disney deserves this money? Only after we answer that, will we know what the law should be.

Change the law? Absolutely. That is actually what I've been trying to advocate all through several discussions, that the outrage is misplaced. Don't like the law? Demand a change in the laws instead and stop wasting time on the companies that follow the law.

It's like that silly issue where everyone gets mad every year at international companies following various country's tax laws to reduce their tax obligations as much as possible but never actually demand a change in the laws themselves. They rail against the company as if that will change anything.

But to answer the question again, yes indeed, Disney deserves that money because that's what the law states. I don't understand how I can make that more clear. The fact that they get any money at all from their original creation is directly tied into such laws. Without those laws they have to hope for the best on the goodwill of people to compensate them for their work. As for deserve? They created it didn't they? Do they deserve anything at all? If they do, for how long until it could be considered public domain? Should anything be considered public domain after a time at all? That's what the law is for, to answer those questions. If you want to change the law, the current law applies until you change it. You can't start at zero and build up, you have to start with what's already established. Therefore, Disney deserves that money because of the law as it stands today.

Except the law is not ethical - if it were ethical we would never need to change it.

The term 'deserve' implies something ethical. Your statement here is so much horseshit - nothing is 'deserved' because of the law, it is only legal because of the law. It is their legal money, but it is not necessarily their deserved money.

Just because someone slips in a by-clause that lets them legally rob a bank every fortnight, doesn't make that money their deserved money, or the robbing of the bank ethical.

I'm not talking about piracy or passive consumption as "participation". I mean people who are making art, movies, music etc. can't create anything new with Mickey Mouse or Snow White or Bambi because they are owned by Disney. You can't even sell a ringtone of Alice saying "You’re mad, bonkers, off your head! But I’ll tell you a secret: all the best people are", even if you make your own version in your own voice. Because Disney decided they're not done wringing money out of a movie made before my father was born. I don't just mean wholesale copying, but using any of it as raw materials for something creative is prohibited.

Why does that matter so much? Why is it so important for someone to be able to sell a ringtone from a movie they didn't create? Why is it so important for someone to make money off a derivative work based off of the work of someone else? Besides, there are examples of people making money off of derivatives of popular content they didn't create. It's just a fine line between making a copy and creating a derivative.

I think the thing I've been missing is so far is because Disney is the example, which is a big company, and big companies are evil right?

Let me toss a wrinkle into that logic.

Newly graduated college student makes an animated short. Took months, maybe years, to get it done. Took weeks, maybe months, of hard work to get it visible to the public. Public loves the film and wishes to buy a copy. Someone makes a "derivative" work that copies the characterizations of the original animation. For some reason, derivative work becomes popular. Original creator loses out. Screw the original creator right?

You do realize that the most likely outcome of allowing derivative works to happen too soon is that the big companies with their huge resources will swoop in and wipe out the small guys in no time flat? You think I'm defending big companies with these statements? I'm defending all creators regardless if they are Disney or the dirt-poor artist down the street.

If you have a problem with Disney being able to continue making money from their original characters, despite some of their characters being based off previous stories in the public domain, because copyright laws keep getting changed then you're problem is with the system that allows such things. Attack the system, not creators because you'll almost always come across as unfair to them in some way.

Disney is the example, which is a big company, and big companies are evil right?

No, just a few :) My problem with Disney is that in protecting their own interests, they also extended copyright on tons of other people's works as well. http://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2014/pre-1976 I believe the original creator, big or small, is not as important as the rest of the people in society. If big corporations make most of the money from derivative works, that doesn't prevent other people from making their own as well. But copyright means there is a state-granted monopoly on nearly all creative works.

If you have a problem with Disney... then your problem is with the system that allows such things.

How would you "fix the system" so that only certain people get a say? Disney can lobby if they want, I just want them to lobby for different things.

> stealing

You keep using that word without realizing that the rest of us may have already moved on to a different concept of ownership.

By the rest of us I'm guessing a small number of people who have high ideals outside of reality? Your definition almost literally means no one has ownership over anything when it is your "right" to take it as you please.

How shall we define the act of taking property without due compensation that the owner of said property expects?

You seem to be acting intentionally dense. Surely you understand that the difference being discussed here pertains specifically to duplicable content, where the property involved is "intellectual property" and much more open to alternative interpretations than things like land or food.

No, I'm not dense, I see property as property. You act as if I don't know what's going on technology wise. But I do know and understand, it's not a difficult situation to comprehend. Implying I'm dense or any other derogatory term is just an attempt to dismiss me without having to actually consider what I'm saying. You shouldn't do that because that's typically the defense of someone who has little to back up their side of the debate.

You simply want to redefine things so you can apply your alternative interpretation of ownership in a way that allows you to obtain someone's property without compensating them for it. You feel entitled to someone's work because it's easy to duplicate it. It could take an artist weeks or months to create their work and you feel they deserve nothing because you can copy it in seconds. That's a sad justification.

Whether the fact it can be easily duplicated is irrelevant. Someone created that work with their time that they can't get back. They spent a moment of their life away from other things creating this that they can't get back. They spent resources (not necessarily money) creating this that they can't get back. None of that can be duplicated in seconds. If they wish to be paid for granting you access to that work then they should be compensated as they wish. If you don't agree with the price of admission then you don't get access. Thinking otherwise is admitting you feel you are entitled to it because you simply want it and the original creator can suck it. You are saying the creator's time and effort is worth nothing.

I simply cannot agree with that way of thinking.

I didn't say that you were dense, I said that you were acting dense. I also didn't espouse any of the positions that you credited me with, rather I simply pointed out that this is a complex issue. You have acted throughout this thread as though this were black and white, and as though "stealing" music were the same as stealing bread or any other physical object. The specific post that I replied to was the most telling instance of this. I'm not arguing for a position on either side of this issue right now, I'm simply telling you that if you want to have a discussion about it, you have to at least come to the table with the recognition that there is a rational basis for the opposing point of view. You can disagree, sure, but the way that you are doing so is far from productive.

Ah, ok, I see what you mean by not claiming I'm dense but just what I'm saying. My bad.

Also, again my bad, I'm attributing the whole discussion onto you instead of specifically your statement. I tend to lump everything together when multiple people respond throughout a single thread as though they are in agreement with the thread as a whole. I'll have to work on that.

I fully recognize the opposing position in this debate, I understand the thought behind it, I use to agree with it. But at this point, exactly as you point out, I highly disagree with it today. For the most part, I see people wanting to alter the definition of ownership for their own benefit to the detriment of the original creator. That the simple idea that a song can be perfectly copied countless times without damaging the original copy is somehow license to demand that the original creator hand over all their ownership rights without compensation is just wrong. It is as simple as the "black and white" example of stealing bread or any other physical object. I would give more credit to discussions about stealing bread because it's possible a human being stole it to survive, no one needs the latest hit song or movie to survive. If time and resources were spent in the creation of the product then I fail to understand why it's wrong for the creator to expect compensation, if they desire it.

Rational basis? What exactly is that in this case? Because I've never seen it. If anyone can give me a rational example of why the "I want it, it's easy to copy, therefore it should be mine" way of thinking is justified, then I'll reconsider my position.

I inadvertently focused this discussion too much on the duplicability aspect of the argument, when there are other factors at play as well. For example, if someone purchases a song and then plays it on speakers, and you are nearby and listen to it, I've never heard someone claim that you've stolen the music. Similarly, if you go to a music video on youtube, then listen to it while switching to another tab, you also have not stolen the music. Yet if you download the exact same song from a torrent site, then listen to it, and then delete it, the claim is that you have stolen the music. The dividing line here seems arbitrary and difficult to pin down. In every case, you had the same auditory experience. In the latter two cases, you had the same sequence of bits stored in memory, the same instructions execute on your processor. Yet only in the latter case have you stolen something. So, what is the property? What, exactly, is it that you have stolen? The fact that this isn't completely trivial to answer is my justification for claiming that there are, at the very least, some shades of grey in this issue.

Have you even read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Articles 23 and 25 are not supplanted by Article 27. In fact, Article 30 specifically states that you cannot interpret the UDHR in any way that would allow you to remove rights set forth in previous the articles. And, as surprising as this may sound, the UDHR doesn't specify order of importance based on word count.

If those seeds or fruit happen to be on land that someone owns then you are stealing those as well.

Ok. I agree forced may be a bit of a strong word since i can always choose not to pirate it.

However what about books or scientific papers which are hidden behind pay walls or just incredibly expensive.

The price of a good programming book is about £20. But when your monthly income is £300 that is a lot of money. Not to mention you have to pay electricity, gas, etc. and the prices for the utilities are not that much different.

So your options are:

1. buy the book and not eat for 2 weeks

2. pirate it

3. don't do anything and let your progress as a programmer be hindered by the lack of knowledge

That's what i call being forced. There's no situation where i can say i helped the author with the little i have and progressed in my development as a programmer.

If you give in to the system they set up knowledge become the privilege of the wealthy I agree that content creators need to live but the one size fits all approach is really f*ed up.

Open it up let people pay as much as they want or set different prices for different regions piracy will fall considerably if you do and for god sake don't limit peoples access to content by regions it's a sure way to increase piracy.

I will agree with you that it's definitely important for products to be priced appropriately for the region they are sold in. And, I understand that access to information can be a huge roadblock, which is why it's important for people to free up information as best as possible. Still, when you consider things like public libraries, free access to internet, etc., you have to question whether or not you have really tried to do it without pirating someone else.

Really? How about turning that around: how is it okay for me to pay more for something, solely because I live in a different country?

This is known as the 'Australian Tax' here, and is at the point where for some software products (Microsoft's dev tools, e.g.) it's cheaper to buy a budget flight to the USA, buy them there, then return.

Geographical pricing is morally indefensible.

I'm talking about lowering the cost in areas to match the economy. I too think the cost of software in Australia is crazy.

They are the same thing. The exact same thing. All you're quibbling about is that you don't like where the pricing is set for the region in which you live.

Huh? I'm not quibbling about anything. You brought it up, not me. I'm perfectly happy where pricing is at in my region. It's commiserate with the general economy. Nothing is disproportionately priced here. Some areas seem to be out of sync with their economy, either high or low.

Indeed - and if things get too far out of sync, it becomes worthwhile to import things from countries where they aren't. Except that such free trade is often prohibited by law.

And I sure as heck don't justify stealing just because you don't like the price.

Well, yes. I think we're in agreement there.

"The price of a good programming book is about £20. "

If only we had a global computer network by which you could find a much cheaper used copy. Or even a free loaner copy.

To play devils advocate, I'm not sure why you think the very poor should be concerned about respecting copyright law.

Because being poor doesn't give you the right to take from others to satisfy your own entertainment desires. I think Jean Valjean wouldn't have been quite the sympathetic character if he stole a lute instead of a loaf of bread ;)

Yes, but copyright abuse doesn't equate to stealing bread. I realise you already know this, but it's kind of a fundamental distinction here.

Also thinking along devil's advocacy lines -- it seems that without a universal basic income, people naturally resort to theft and copyright infringement to pull themselves back up to the baseline quality of life. With the economy naturally balancing itself out either way (The rich either pay taxes or get stolen from; the poor either spend their money or don't have any), it seems to make sense to go for whichever option has the lowest overhead.

> DRM-free . . . Steam

How is Steam DRM-free? You must first log in to your Steam account in order to play. Locked down. They seem to do it with very good UX, but it's DRM.

I think this negates the first part of your thesis: that DRM-free is picking up.

They can also remove games from the store and from users' libraries: http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2013/12/30/steam-remove...

From the store, anyway. The update at the end of the article states that they were wrong, and the single player game is still in users' libraries.

Steam could be used simply as a distribution method, you have an account to purchase and download. The level of DRM protection is up to the developer/publisher to decide. It's possible for the game to no longer require Steam once it has been downloaded.

Although, if the developer/publisher doesn't include an installer of some sort within the game files reinstalling without Steam might be a bit tough. Makes me wish for the old days when you didn't need installers, you just zipped up the folder as a backup. Need to reinstall? Unzip to new folder.

> For games, Steam makes it easy to avoid SecuROM Hell

Not really, there are Steam games with all kinds of additional vendor-specific DRM, including SecuROM.

http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_3rd_Party_DRM_o...

The reason for piracy is simply bad salesmanship.

Nobody would bother with torrents if there is a much easier and correctly priced alternative - when Steam started selling games in Bulgaria I stopped pirating games. When Spotify started selling in Bulgaria I stopped pirating music. When, eventually, Netflix starts selling in Bulgaria - I'll stop pirating movies.

The solution to piracy is simply knowing how to sell your product. DRM is an attempt at a technological solution to a non-technological problem.

> DRM only works if you don't know how it works.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs's_principle

Doesn't really apply here. When sending an encrypted message, the adversary doesn't know the secret key. With DRM, the adversary is the receiver of the message. You (or your computer) already has the secret in Kerckhoff's sense. It's just a matter of finding out where the key or the unencrypted data is stored - in the worst case by hooking up hardware to the mainboard or the screen.

You could make DRM "Kerckhoff hard", but you'd have to use a completely trusted architecture with secure boot and signed applications - which is not conicidentially where all major players are moving. Even then, there are a couple of loopholes (bugs/jailbreaks, you could tamper with the hardware, or you could just record the signal during playback ("analoge gap"))

> or you could just record the signal during playback ("analoge gap")

And for that we are striving for newer technologies to close that gap from the analogue side. I'm not being entirely serious (yet), but thinking about Occulus Rift or Google Glass, etc.

Once we get our media/games to jack in directly to our brains, like all the cyberpunk novels prescribe, it's going to be pretty hard to get a tap between the analogue side :)

Whatever means you use, you must have an unencrypted stream somewhere, and you can tap that stream.

In your example, just make a computer that pretends to be your brain, and you'll get the data to post at Pirate Bay.

People don't seem to understand this about DRM. It's based on encryption, but encryption only allows a secret message between alice and bob, away from the prying eyes of carol. But in a DRM situation, alice and carol are the same person.

Overall I agree with you except your example of Steam.

Steam is DRM.

Gaming is going towards more online by adding value (just like SAAS can't be pirated like traditional software) always online games by nature such as Battlefield 4 can't be pirated as well.

That's possibly why also Simcity decided to go online but the added value wasn't enough and caused a backslash.

No, the organizations are just paranoid. I had to sign an NDA before seeing the Disney digital content handling requirements. That sort of document will be the W3C requirements. It didnt say anything detailed about implementation, just requirements about encryption, watermarking etc.

> * For games, Steam makes it easy to avoid SecuROM Hell

Steam has its own DRM, and games distributed via steam may have additional third-party DRMs (including SecuROM and other similar shite).

IIRC GOG is only DRM-free games, although it is less convenient.

GoG is actually quite convenient, it has a much better website and a good downloader.

The only downside is the much smaller library than Steam.

I find the site good, but I only got grief from the downloader (back when I tried it a year or 2 ago, it may have gotten better since), for all of its slowness Steam's installation and updating process is much more hands-off and convenient.

The downloader is quite smooth, at least now. You still have to install and update manually, which is a bit annoying.

The one really cool thing in Steam is savegame sync, but not even all games support it.

> The one really cool thing in Steam is savegame sync, but not even all games support it.

Yes, that was a very annoying discovery when I came back from holidays, after I'd started playing Rogue Legacy on my laptop and realised I had to hunt the savegame locations and pray they were compatible between the OSX and Windows versions of the game (they were)

And no GNU/Linux support...

> all the reasons people don't pirate and instead buy on Steam.

Because the sames are stupidly, insanely reasonably priced. $5 for 20 hours of content? Games from time to time being 50% off? The ease of getting new content in a few clicks?

Contrast that with movies that are available for download at the same time they show up on DVD in stores: $15 for <2 hours of content that's probably not going to be that great, when my alternatives are to go to the movie store and pick it up for $2 as a rental or to pirate it for free.

I think that the early exploitation of Napster against the music industry made publishers feel like they were losing large amounts of revenue. There was one programming publisher who was trying to make the argument that the lack of availability for an affordable price was the reason why people were downloading illegally.

The counter argument was that his small niche was not indicative of a large industry. What you are mentioning about Amazon is pretty enlightening for me to read. If you think about it, the lock-in you suffer from iTunes is an outdated and anti-consumer stance. It is absolutely unnecessary to force a purchaser to store his digital goods on the cloud.

> DRM only works if you don't know how it works.

That's not entirely true, I don't think? What about AACS, which uses a very clever master key / sub key + key revocation mechanism. People figured out exactly how it worked well before it was actually "broken" - and it was broken by stealing private keys from devices.

> For games, Steam makes it easy to avoid SecuROM Hell

Steam is DRM. Sure, it's fairly nice as DRM goes, but it is still DRM.

> Steam is DRM. Sure, it's fairly nice as DRM goes, but it is still DRM.

Depends on what you mean by DRM. Many Steam games run without Steam and only use it as a platform for digital distribution.

> DRM only works if you don't know how it works.

Which is why it doesn't work.

But it is very useful for excluding competitors and pissing off consumers.

I recall DreamCast failing primarily because of piracy -- everyone burned games to CD-Rs instead of buying them.

Not really... in the PSX there used to be TONNES of copied CDs and we all know how that went...

The failure of the Dreamcast was the pitifully small library, not piracy.

the dreamcast had 700+ games, more than gamecube and xbox combined

390 of which were only released in Japan.

The xbox actually had ~900 games and the GameCube had ~700.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dreamcast_games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_GameCube_games

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_games

Wikipedia lists 967 games for the xbox alone. The Gamecube appears to have come in somewhere around 500 or so. But it's probably worth noting that no one ever claimed either of those consoles had massive libraries, either.

It is amazing how that myth persists. Piracy was much more common for the playstation, and I seem to recall it did ok.

I even heard that Sony was trying to make their games pirat-able in order to promote them faster and kill the competition, LOL. Don't know if was true, but worked fine.

DRM enables movie rentals over the internet and that's about the only good use I've seen for it.

Sadly, both Steam and Netflix still include DRM, it's just a bit less annoying.

Netflix along with Google and Microsoft are the companies behind the HTML5 DRM proposal.

iTunes doesn't DRM music anymore either. Haven't for years.

This is up to the publisher, audiobooks and most japanese music is still DRM'ed on iTunes. (and the most annoying thing about it is there is no way to see that before you purchase).

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