Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

> . We face a choice between a feature our users want and the degree to which that feature can be built to embody user control and privacy.

It can't be said for all users. I don't want it. No DRM junk in the browser please. I understand that she probably means some estimated majority, which is unfortunate (i.e. majority accepting unethical practice like DRM).

> Firefox users would need to use another browser every time they want to watch a controlled video

Irrelevant for many users of DRM-free OSes (like Linux) who won't have any DRM backend for EME anyway. I.e. it really sounds like "users would need another OS".

> Each person will be able to decide whether to activate the DRM implementation or to leave it off and not watch DRM-controlled content.

I hope there will be a switch for disabling the whole EME altogether. Even better, I'd prefer builds of Firefox free of any DRM sickness. It's very unfortunate that this garbage is finding its way into the open source browser which always stood for the users' rights more than many others.

> majority accepting unethical practice like DRM

Are you kidding? DRM is great. I love being able to just pay money to Netflix in return for content. DRM enables that nice, clear-cut transaction. What's the alternative? Judging by the rest of the web, it involves tracking your internet activity and throwing advertising in your face.

DRM is never great. Show me one user who actually appreciates DRM itself. What you meant above is that users like the service. They could like it even more if it hadn't DRM garbage attached to it. I.e. DRM has nothing to do with what users like - it always degrades the quality of the service and the digital goods it delivers.

That's like saying nobody likes the turnstile on the subway. Of course not, but it enables the service to exist in the form it does. I'd much rather go through the turnstile, as awkward as it can be if you've got a suitcase, etc, than be forced to watch advertisements during my subway ride...

No, DRM does not enable the service because it's not an essential part of it. The service could work without DRM all the same while being ethical and more user friendly at the same time. DRM is like a sickness attached to an otherwise healthy product. It only becomes better when you remove it.

That's like saying the subway turnstile isn't an essential part of the subway. It's only true if you define "essential" in a narrow technical way that ignores the realities of having to monetize the use of products and services.

> realities of having to monetize the use of products and services.

Essential means technically and financially essential. I.e. without it the service can't work or can't bring profit. DRM is neither of that. Those who require DRM [publishers] have no technical or financial reasons to justify it. No valid ones at least (all reasons they usually voice are false, and their true reasons they usually don't voice).

That makes no sense. What "true reasons" do publishers have for DRM that aren't fundamentally financial?

I can think of several:

1. Monopolistic lock-in. DRM is more than often used to control the market. It happened with Apple in the past, and was one of the key reasons that music publishers realized that being DRM-free is actually better for them.

This reason also includes DRM derivatives like DMCA-1201 and the like. It's all about control (over the markets, over users and etc.).

2. Covering one's incompetence. DRM is used to justify failing sales (i.e. when execs are questioned about why the product performs poorly, they say "Pirates! But worry not - we put more DRM in place").

3. Ignorance and / or stupidity (many execs have no clue and might believe that DRM actually provides some benefit). This type can be called DRM Lysenkoism.

None of these reasons are valid, all of them are crooked and anti-user, but they are often present in various combinations.

> 1. Monopolistic lock-in. DRM is more than often used to control the market.

How does this benefit the publisher? They already have a exclusive rights to whatever particular movie you're watching.

It's not always the publisher. It can benefit some middle parties which implement DRM. Or for example mobile carriers which use DRM to prevent users from switching. Or whatever other monopolistic lock-in scenario.

When publishers realize that monopoly falls to some other hands, they quickly become sober and find common sense. When monopoly remains theirs, they pretend that DRM is needed for other reasons.

> I'd much rather go through the turnstile, as awkward as it can be if you've got a suitcase, etc, than be forced to watch advertisements during my subway ride...

That's quite a false dichotomy, since the service clearly can exist independently of DRM (both technically and economically).

Furthermore, this dichotomy doesn't work either in your analogy (there are ads on the subway, and yet I still have to pay) or in the real case we're talking about (Hulu+ is paid service locked down by DRM, and it still shows advertisements).

I don't think Netflix, Amazon Video, etc, which don't show advertisements, could exist economically without DRM.

Amazon sells music perfectly without any DRM. It doesn't just exist - it brings them tons of profit. GOG sells games without DRM - and having growing profits. And etc. and etc. Your point disproved.

You're assuming that market mechanics for music and movies is the same.

I assume that DRM has no effect on piracy (it doesn't) and it always degrades usability (it does). Which means scraping it off always has no financial impact except for improving usability of the service and reducing costs of using DRM itself. Better usability + more user friendliness = more satisfied users + more new users = more profit.

I don't think it's a reasonable assumption to make that DRM has no effect on piracy. It won't stop sophisticated pirates, but I do think it stops people from releasing an easy-to-use app that lets your grandma store Netflix movies locally.

> I don't think it's a reasonable assumption to make that DRM has no effect on piracy.

It's not just reasonable, it's easily demonstrated in practice, when goods released with DRM are pirated almost right away (with DRM being scraped off). Sophisticated pirates are needed to break DRM. Unsophisticated ones get it from them without any hassle. Which means that DRM has no effect altogether except on legitimate users!

I.e. the vast majority of pirates never deal with any DRM, and experience of legitimate users is always degraded by it. It's pure common sense that removing DRM would always improve any service. And the fact that it's not happening is caused by other reasons (see above).

Why bother with letting grandma store Netflix movies locally in a hypothetical DRM-free world when you can just use BitTorrent to download them now?

There's no reason a BitTorrent movie downloader couldn't be made just as easy to use as a Netflix downloader. If one doesn't already exist, it's not because DRM is somehow stopping it.

Grandma doesn't need to store Netflix movies locally. She can head to the Pirate Bay (with adblock lol) and download the video that a "sophisticated pirate" kindly ripped earlier. She never has to deal with the DRM at all.

Reminder to everyone: use downvote only for poor behavior, not disagreements. Appreciate that rayiner often provides intellectually honest contrarian viewpoints to many arguments. If people like him weren't here, this place would just be a big and disgusting circlej erk round the clock.

I believe he's talking about (1) movies, not music, and (2) streaming rental, not download sales.

DRM for movies is not needed the same way it's not needed for music.

About renting vs. sales see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7745797

What is happening here with the reply links? Apparently you two can still post but nobody else can (at least I cannot). Is that the new policy from a while ago?

You can answer, but first you might need to click the "link" link. I'm not sure why it's needed sometimes. May be when discussion happens too rapidly, the site assumes it can be some spam bot or whatever. So it puts some roadblocks.

Some places don't use turnstiles. Instead, you voluntarily validate your ticket with a machine. To ensure compliance, random checks are performed, with a large penalty if you don't have a valid ticket. It's a pretty nice system.

Similarly, some places don't use DRM. I don't think it's made it into the video space yet, but legitimate DRM-free music is common. It seems to work pretty well.

To say that DRM enables the service to exist only works if there's no other, better way. But there is, and the only reason we don't get to have it is because of customer-hostile policies from media companies.

The turnstile is actually a great analogy for DRM, including all of its flaws. And the turnstile isn't what allows subway service to exist.

A turnstile isn't very hard to jump over. If the turnstile is the only enforcement mechanism, anyone who wants a free subway ride just has to vault over (or perhaps also glance around to see if there are cops nearby, google whether there are monitored cameras, or pull a hoodie over their face).

There's an alternative, though: most places in Europe, there are no turnstiles, and nothing preventing you from getting on public transit without paying. It's a "trust but verify" system: you are required to validate your ticket before you get on the train, and occasionally someone comes around the train to check if you have a valid ticket, and issues a fine if you don't have one.

With this method, the users aren't inconvenienced, enforcement costs are reduced, and everyone's happy. With the turnstile, you get massive queues at busy stations during rush hour, and by making this one mechanical device your sole point of enforcement, you've actually made it more likely that people who don't want to pay will cheat the system.

Many of those countries also have criminal penalties for fare evasion.

As it happens, a lot of subways don't have turnstiles or ads, but instead periodically check for tickets after you're on board. I don't think that's terribly relevant here, though.

If you're watching streamed video, the DRM is completely transparent. I don't see how that is a degradation in service.

The only way it would be an issue is if you're trying to rip the stream. But if you've paid the provider for streaming only, rather than to download and keep a copy, then that's also not really degrading the quality of service. Similarly, the prohibition on bringing a video camera in to record cinema screenings does not reduce the quality of the cinema experience.

In general, I don't really see a problem with DRM that is temporally bound to the moment of consumption.

> If you're watching streamed video, the DRM is completely transparent. I don't see how that is a degradation in service.

It is crippling usability in several ways:

1. DRM is usually not portable (or not ported at least). I.e. most probably it's tied to certain devices / operating systems / applications and etc. For the end user it translates to "you can't watch it on the device / operating system / application of your choice".

2. DRM prevents backups. If the service goes bust or you lose connectivity - you have no access to your data.

3. DRM poses a security / privacy threat. Being transparent doesn't make it any better - it only makes it worse (think of a hidden camera).

All those are clearly examples of degraded usability no matter how "transparent" some DRM is.

Regarding your first point, hasn't this always been the case even before DRM? For example, one cannot directly interpret the magnetic fluctuations encoded onto a cassette tape - a tape player is needed to transduce the signal. DRM just takes this a step further by introducing cryptography and obfuscation into the decoding process.

I don't think backups are relevant to DRM-laden streaming video, given that it's someone else's data that you happen to be observing.

I'm not sure what you mean by a security and privacy threat. Surely it is no more of a threat than visiting potentially untrusted websites, or using closed-source or unverified open-source binaries, in the first place?

> Regarding your first point, hasn't this always been the case even before DRM?

It's not the case for any normal standard portable format (video, audio, etc.). They can be accessed on any platform. DRM prevents that limiting your options where and how to use it. If you take tapes analogy, you can play your tape in any player. Imagine a tape which is only playable in Sony player or whatever. It's clearly a defective product in my view.

> I don't think backups are relevant to DRM-laden streaming video, given that it's someone else's data that you happen to be observing.

That's exactly the point. It means usability is reduced if anything goes wrong with the service or you can't connect to it or whatever other similar reason.

> I'm not sure what you mean by a security and privacy threat.

Since DRM is based on distrusting the user (assuming all of them are potential criminals by default), symmetrical treatment for it from the user's side should be "always potential malware by default". Here is a good example of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit

Since DRM is always a black box / closed code, it adds to the reasons to never trust it.

I don't think DRM really prevents anyone from watching video. There are plenty of alternative options. For example, for popular films, one option would be not to use the streaming video service but instead purchase a DVD. Another alternative is to use a platform that supports the desired DRM-laden streaming video service. A more difficult approach would be to reverse engineer the DRM software and reimplement it for the chosen unsupported platform. So it's not ultimately limiting, at most it's a small inconvenience.

The same arguments apply to the issue of backups. It would be highly unusual for the only copy of a media product to be only accessible via a DRM-encumbered streaming video service.

I do see your point on the lack of trust though. In this case, hopefully Mozilla's sandboxing approach would go some way towards mitigating that. And the inevitable disassembly of whatever closed-source binary they release.

> I do see your point on the lack of trust though.

If you put that in perspective of recent privacy / mass surveillance issues, DRM is a perfect ground for various agencies to put their effort it. After all, DRM is already by design intended to spy on users and control what they do, plus DRM is massively deployed because many consumers accept it without second thought.

Movie rentals existed before Netflix. It's always been technically possible to make illegal copies of movies. But most people would rather have a legal option. Otherwise everyone would skip Netflix and just use the Pirate Bay.

Edit: To be clear, I'm saying that people will pay for a legal streaming service even if they could rip it off for free.

And just like movie rentals, it's still possible to rip off DRM'd content.

It isn't hard to screen-record, and it never will be. As long as that exists, what's the point of DRM anyway?

Illegal copy from Pirate Bay: free (as beer) and no DRM. Legal copy: you have to pay and endure DRM.

Now let the market decide.

The market has already decided on "both". The people who spend the most money on music are the same people to pirate the most music.

Correct. Thus it is a very bad idea to infuriate the people who love music/movies with DRM mechanisms, because otherwise they'll just pirate and not buy.

I also love being able to pay Apple money in exchange for DRM-free music. Also, DRM on video is approximately 0-efficient; pirates will still rip movies and upload them to torrent sites, freeloaders will still find free low-quality streaming movie sites, and the majority of non-technical users wouldn't be able to rip streaming video even without DRM.

So: NO.

> the majority of non-technical users wouldn't be able to rip streaming video even without DRM.

How hard would it be to make an app that made this easy for non-technical users, without DRM?

As easily as Mozilla can make an open-source DRM client... simple (DRM will be broken sooner rather than later, if it hasn't been already), but you can't distribute it. So we're back to "pirate channels", like all the movies today.

And in any case, this misses the point: non-technical users won't distribute pirated content, even if they could rip it. Who are they going to distribute it to? Friends? Whoever wants free movies, can get them easily. But the main advantage of streaming, on-demand-ness, remains in the hands of the big players, who can afford to lease the servers and pay for the bandwidth.

How hard was it to make Popcorn Time?

I don't know, but however long, it apparently wasn't prohibitive. And I don't think it'd be tough to clone.

What about Netflix requires DRM? I know that the studios currently require it but what benefit does it actually serve? How much of the content on Netflix is not available to pirate if so inclined?

It all is about obliging the insanity of movie publishers. And why they require it? No valid reason.

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