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Comment by jaxytee | Hacker News Reader

>There is completely no need to prevent users from retaining a copy once they watched it.

For Netflix there's one big reason to: PROFIT

What profit? Netflix offers rentals only, and no sales. And Netflix DRM doesn't prevent any piracy since users who want to illegally retain the copy can do it either way. So what is the reason for them using it? They can simply use sales and have the same profit.

What profit?

The profit that comes from actually having content to offer, which wouldn't happen if they didn't have DRM to "protect" the studios' shows and films.

Regardless of their opinions on DRM, it's not their decision to make, unless they just want to stream self-produced content.

Engaging in proliferating an unethical practice under pretense that "they have no choice" is a very questionable thing. Netflix had a choice, but they chose to do this.

No argument there, I was just replying to your question. You're right that Netflix had the choice of not existing.

Rather the choice of doing something else which doesn't involve unethical practices.

Yes, I'm sure the people would be doing something else. I was just talking about the company, which would have no reason to exist.

They could exist trying to concentrate on DRM-free distribution. Others managed that: https://www.headweb.com/en/

Of course it wouldn't have the same scale. But we aren't talking about scale - you mentioned existence as if selling something DRM-free is not possible or not sustainable.

I don't think the Scandinavian and US markets are comparable, but fair enough, I doubted even something like headweb could exist.

I wish they could expand. But alas, so far nothing like that is coming.

But the right owners also license same movies for sale via other channels, and they (I presume) agree to lower price for Neflix because it's only rentals.

Physical media is a very different market with different mechanisms. In the digital space there are no major offerings with selling files with video so far (besides small local examples like Headweb), so there is no segmenting like mentioned above.

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