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"No, DRM can't enforce it (since this stuff is pirated practically instantaneously). So why is it used?"

Strongly suspect this is due to contractual obligations with the studios.

The agreements will almost certainly stipulate that content must be sufficiently protected. Hence Netflix plays ball, if it wants access.

My question "why" was not pointed at Netflix. It was pointed at publishers (studios, etc.) which demand that DRM. They have no valid answer for that question.

While Netfilx aren't an ideological champion for DRM, they are a huge proliferator of it. Compare it to distributors which sell only DRM-free content and actually attempt to influence publishers to sell through them (like GOG for games). Those are actually doing something good! Netflix just help to spread the sickness claiming that "they have no choice". But that's a poor excuse.

It's a form of price discrimination. If you want to watch a movie once ("rental") it costs $5 but it you want to watch it unlimited times it costs $20. As a customer, I appreciate this because it allows me to pay less when I want less.

Why discriminate? Let's say users watch N movies per month on average. They can set average purchase price per movie at $20 / N, not at $5. That's it. They can combine the two to make it more even. Charge X per month for the convenience of streaming and Y per movie for the purchase (and aim to arrive at the same $20 / month roughly). All that doesn't require any DRM.

Because money. If 20 users are willing to pay $20, and 80 are willing to pay $5, Hollywood can make $2020+$580=$800 instead of $5*100=$500.

It's not $20 per film. Not sure what you are calculating.

It's an example. The exact price can be used in the same formula. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination

I find such price discrimination to be a despicable practice, unless we are talking about differentiating prices because of different average level of income in those markets. And even so, regional discrimination becomes even less relevant in the digital space. The fact that such practice leads to resorting to unethical methods in the digital world (DRM) implicitly proves the point that it's crooked.

Related subject discussed on GOG: http://gog.com/news/getting_back_to_our_roots

I agree, but they have every financial reason to keep doing it. How would you convince them to sell one product for one price to everyone for less total money?

Usually such crookedness can be avoided if competition is high enough. I.e if competitors can be profitable without ripping customers off, they could do that in order to attract customers to their option. Seeing that they are losing customers, those who resorted to price discrimination start thinking about restraining their greed. Unfortunately when completion is weak, or all participants agree on using this crooked practice to keep the prices high (which should be illegal really), they get away with it.

one aspect of this - if you don't make an attempt to protect the content, even if it is "pirated practically instantaneously", then the studios can't go after anyone pirating their product in the legal system with any chance of winning. there is great fear of the slippery slope you go down in that world.

> if you don't make an attempt to protect the content, even if it is "pirated practically instantaneously", then the studios can't go after anyone pirating their product in the legal system with any chance of winning.

Why not? Absence of DRM doesn't make infringement legal. Studios can go after it the same way they do now. What they'll lose are various evil perks they get from DMCA-1201. But they weren't entitled to them to begin with. They all exist because of undemocratic and corrupted political process.

> When you buy a book you also own the book, and not the intellectual property it contains.

But a book is not a movie. You can't take your physical book and let 500 people read it simultaneously. So there's no need for even considering restrictions on what you can do with your physical book. The closest thing that comes to mind is scanning and re-printing the book 500 times and distributing that. And you can't do that. That's illegal.

> I don't see how it correlates with any necessity for DRM.

Because of the extreme ease of reproduction + distribution, coupled with the near zero chance of being caught, is a strong incentive to violate IP law.

> Limited time of rental is justified for physical goods. For digital it's not (I explained above why).

No you didn't. What you said has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the validity of limited-time licensing of the right to view content.

> I don't see any sense in limiting access. Netflix can charge the same thing for unlimited access, plus allowing making backups and still make the profit

Hah, in your dreams. Netflix's ability to negotiate (with the content providers) for the legal right to stream content to you is predicated on there being limitations. The more unrestricted the access, the more they have to pay.

Not only that, but if you did remove all limitations (and restricting access to the duration of your membership is, of course, a limitation), then there would be no reason for people to stay Netflix members for longer than it takes to download and save all the movies they want to watch for the next few months. Subscribe for one month, download 6 months worth of movies, unsubscribe. Doesn't sound like a great business model, does it? But of course they couldn't do this even if they wanted to, because no content provider is going to give Netflix a license to re-license the content to Netflix subscribers in perpetuity.

> No, DRM can't enforce it (since this stuff is pirated practically instantaneously). So why is it used?

Because it's better than nothing. New content is pirated pretty fast, sure, but stuff doesn't stay easily available forever. Netflix doesn't deal in new content anyway (barring their recent ventures into producing their own content, which is a different discussion).

Without DRM, if I have a friend with a Netflix subscription, I can just ask him to grab a few movies and send them to me. Not only does this work even if the movies aren't easily available on BitTorrent, but it's also a lot safer because nobody can track this (whereas BitTorrent does have a non-zero risk of being tracked, or of quality problems, or fakes, etc). At this point it's about convenience. Make it hard enough or risky enough to acquire the content for free, and people will decide it's easier to just pay for it. And that's what DRM does.

Granted, DRM solutions do not work particularly well. But in the eyes of the rights-holders, it works better than nothing.

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To clarify, I'm not an advocate of DRM. I would much rather get content without it. DRM-free content is more convenient to work with than DRM'd content. But there is a vast gulf between saying "I'd rather have DRM-free content" and saying "All content must be DRM-free". The former is something I can ask for. The latter is just wishful thinking.

> But a book is not a movie. You can't take your physical book and let 500 people read it simultaneously.

So what? Because you can make 500 copies doesn't justify using an unethical police state approach which DRM implies (i.e. treating all users as criminals by default). DRM is unethical by definition, because it's an overreaching preemptive policing. One would reject all DRM on the same ethical grounds one would reject police state approach to society.

That's besides the fact that DRM doesn't prevent any piracy, since it's broken practically right away and subsequent pirates never deal with it. Therefore this argument of copies is completely irrelevant to justify it.

> Because of the extreme ease of reproduction + distribution, coupled with the near zero chance of being caught, is a strong incentive to violate IP law.

Again, DRM has no effect on easiness of illegal reproduction (see above). It has nothing to do with incentives or fear of being caught. It's the same with or without DRM.

> What you said has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the validity of limited-time licensing of the right to view content.

I disagree. If you have some point to present for the benefit of the discussion, address what I expressed above, otherwise we just affirm our disagreement.

> Not only that, but if you did remove all limitations (and restricting access to the duration of your membership is, of course, a limitation), then there would be no reason for people to stay Netflix members for longer than it takes to download and save all the movies they want to watch for the next few months.

Even that out with a fee per file. That would prevent downloading the whole catalog at once.

> Because it's better than nothing.

No, it's worse than nothing, because it cripples usability for legitimate users while having no effect on pirates.

> New content is pirated pretty fast, sure, but stuff doesn't stay easily available forever

On the contrary. Once it's pirated by the first pirates which scrape DRM, it becomes easily available practically forever for the rest of the pirates.

> Without DRM, if I have a friend with a Netflix subscription, I can just ask him to grab a few movies and send them to me.

Too much hassle for potential pirates when they can access the same with just a few clicks through P2P networks. The scale of such copying can't compare. Pirating through P2P is waay more massive than any potential copying from friends. DRM doesn't make piracy neither more risky nor more scary. According to some, DRM actually only increases piracy (see an interview with CD Projekt Red).

> Granted, DRM solutions do not work particularly well.

They work - to cripple the product for users who pay for it. Plus they work for whatever shady reasons those who push for those solutions came up with. They surely don't work for stopping any piracy.

You've drifted from your original claim that rentals don't make sense for digital goods, into railing against the effectiveness of DRM, while presenting your argument as railing against the idea of DRM itself. DRM is ineffective, yes, but that doesn't mean the concept is inherently bad. It just means the implementation is bad. It's certainly quite plausible that there is no way to produce good DRM, but that would be a different argument.

I'm not interested in debating the merits of implementations of DRM, nor of its morality (as it is quiet unlikely that an argument about the morality of DRM will ever sway any participant, as this is not a topic where logic and reason tends to apply).

If you want to try and argue again as to why you think the concept of renting digital goods doesn't make sense, feel free. But you'll have to go back and address my original reply again.

Two arguments combine and reinforce the conclusion that DRM is never needed. To clarify:

1. Rental of digital goods doesn't make sense for me (explained above).

2. Even if you can come up with sensible reason for rentals of digital goods, DRM is still ineffective so there is no point of using it anyway, which makes rental unenforceable which kind of makes it pointless even more and brings the argument back to #1.

> I'm not interested in debating the merits of implementations of DRM, nor of its morality

That doesn't fit with your statement that "that doesn't mean the concept [of DRM] is inherently bad". Unethical nature of it makes it inherently bad. Ineffectiveness of it in combination with always crippling the usability makes it inherently bad. Security and privacy threats it represents makes it inherently bad. Implementation is always bad because it's always aimed at crippling usability and treating all users as potential criminals by default. It's the definition of DRM. So there can't be a good implementation, otherwise it wouldn't be DRM anymore.

> as it is quiet unlikely that an argument about the morality of DRM will ever sway any participant, as this is not a topic where logic and reason tends to apply

Why not? Ethics has its logic. I explained in this thread why DRM is unethical. The logic is pretty straightforward and similar to how it's explained that police state is unethical.

There are two major objections to DRM - ethical and pragmatical. Both can be discussed and both have valid logic. I expressed that before here: https://secure.gog.com/forum/general/day_against_drm_1/post6...

So far I never saw proponents of DRM coming with any convincing arguments against either of those objections. They either claim that since many users are ready to accept DRM's overreaching policing it's not unethical, or they claim that DRM is actually doing something useful. Neither of that is convincing, because many users have no clue or don't understand the nature of DRM, so their acceptance doesn't mean much. And DRM is proved to be ineffective on the constant basis. I'm yet to hear any other argument which actually makes sense.

> Rental of digital goods doesn't make sense for me (explained above).

You mean "stated above". You never adequately responded to my comment, instead drifting off into the weeds of railing against DRM.

> Unethical nature of it makes it inherently bad.

You're taking it as a given that it's unethical. You haven't proved that yet, you merely made an analogy to a police state.

> treating all users as potential criminals by default

The perfect DRM would enforce the IP rights without interfering with legitimate use. Such a perfect DRM would not, in fact, treat users as potential criminals. Certainly not any more than, say, merchandise tags in retail stores. I doubt you rail against those.

What does treat all users as potential criminals is those unskippable FBI warnings at the start of movies. But that's not DRM.

Granted, DRM implementations in general are flawed, and those flaws do impact legitimate users. But that's not always true. For example, I wouldn't say that the DRM iTunes uses for movies/TV is crippling otherwise-legitimate uses. Which is to say, it's never stopped me from enjoying my movies or TV shows the way I wanted to. Granted, I've never wanted to watch my TV shows on, say, an Android device, but the ability to view iTunes content on an Android device is not something I purchased the rights to in the first place.

> Why not? Ethics has its logic.

And yet you haven't even attempted to use logic to defend your claim that it's unethical. You've just made sweeping generalizations and analogies, with the expectation that I would agree with you.

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In any case, I did say I'm not interested in debating DRM, and I'll say that again. If you want to try to make an argument for why rentals don't make sense, using some justification other than "because rentals require DRM and I believe that DRM is unethical", go ahead (but you should go back and reply to my original comment, not this thread). But you don't really seem interested in defending that statement, instead you just want to talk about DRM. And I would rather not.

> You never adequately responded to my comment

Which one? About no bearing (I didn't see what to respond there), or about risk of users downloading the whole catalog at once? I responded to that (the service can charge some fee per file to prevent such thing). Or you mean about that Netflix has to negotiate something? The discussion wasn't about what is handed to Netflix by the publishers, it was about the concept of renting of digital goods which I find to be illogical. So please point me to the comment you want me to answer to, because I'm not sure which one that is.

> You're taking it as a given that it's unethical.

For me it is. I can expect that some people have different view and find it normal. After all some people find extreme Orwellian policing of society acceptable. It's not normal for me and never would be.

> The perfect DRM would enforce the IP rights without interfering with legitimate use.

Perfect policing system would prevent all crime without interfering with legitimate activity and without suspecting innocent people. I doubt such thing can exist. Increasing policing to extreme levels of total surveillance is not perfect policing because it equals to suspicion by default and it clearly interferes with legitimate activity. That's what DRM is. Overreaching preemptive policing.

I.e. the logic of DRM goes like this:

1. All users are potential thieves.

2. We need to prevent all of them from doing anything that is not authorized.

3. Let's build some technical measures and deploy them on users' systems and devices (since there is on other way to achieve the goals of #2).

4. Let's enjoy piracy free world.

They eagerly do #3, while #4 obviously utterly fails (it doesn't stop them from doing #3 for some reason as we discussed above). Now, I see huge problems with 1-3. Firstly, all users are assumed criminals. It's insulting and disgusting and it's not comparable to a lock on a store or tags like you said. Because of #3 - i.e. users' private digital space is invaded for the sake of deploying the enforcement of all these policies.

Imagine some police claiming, that all people in the country are potential criminals, so they need to invade all people's houses with police cameras to prevent any potential crime. That's what DRM does in essence. House is one's private area. One's computer / system / program one uses is one's digital private area. Invading it with preemptive policing measures is unethical and overreaching and prone to all kind of abuse.

> And yet you haven't even attempted to use logic to defend your claim that it's unethical.

See above, I expanded on my previous brief explanations which I assumed were sufficient.

> you can own the file, but not he intellectual property it represents.

So I'm allowed to distribute files I own freely, as long as I take the file extension off of it? Or the metadata?

I agree, the long string of the presence or absence of electric charge that make up A New Hope is not the concept of a "A New Hope". Too bad nobody else sees it that way, because when you put that number through a math function named (and patented) h.264, and you draw the outputs of one stream to a pixel grid on a fixed update cycle and you output the other stream as a sine wave of PCM values, you get "A New Hope", the visual and audible experience.

> So I'm allowed to distribute files I own freely, as long as I take the file extension off of it?

Who said you are allowed to distribute them freely? You are not. Same way you aren't allowed making photo copies of books and distributing them freely (except fair use cases). Making personal copies is fine (it's fair use). It's not relevant to the discussion above really.

Right here, in the parent:

> you can own the file, but not the intellectual property it represents. So legally nothing is wrong with buying digital goods (files), while the intellectual property they hold is only licensed to you (and not sold)

He makes references between books the paper and books the print. My point is that while that distinction holds in digital space, nobody actually believes it.