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Comment by wamatt | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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