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Comment by msane | Hacker News Reader

On the subject of cracking streaming music DRMs, a realization I have been sitting on for a while about what people can do with it... Considering the common wisdom that:

- storage will get exponentially cheaper

- data transfer speeds will get higher

It makes me think that eventually there will be illicit torrents of all the worlds music, plus the index, plus the metadata, and plus the interface/app for browsing it. In other words, people would not only pirate individual songs or movies, they would download their own complete copies of Spotify / Netflix. It isn't feasible now but it could be sometime in the next 5-15 years, depending bandwidth speeds.

I'm not sure how many people see this coming or take it seriously but I wonder what the effect could be and what the remedy attempts would be.

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You can see the remedy attempts already

* push for cloud storage over local storage

* push for locked down devices over general purpose computers

* push for DRM on the open web

* big ISP companies fighting against net neutrality

I very much agree. I hope that, capitalism, ironically enough for DRM, is the probably always the solution to overstepped DRM remedies. Regardless of the issue of piracy, which I am not advocating.

For instance there will always be a market for custom computing and "PCs", and so non-locked PCs will (hopefully) always exist in a capitalist environment. That market I think ultimately circumvents any attempt at ubiquitous control of hardware. The same thing is at play with software. And hypothetical new methods of connectivity may be able to circumvent many attempts at central control of the net.

For instance there will always be a market for custom computing and "PCs", and so non-locked PCs will (hopefully) always exist in a capitalist environment.

Unfortunately, that market is slowly becoming the minority, and because those "more free" devices may have limitations that make them incompatible with a lot of proprietary content (which is the majority) and circumventing those limitations could be illegal and difficult, there will be fewer users of them.

Reminds me of this https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html and the old saying "If you outlaw freedom, only outlaws will have freedom."

Given the move away from the carrier-subsidized model for mobile devices, I am optimistic about the technical future of general purpose mobile computing. What I am not optimistic about is the ability to seamlessly access content across devices from data that is privately stored in the cloud, mainly because not enough people would be willing to pay for/fund the development of such a service/piece of software to make it worth developing.

> It makes me think that eventually there will be illicit torrents of all the worlds music, plus the index, plus the metadata, and plus the interface/app for browsing it.

It seems to me that the a-grade private torrent trackers are exactly that. Larger catalogue, more comprehensive metadata, and better interface than any commercial service.

> In other words, people would not only pirate individual songs or movies, they would download their own complete copies of Spotify / Netflix. It isn't feasible now but it could be sometime in the next 5-15 years, depending bandwidth speeds.

If you have the infrastructure, and are really dedicated, you can definitely do it today.

I don't think you see what I'm saying. Imagine a single torrent called "music", 15 terabytes large. Opening the application inside brings up a local copy of Spotify.

>It seems to me that the a-grade private torrent trackers are exactly that. Larger catalogue, more comprehensive metadata, and better interface than any commercial service.

Regardless of metadata quality and collection size which I think is debatable although having not seen one... they are a la carte, so much different.

> If you have the infrastructure, and are really dedicated, you can definitely do it today.

No infrastructure is required, just multiple terabytes of storage (which most households do not have... yet), and bandwidth that makes downloading terabytes an attainable feat. Needless to say the later is not viable today either. But eventually both those things will become commonplace.

15 is a high number too. The set of music one would be possibly be interesting in hearing (of the set of all music which has already been produced) may be closer to 3-5 terabytes. Movies of course, are different larger set of numbers.

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