How to drive away customers: prioritize your unproven loss of income over making an attractive product. Accuse all your users of copyright infringement.
1. The article is an experiment on techniques and what can be achieved.
2. At the VERY BEGINNING of the article, the author links to his own comment in a previous HN post which said "I do not advocate using any of the techniques, please don't use it, it's terrible and will give your users headaches! I'm against ressource "protection" on the web, what's on the internet should be fully consumed by users of it! The article describes just a few experiments I set up to see how far someone could go if it WAS important."
3. The article acknowledges these techniques are ultimately stupid.
What is this attitude? Would you have the same attitude with someone experimenting with XSS flaws, hacks and so on to figure out what is possible? Did you all forget than, in order to do good, you have to know what is bad first?
Regarding your points 1, 2 and 3... where does it stop? Should we always be enthusiastic about experimentation for the sake of experimentation? At what point would you say "that's stupid"?
For instance, what if the title was: How To Dump Toxins In Your Local Water Supply
Would you read the article and then come here and congratulate the author on their efforts? I bet most people would glance at the article and then come here and complain about too many toxins in the water and what a jerk the author is.
You know where it stops? It stops when you start putting people in danger. I cannot believe you're seriously asking that question (and yet, I have to believe you are seriously asking that question, because the alternative is that you're an awful troll).
I would like to encourage you to read my comment, and then read it again, and keep doing that until you understand the difference between killing people and blogging on the internet. I would then like to encourage you to read up on things such as "white hat hacking", pentesting and so on to give you an insight as to why, in the IT world, if the good guys don't push the limits first, the bad guys will.
Let's try another hypothetical title: How To Force Your Neighbors Take Out Your Trash or, How To Write A Virus That Steals Banking Information...How To Really Embarrass Your Coworkers...9 Ways To Enrage Internet Commenters...(this is fun!)
Would you applaud those experiments? I'm guessing YES since "It stops when you start putting people in danger." and nobody is being put in danger.
(BTW, I'm just doing my own experiment here - I guess I should have said that. You're not being a very good sport though ;) Seriously - I'm sitting here trying to understand your point of view and I made some POLITE arguments. You mis-represented one of my arguments and then patronized me to the extreme, so is that the kind of behavior that you're promoting?
As an amateur photographer you'd be amazed how many people think nothing of taking an image and slapping it on their website, or in their print media.
People routinely use services like imgur.com to rehost images they have no permission to use, and can and will strip watermarks and be silent when asked for attribution.
I'm used to it now, but damn it's frustrating when you take that _one_ great shot and find it everywhere on the internet the next day with no credit.
If the watermark can be removed without making the image largely useless then you're not watermarking properly. Sure, its not pretty, but this isn't a pretty world. I never understood the lazy bottom-right watermark. Its trivial to remove and sites like reddit reward fraud because people like to pretend its their content as narratives like "Oh i bought a camera and took my first photo" are eaten up by low-information voters (who i imagine are the plurality of votes on reddit).
Newspapers, big online sites that should know better. They take pictures and half the time you never even know unless you use tineye, or a friend/colleague will share a link with you "Hey nice work getting included in the New York Times", etc.
I do understand hard work, and skill, and putting in the time that made you the great photographer that you are, and I understand the need to earn a living, and I understand capitalism, economic profits, and accounting profits and economic profits.
But a large number of highly trained and skilled people put a lot of hard work and effort into writing the open source software that is running the internet and the webservers that your images are on.
I understand your perspective: you'd rather buy a proprietary microsoft operating system and a proprietary microsoft webserver so you could run a proprietary Oracle database to keep track of your DRMed photos.
But understand that I wouldn't, I'd rather have a public domain web where photographers share their work like artists do and computer programmers and graphic designers and bloggers and everybody else.
I'm just not that excited by your great photo, there are a lot of great photos.
full disclosure: I took a significant news photo once and made money selling it. I enjoyed spending the money. I don't chase around the internet stopping people from duplicating it.
Most of my pictures are prints, hanging on walls. But you need a portfolio to attract (paying) clients, so images have to exist!
> I understand your perspective: you'd rather buy a proprietary microsoft operating system and a proprietary microsoft webserver so you could run a proprietary Oracle database to keep track of your DRMed photos.
So if I said I'm an ex-Debian developer who's released a pile of open-source software, for free? And does so regularly?
Seriously you're getting too personal there, and just wrong. Photography started as a hobby because I love people - in the same way that woodworking is a hobby because I like doing things with my hands that are "real".
But there are costs involved, I've probably spent close to 10,000 in camera-equipment, to have people steal your work, means that stuff doesn't pay for itself any more.
You mention proprietary software? How would you feel if you wrote open-source software and people abused the licenses? That's copyright infringement, and the same thing is a huge deal in the photography world.
Sure everybody has a camera, and fly-by-night people will take money for pictures. But that's like hiring a self-taught PHP-programmer instead of a kernel developer. There are skills, styles, niches, and similar involved that clearly differentiate photographers.
Is it big enough to start deploying the lawyers? That's what software companies have to do. If you're not doing that, then it must not be a big enough deal to you. If you CAN'T do that, then I think you should get out of the biz.
But, I bet you won't because you are probably getting something more than money out of your career. Maybe you enjoy the work. If it were all about money, you would have become a banker, right?
No sympathy here either. You have no natural right to get paid every single time one of "your" images is used. (Oh and who owned the stuff you took a picture of? Should you pay them to photograph it? Should they get paid every time the image is used?) With no natural rights, you have to use the legal system. Nobody cares if you sue some big corporation, but please...complaining about people posting stuff to imgur.com? What money was lost because your image showed up there? Did you try sending them a cease and desist? I bet they'd take it right down. If you don't do that, then you're not trying hard enough.
I have sent cease and desists in the past, in the same way that I've sent DCMA takedown notices against people who post documentation I've written with no attribution, and against people who've forked my code and pretended to have authored it.
But I'm done with you now.
That was really my main gist. Sorry for not being sympathetic. I thought I made a pretty good argument. I was not trying to be impolite, but I can see how it could be taken as such. Could you just answer that one question? I'm really interested in the fine line that is being discussed here.
If yes, then I think you agree in principle with the goal here, even if you disagree with the specific use case.
Even look at music piracy. Pirates did the big labels a favor: small, independent artists can't make a living anymore because everyone just expects it to now be free. They now are almost forced to go with a big label if they actually want to make any kind of living.
Imagine you have a stock photo website. Basically honest potential customers might try right-clicking a photo once to download it, and failing that will whip out their credit card. Basically dishonest non-potential customers aren't going to pay you and see your protections as something fun to be worked around.
There just isn't a business case for heroic measures that can ultimately be trivially defeated.
You have no idea how much time I've spent on sites doing weird things to try and stop the user from downloading their content. Like online schools that don't want anyone to save the class-lesson videos. I don't even want the media, I just find it irresistible to understand and ultimately defeat their protection.
DRM can't help artists make money. It only helps them lose more.
Examples which talk about it:
* http://www.lexi-alexander.com/blog/2014/6/1/will-the-real-pi...
> And this is my favorite part: I am 100% certain that the hacking of entertainment industry's security features provides better entertainment for these kids than the entertainment we're trying to prevent them from stealing. Let that sink in for a second, then try not to bust up laughing.
* http://brutalgamer.com/2012/03/09/cd-project-red-drm-no-long...
> Every subsequent game we will never use any DRM anymore, it’s just over-complicating things…We release the game. It’s cracked in two hours, it was no time for Witcher 2. What really surprised me is that the pirates didn’t use the GOG version, which was not protected. They took the SecuROM retail version, cracked it and said ‘we cracked it’ — meanwhile there’s a non-secure version with a simultaneous release. You’d think the GOG version would be the one floating around.”
The people releasing the content do not care about the actual content, they are not fans, hell most of them probably never watched/played/listened to the movie/show/game/song they are releasing.
The Act of cracking, releasing, encoding, etc is the entertainment for them... The content is irrelevant
All the money is in touring and merchandising.
This is a point I hear often, but there seems to be no consensus. If I understand you correctly, are you saying that small, independent artists used to make a living just from CD sales?
I've only met in person poor musicians, those that make money either from street concerts or the occasional gig, which were consistent with Courtney Love's position[1] that CD sales are not really important when it comes to revenue. But I'd love to hear an argument from the other side.
I suspect that your DRM was so overly burdensome that it turned away any potential customers, you in effect screwed yourself.
If the DRM does not get in may way, or require me to do anything(i.e it is invisible to me) then I might buy that software, for example Steam Games, Spotify, etc have DRM that is invisible to the End User. I will grin and bear this level of DRM, begrudgingly. However if you go much beyond this no thank you.
If your software has Activation Keys, Installation Limits, Locks itself to my Motherboard that I change ever 6mos, or other crap like that then you would never get a single dollar from me.