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Comment by horseemergency | Hacker News Reader

How is that faulty logic?

You can take the stance that DRM is a good thing if it's protecting creators' rights and doesn't get in the way of consumers using the product. I'd argue that most creators take this stance, because they want to get paid for the stuff they made so they can turn around and make more stuff.

Or you can take the stance that "DRM can't be good", because reasons. This is the stance that a lot of people take who don't create (or who aren't paying the bills by creating).

Personally I'm somewhere in the middle, but I see the validity of both sides. Creators want to get paid, and consumers don't want to be told how/when to use the things they own. Being anti-BAD-DRM is taking that middle ground, and in terms of Steam they're doing it pretty well.

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The problem with such approach is that it ignores the root of the issue - the unethical nature of DRM.

I.e. to draw an analogy, imagine someone objecting to the police state methodology not on the grounds that it's evil and abusive, but on the grounds of discomfort of such invasion. By that logic, if police state would employ covert methods, that would be acceptable since it doesn't disturb one's comfort.

I think such logic is pretty flawed.

> you can take the stance that "DRM can't be good", because reasons. This is the stance that a lot of people take who don't create

No, it's the stance of anyone with common sense. Those who create including.

Examples:

* http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blog...

* http://brutalgamer.com/2012/03/09/cd-project-red-drm-no-long...

* http://www.lexi-alexander.com/blog/2014/6/1/will-the-real-pi...

If you don't believe DRM to be unethical, then surely it's perfectly consistent? You're argument seems to require DRM to be unethical a priori

No, even if one assumes DRM not to be unethical, one can observe that DRM is nonsensical from the practical standpoint. I.e. because not only it doesn't reduce piracy while punishing only legitimate users, it even induces piracy! (See second and third links above).

Does it, though? Even if you can't eliminate something, making it prohibitively difficult has an impact. In my younger days, at LAN parties where people could just pass around the installer of a game almost no one bought most of the games. As it became more and more difficult to find reliable sources of cracks/installers, the ratio of people deciding to purchase rather than put up with the hassle increased. Even if you CAN get a free version if you try hard enough, the level of trying required will cause more and more people to find it worth the purchase.

> Even if you can't eliminate something, making it prohibitively difficult has an impact.

Technically adept pirates are actually encouraged by the mere presence of DRM, since they see breaking it as a sport. That happens fairly quickly, and the rest of the pirates never deal with it again.

So, there is an impact, just not the one you'd probably expect. Firstly, pirates are encouraged to pirate the material even if they don't care about the contents. I.e. DRM boosts piracy. Secondly, legitimate users are punished with this DRM degrading the quality of the product for them (while pirates enjoy the full quality, DRM-free pirated version). DRM is abysmally dumb from any common sense perspective of doing business.

> Even if you CAN get a free version if you try hard enough, the level of trying required will cause more and more people to find it worth the purchase.

Hard part of breaking it can be done by one pirate. The rest will use the DRM stripped version, nothing hard in it anymore.

I linked a few articles above where the point of DRM actually encouraging piracy is discussed. If you missed that, go through them:

* http://brutalgamer.com/2012/03/09/cd-project-red-drm-no-long...

* http://www.lexi-alexander.com/blog/2014/6/1/will-the-real-pi...

Another impact of DRM is certain amount of users who would simply avoid that product because they don't want to deal with any DRM to begin with.

If it was beneficial for a company's bottom line to abandon DRM they would do it, so why don't they?

Does DRM boost piracy, are there actual statistics for this, those links seem short on facts? World of Goo was heavily pirated.

One thing piracy has boosted is the explosion of the freemium model.

> Does DRM boost piracy, are there actual statistics for this, those links seem short on facts?

Those links explore the psychology of piracy, and note that DRM can boost it. Since pirates can be not interested in the material itself, but interested in breaking DRM for sport. Producing numbers is not an easy thing here, since there is no definitive way to count this globally (a concrete factual example was shown by CDPR though with their Witcher game).

However that's not even the main point. Even if DRM doesn't boost piracy significantly, the main issue here is that doesn't deter it, while on the other hand it punishes paying customers.

> If it was beneficial for a company's bottom line to abandon DRM they would do it, so why don't they?

Several possible reasons, none of them good and valid though. I listed them here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8070346

Probably #1 (intertia / lack of common sense) is the most common.

See what Cory Doctorow writes about authors actually losing opportunities to gain money because of publishers stupid insistence on DRM:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blog...

> You can take the stance that DRM is a good thing if it's protecting creators' rights and doesn't get in the way of consumers using the product.

You could, but there's a problem with that. Because DRM by nature can neither operate without getting in the way of consumers using the product, nor effectively protect creator's rights.

DRM is fundamentally and inherently bad, not as a moral proposition (though it may be that, too), but simply at what it is nominally intended to do.

> DRM is fundamentally and inherently bad, not as a moral proposition (though it may be that, too), but simply at what it is nominally intended to do.

Which often reflects the fact that DRM is used for completely other purposes. None of them good.

It reflects the fact that DRM is a fundamentally incoherent concept -- you can't provide data and all the tools for legitimate users to access it freely and still deny illegitimate uses of the data.

What I meant to say is, that often the real reasons behind using DRM are different from the stated ones (i.e. preventing piracy). And all of those reasons are bad. They usually are some of these:

1. Lack of common sense or just "following the herd" (Lysenkoism).

2. Covering one's incompetence. (Poor sales are blamed on piracy, and DRM is used as a demonstration that they are "doing something about it").

3. Controlling technology progress and direction (like standards poisoning and so on).

And etc.

My rebuttal to that is: Steam (which is appropriate because that's what got this discussion started in parent comments)

I've been a Steam user for 8ish years now, and it's never once gotten in the way of me playing games. The only downside that I can see is that you can't gift old games to friends (or sell them), and they're very upfront about that fact from day 1. They just recently made a change that allows you to share game libraries with friends/family actually, so that small gripe is going away.

It's hard to have a real discussion about DRM because it's like religion to a lot of people, and many are quick to dismiss DRM because it's not perfect. Saying "DRM is fundamentally and inherently bad...but simply at what it is nominally intended to do" isn't saying that DRM as a concept is bad, but that the past/present implementations have been bad. Dismissing the idea because a few implementations have failed doesn't seem very hackerish :)

The core of DRM is: Creators should be paid for the stuff they create, by the consumers of their stuff. There have been plenty of misguided attempts at this, for sure, but I think you'd have a hard time defending the counter position (especially if you want to have a morality discussion RE: DRM and not just a conceptual one)

> The core of DRM is: Creators should be paid for the stuff they create, by the consumers of their stuff.

That's not the core idea, while it's often presented as such. The core idea is "we need to control consumers and limit what they can do with their digital goods, lest some piracy happens". That's why such idea is flawed from the beginning.

Saying that it failed because implementation wasn't perfect and more policing will help to solve the issue reminds me the story of the Watchbird: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29579

Definitely read the whole thing if you didn't yet. What's hackish is not to be eager to implement even more draconian overreaching preemptive policing, but to understand from the start that it's a defective and unacceptable idea.

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