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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

> This is a philosophical position, not an infallible universal truth.

Not more than the claim that police state is evil. We aren't talking about moral relativity here however.

> The problem with DRM, in general, boiled down to it's most salient point, is that it destroys value.

Somehow ethical problems of DRM you try to devalue, while practical problems of DRM (like being infective against piracy and punishing legitimate users) you promote as the main issue with it. I don't think that's proper. However both are enough of a reason to never use DRM.

> What't the benefit to me of Steam? I get all my games in one place, my save files synchronized across an unlimited number of machines

Benefits of Steam have nothing to do with it having DRM. They could all be provided in a DRM-free fashion. Yet they chose not to.

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We are talking about why your moral stance should be applicable to me, complete with comparisons to a police state (of all things..)

You haven't convinced me yet.

The fact that you feel there are ethical problems is again a philosophical position.

The premise of DRM is the same as police state ideas, that doesn't require convincing, it's the very definition of it. Whether you find it acceptable or unethical is another question however.

See also updates above about other points.

You'll forgive me for regarding your implication that "Log in to play your games" is somehow equivalent to a police state, as utter nonsense.

If that wasn't clear, here is a simple explanation.

DRM is built on the presumption of guilt and overreaching preemptive policing. These are quite standard features of some abusive police state ideology. It was well spelled out by one Sony exec: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_rootkit#Background

> "The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source - we will block it at your cable company. We will block it at your phone company. We will block it at your ISP. We will firewall it at your PC... These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake."

Concise and to the point. That's what DRM is about. I.e. assuming everyone potentially criminal, and policing everyone preemptively in abusive fashion which violates one's privacy (because DRM is found in your private digital space). This core idea applies to any DRM by its definition.

I hope this makes the analogy with police state approach more clear.

I think what you mean is that DRM is like the police, and bad DRM is like a police state. The police are there to enforce what you can and cannot do. Do they stop 100% of people? No. Bad people can get away with bad things that good people can't, just like pirates can break pretty much any DRM system. But in a normally functioning society, good (normal) people don't really notice that the police are there. They understand the rules and they try to stay within the rules. The rules mainly prohibit things they wouldn't have done anyway, like cheating in a multiplayer game or distributing the game to hundreds of other people for free. That's not infringing their rights in any way, I'm sure you can agree. This is how Steam works.

However, bad DRM exists. You have to authenticate to their servers every time you play, you have to stay online all the time even in a single player game, if their server goes down you lose your games, they can take your games away from you whenever they want. The DRM is noticeable from the beginning because of the bureaucracy the lack of trust that comes with it. You're being punished just for the fact that you exist. You have to install rootkits or shut down/uninstall programs on your computer. There's no benefit to you other than the fact that, after they have been satisfied, they let you play the game. That DRM is like a police state. That DRM, however, does not describe all DRM. This DRM describes Sony's DRM, or SecuROM DRM, or Games for Windows Live.

See the difference (probably not)? I know I'm wasting my time, you've made it clear that your opinion won't be changed, but just know that not everyone agrees with you. Steam is DRM, and that's not a bad thing. You can have a local police department without existing in a police state.

> I think what you mean is that DRM is like the police, and bad DRM is like a police state.

I see any DRM as bad / police state like.

Policing can be good when it serves the proper purpose and doesn't cause other problems. Overreaching policing is bad however. I.e. preventing crime in general is good. Putting police surveillance in every home to do that is bad. I already explained above why any DRM is always overreaching. I.e. presumption of guilt and violating one's digital space. In case of Steam, its DRM is run on your computer, so it's analogous to putting policing mechanisms in your own house.

What kind of DRM does not have these characteristics? I know of none. DRM is defined as such, and as such is always bad.

I know I'm wasting my time, you've made it clear that your opinion won't be changed, but just know that not everyone agrees with you. Steam is DRM, and that's not a bad thing. You can have a local police department without existing in a police state.

> You can have a local police department without existing in a police state.

Feel free accepting a local police department dedicated solely for policing you located inside your own house. Or for example, imagine yourself with ball and chain, or some kind of electronic device attached which limits what you can do in your own house as if you are a criminal. Others find it completely unacceptable. That's exactly why it's police state like and it seems that you don't get the point.

What is Steam's DRM limiting me from doing? Every possible limitation that every other DRM system has that I can conceive, they've already addressed in some way.

You keep bringing up "limits" and "preventions", yet I am at a complete loss to describe anything that Steam meaningfully does along those lines. Even the incredibly broad fair use arguments that could be made against other systems don't work here.

Actually, come to think of it, not every game on Steam uses Steam DRM (aka Steamworks).

A significant amount of games on Steam require you to run the client to play them (i.e. no service - no game). Also, you can't use Steam backup tool without being connected to the service (or more exactly, you can't install games from that backup).

While technically, some games which don't require the client to run can be manually copied to back them up, Steam forbids using them in the TOS if you don't have an active account. Now imagine a scenario when you have hundreds (or more) games in your library, and such kind of DRMed service just goes bust. Having no access to all those games would make all the downsides of DRM so much more clear, though it would be quite late already.

Either way, Steam is clearly geared towards DRM approach. In contrast, GOG doesn't require anything like that, and neither enforces anything like that. Once you bought some game, you can back it up all you want and install / play it regardless whether your GOG account continues to exist or not.

Actually, offline mode is a thing. You still go through the client, but the service being available is neither here nor there.

However, I find that the client offers enough on its own (the in-game overlay, mostly) that I'm more annoyed when I can't get it to work with a game. I have re purchased games I already owned on physical media and other ways to get the Steam integration (and I'm not alone there).

Steam going bust, in addition to being really unlikely, would be a mild annoyance at best, since bypassing it is a simple matter of replacing a DLL.

People are more accepting of Steam because it has other benefits (e.g. keeping drivers up to date) and most of the drawbacks are as bad or worse outside of Steam, other than the pirate editions.

That said, you're right that there's something a little off about accepting other people monitoring what you can do in your own home with your own property.

> People are more accepting of Steam because it has other benefits (e.g. keeping drivers up to date) and most of the drawbacks are as bad or worse outside of Steam

That's why GOG has a good chance to provide a strong competition and actually change the landscape for the better. Comfort of usage with no DRM would be a clear contrast to other services and can eventually prompt them to ditch DRM as well.

I imagine the number of people that are philosophically opposed to DRM (rather than practically) is asymptotic to zero.

GOG's going to have to out-feature and out-customer-service Valve, because the Steamworks DRM is transparent enough that most people are not going to see that as a valid selling point.

> I imagine the number of people that are philosophically opposed to DRM (rather than practically) is asymptotic to zero.

GOG think otherwise. And GOG users confirm that. Visit GOG forums and find out for yourself. Unsurprisingly, many GOG users don't use Steam at all. Whether that is because of ethical or practical reasons doesn't change the fact that they don't. GOG know what they are doing and know their audience as well.

He's not comparing the two. He is not saying "DRM is like a police state."

He's saying that both DRM being a bad thing and a police state being a bad thing are self-evident truths.

(I'm not taking sides, just hoping to clarify.)

To clarify - I am saying that DRM shares core ideas with police state methods. Some of them. I explained that above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8070304

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