Why do companies put so much effort into DRM when a commonly available $20 device strips it away in real time? I don't want to steal streams, I just want my HDMI devices to work together. This little gem strips HDCP so my old (but nice) receiver can talk to my newer projector: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B004F9LVXC
Because a ton of people are honest and want to pay for content, and don't want to try that hard to pirate it. Even a small hurdle is enough to keep them on the straight and narrow.
I'm quite willing to pay for content, I'll even go out of my way to find a way to do it sometimes. The few times I've looked into piracy in the last few years it's such a thorny mess that I'm quite happy to try and find a legal way to view. If there isn't one? I probably just won't watch it. I don't want to dig into that giant hornets nest of a mess.
There's always the analog loophole. If you can watch it on your screen, you can record it.
Of course, but typically quality suffers significantly, so what you get isn't as good as the original and that in itself is a deterrent for a lot of people. Also, some modern watermarking techniques can survive conversions like this, so if anyone is making a habit of recording content from a service using watermarking and redistributing it on a scale that justifies taking serious action, it'll be pretty easy to prove…
> it'll be pretty easy to prove who it was when the lawsuit comes up
Perhaps. But this person can always claim that it was done by an external hacker. In fact, it can be done by an "external" hacker, and it will be if these guys are smart.
It only needs to be done by one person, not every viewer. And yes, the value of much of my time is effectively zero. The same is true for most people.
That's why we have laws to apply negative externalities like very large jail sentences if you're caught distributing a file that you created by taping a movie off-screen.
Local solutions to global problems that don't even work locally. Those large jail sentences also place a lot of externalities on the rest of society.
This is like saying door locks are pointless because you can break a window and climb through. Protecting media copyright isn't a black or white thing like crypto. It's about compromises to drive behavior and consumer spending with convenience.
What exactly do you think this DRM will stop? 1. People who have access to the content can usually see it over and over again (when they have a subscription to a service like Netflix). DRM will do nothing here. 2. People who don't have access to the content can't even see the DRM'ed version of the file, so DRM will do nothing here either. 3. People who want to pirate (illegally distribute) the content have advanced t…
You missed:
2b. People who don't have access to the content, but want to watch it for free.
People have been recording the things they watch since the invention of the VCR. DRM will not have any impact on that. Someone will come along, and make a video-grabbing utility that bypasses the DRM. Also, many of the content is already available via bittorrent. DRM is pointless. But perhaps you are right about "browser vendors refusing to cooperate" not being the best possible approach. However, do you know what is…
We somehow got away from DRM on audio. I was wondering how to do this for video too. What worked for audio, was that you had one vendor (Apple) that had a large enough market share. In order to sell DRMd media that worked on Ipods, the media companies had to sell through Apple. Or they could sell non-DRMd files that would still work on Ipods. They did the calculation, and figured they would make more money going non-…
> For video, people don't download it and take it with them (typically)
...which is crazy, especially for HD video. Why use the bandwidth every time you want to watch something when storage is so much cheaper?
"I don't know if I'm just looking too far into your comment, but I don't see why you're blaming Netflix (or it seems you are) or how you got to them being the bad guys for this? They're not the ones that make the content. If it was up to Netflix, they would just release their shows DRM-free on Netflix for any platform. Unfortunately, that's not how things work and they have to bow to the demands of the content distri…
The balance of the power is with the rightsholder. They own the content that Netflix wants to sell and that people want to watch.
I think you're living in fantasy world where DRM actually works. Not once has DRM prevented me from watching a netflix show, it's only prevented me from watching it on netflix.
There's a difference between deterring (upping the bar) and making it impossible. See CIA guidelines on writing malware in the recent leak.
It only deters people that were already detered by their own technological inability, the ones that don't know what files are. Everyone else can circumvent it by grabbing a pirate bay version.
DRM schemes effectively allow the implementer to invent their own rules well beyond what copyright law specifically reserves (e.g. restrictions on resale and lending, ability to create their own licensing regime to publish on a given platform), so I don't see how DRM depends on government intervention. DRM is already defined more by business and technical considerations than by the law. If anything, it seems to me th…
What keeps DRM in play though is it is illegal to distrbute tools to circumvent DRM So company like Slysoft, Replay, the devs of DeCSS, etc get sued out of existence when they create software that circumvents DRM the cat and mouse game of DRM only works if you have government legal backing hamstringing the anti-drm crowd. With out Anti-Circumvention laws there would be software on the open market to bypass every know…
I see how that's supposed to work, but I don't think that's how it happens in practice, and hence doesn't explain much about the motivation behind actually bothering to deploy DRM. Proto-DRM (copy protection, lockout chips, dongles) was in play decades before anticircumvention laws, and as far as I've seen those laws have little practical value in stopping circumvention anyway. They seem to be primarily used for extra charges against vendors of "fully loaded" hardware (e.g. consoles and media players preloaded with illegally copied content). When governments are leveraged to go after pure circumvention tools, the Streisand effect usually kicks in and ensures that the necessary code and keys are spread far and wide. The main place where DRM actually has teeth is in applications where connectivity and an account are required, such as streaming media services (i.e. the primary application of EME) and online gaming. In that case, the vendor can frequently update anticircumvention measures in the client and deactivate accounts (or, in the case of vendor-managed platforms like game consoles, ban the actual device) that fail enough checks.
> Now, the same thing is happening again, except that Mozilla is on board with it. Mozilla doesn't have as much leverage now that a large part of "the community" has abandoned Firefox for Chrome. If you care about these issues, stop and consider the effect of your choice in user agent. > It's only a matter of time until Firefox is just a wrapper for webkit It will be a very cold day in hell before this happens. Mozil…
> Mozilla doesn't have as much leverage now that a large part of "the community" has abandoned Firefox for Chrome. If you care about these issues, stop and consider the effect of your choice in user agent. Mozilla still has nearly an order of magnitude more market share than they did when activex was everywhere.
At the time that Firefox started really turning heads, it took an order of magnitude less money to build a better browser. JIT innovations that were once just good research ideas from the Smalltalk world had an open source implementation in Java which then got ported to open source dynamic languages like Python (see polymorphic inline caching & similar techniques). Then Adobe came along and donated a bunch of it's JIT code form ActionScript to Mozilla as well. To top that off, Microsoft was visibly asleep at the wheel with respect to Internet Explorer.
All of this allowed Mozilla to both build a better browser and show the community a way forward with rich experiences that leveraged Javascript instead of ActiveX based solutions.
With Google pouring resources into Chrome and Microsoft actually paying attention to Edge, competition is much harder. Mozilla is spending large sums of money on Firefox and delivering an experience that is just okay compared to the other players.