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DRM Is Toxic to Culture

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Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#31

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

makecheck wrote: post #7

DRM and advertising tech have a similar problem of bad execution. Sure, there exists a way to do each of these that many may consider "reasonable" but in practice industries have shown that they would rather be obnoxious and make everything annoying or just much more difficult than necessary. This means they can't be trusted to do it well, and the solution must be to avoid it completely (DRM-free content and ad block…

They also have a problem of delivering more than was traditionally available, normalizing greater intrusiveness. Ad tech allows a staggering amount of control and analysis that never existed with traditional media advertising. DRM lets you not only prevent user copying like old-school "copy protection", it lets you enforce any arbitrary scheme of "rights" that you can code into the DRM system (e.g. you could make viewing video on high-end displays exclusive to a "premium" option). Advertisers and publishers are now accustomed to these and will fight any attempt to take them away.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#32

Post by coldtea »

izacus wrote: post #18
_jal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, to be fair, the VCR didn't have a distribution system attached that allows sharing worldwide. I still agree with you, though; times change, and nobody "deserves" business-model protection. The legacy copyright industries already get massive state subsidies through the legal enforcement of artificial monopolies - degrading everyone's computing to prop them up further is insane.

True, but they still kept earning billions through peak global torrents distribution and Netflix happily made people pay for them because they were accessible. And now they run after the DRM train like everyone else.

>True, but they still kept earning billions through peak global torrents distribution

Isn't that kind of irrelevant though?

Whether a business still makes money is not an argument as to whether torrenting their stuff would be OK.

A physical business (e.g. clothes store) might make millions even though people steal stuff, but we wouldn't consider that as making stealing OK.

(And I don't care for the "copying is not stealing" argument. It might or it might not be, but I'm making an analogy here, and the core of it is: whether a business is still coming out on top, making money, etc, doesn't mean another practice against them is OK).

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#33

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #27
izacus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get this - why is DRM is friggning' NECESSARY? What makes it this forced law of nature? The current multi-billion media conglomerates grew at times when being able to copy a piece of content from TV was encoded in the LAW. Content providers earned billions of dollars at times when you could press REC on your VCR and ("THE HORROR" now every content provider shill screams) rewatch the show many times and ( GASP…

> What exactly was so horrible at being able to rewatch, store and borrow a movie to a friend that now seems to completely incomprehensible to people here on HN and outside? You're forgetting that VCRs and other analog tape-based media had generational losses; every copy made degraded the quality noticeably and put wear on the tape which, from the studios' perspective, kept copying under control. That isn't so for di…

> Beyond that, one can't be against DRM and for GPL enforcement at the same time

So, one can only be for the enforcement of laws against homicide if one is in favor of capital punishment? Is that roughly the point that you are making?

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#34

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #27
izacus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get this - why is DRM is friggning' NECESSARY? What makes it this forced law of nature? The current multi-billion media conglomerates grew at times when being able to copy a piece of content from TV was encoded in the LAW. Content providers earned billions of dollars at times when you could press REC on your VCR and ("THE HORROR" now every content provider shill screams) rewatch the show many times and ( GASP…

> What exactly was so horrible at being able to rewatch, store and borrow a movie to a friend that now seems to completely incomprehensible to people here on HN and outside? You're forgetting that VCRs and other analog tape-based media had generational losses; every copy made degraded the quality noticeably and put wear on the tape which, from the studios' perspective, kept copying under control. That isn't so for di…

> Beyond that, one can't be against DRM and for GPL enforcement at the same time and remain logically consistent.

One can absolutely do that. Technical restraints and legal remedies are not the same thing, and it's completely consistent to say that DRM should be unavailable to both proprietary and free works while legal remedies should be available to both.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#35

Post by [deleted] »

AlexandrB wrote: post #30
gaius wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"All intellectual property should be free! Except the IP I create which I should be paid for!" is problematic. The author of this piece contributes to the (perceived) necessity of copy protection. Also those armed policemen in Paris aren't there to shoot fare evaders...

> "All intellectual property should be free! Except the IP I create which I should be paid for!" That's a strawman. People should be paid for their work, but that doesn't give them the right to impose extralegal restrictions on how I use their work through technology. If you think that DRM is about piracy, you're living in a fantasy world. Almost all DRMd content - movies, books, music, news - is readily available th…

[deleted]

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#36

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

skywhopper wrote: post #26

I would say that DRM is merely an inevitable outgrowth of our society's enshrinement and worship of the idea of "intellectual property". That word, "property", gives the opposite connotations of "copyright"--permanent rightful ownership vs a temporary grant of monopoly on an idea. But yes, it's definitely the case that the cultural idea that humans and corporations have the right to own a copyright for a length of ti…

> I would say that DRM is merely an inevitable outgrowth of our society's enshrinement and worship of the idea of "intellectual property".

If intellectual property rights cease to exist, then there's no longer any legal basis to enforce the GPL and similar licenses and the Free Software ecosystem would collapse. Are you sure you want that?

EDIT: Replaced "open source" with "Free Software". My thanks to other posters for the correction. Yes, BSD-style open source would still survive.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#37

Post by eastWestMath »

izacus wrote: post #11
makecheck wrote: post #7

DRM and advertising tech have a similar problem of bad execution. Sure, there exists a way to do each of these that many may consider "reasonable" but in practice industries have shown that they would rather be obnoxious and make everything annoying or just much more difficult than necessary. This means they can't be trusted to do it well, and the solution must be to avoid it completely (DRM-free content and ad block…

I don't get this - why is DRM is friggning' NECESSARY? What makes it this forced law of nature? The current multi-billion media conglomerates grew at times when being able to copy a piece of content from TV was encoded in the LAW. Content providers earned billions of dollars at times when you could press REC on your VCR and ("THE HORROR" now every content provider shill screams) rewatch the show many times and ( GASP…

There's a huge difference between lending your friend a VHS and uploading a torrent. And the idea of owning a license to a piece of intellectual property shouldn't be a hard thing to wrap one's head around if you work in software.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#38

Post by gaius »

comex wrote: post #20
gaius wrote: post #2

We offer research reports and white papers for your management and Board from experienced advisors Strangely, I couldn't find any of these reports available for free download and in the public domain...

Strangely, I couldn't find any of these reports available for free download and in the public domain... No, but I bet if you pay for them you get them as PDFs, unencrypted, which you can view on a vast breadth of devices and OSes and applications, annotate/modify, clip parts out of, convert to other formats, and otherwise manipulate as you please, with no arbitrary technological restrictions getting in the way. (Comp…

with no arbitrary technological restrictions getting in the way

How does the arbitrariness of those technological restrictions differ from the arbitrariness of the legal restrictions which I'm sure the author would insist upon, should you decide to republish their work? To me they are the same thing - mechanisms for saying "you might've bought this but the original owner still has a say in what you do with it".

The world IMHO is a better place because there are mechanisms by why IP creators can be paid. Yes there is poorly written DRM (Sony, we're looking at you) but that is a problem of execution, not one of concept.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#39

Post by izacus »

coldtea wrote: post #32
izacus wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but they still kept earning billions through peak global torrents distribution and Netflix happily made people pay for them because they were accessible. And now they run after the DRM train like everyone else.

> True, but they still kept earning billions through peak global torrents distribution Isn't that kind of irrelevant though? Whether a business still makes money is not an argument as to whether torrenting their stuff would be OK. A physical business (e.g. clothes store) might make millions even though people steal stuff, but we wouldn't consider that as making stealing OK. (And I don't care for the "copying is not s…

It's extremely relevant when we're debating how far we're letting companies go at restricting your freedoms and where do we curb them.

A similar example: warranties. In EU at least, we demand that companies invest money to make their hardware work at least 24 months without issues. Even though this costs corporations money and they'd probably prefer your TV to die in 24 hours because that would increase their revenue flow. It benefits the society at large and makes life better for everyone at the expense of some cash flow of businesses.

I see DRM as the same kind of issue - it actively ruins cultural experience of society at large, forces locked down devices on people, demands that culture must not be experienced repeatedly and forces people to become renters of content. I'd prefer businesses to lose some profits due to piracy instead of having to tolerate all the horse shit DRM pushes on us. And my talk about profits is all about that - even though piracy exists, businesses still can generate huge profits. As such I argue that thus DRM isn't necessary at all considering all horrible consequences it brings.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#40

Post by AlphaWeaver »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #36
skywhopper wrote: post #26

I would say that DRM is merely an inevitable outgrowth of our society's enshrinement and worship of the idea of "intellectual property". That word, "property", gives the opposite connotations of "copyright"--permanent rightful ownership vs a temporary grant of monopoly on an idea. But yes, it's definitely the case that the cultural idea that humans and corporations have the right to own a copyright for a length of ti…

> I would say that DRM is merely an inevitable outgrowth of our society's enshrinement and worship of the idea of "intellectual property". If intellectual property rights cease to exist, then there's no longer any legal basis to enforce the GPL and similar licenses and the Free Software ecosystem would collapse. Are you sure you want that? EDIT: Replaced "open source" with "Free Software". My thanks to other posters…

If intellectual property rights ceased to exist, we wouldn't have a need for the GPL, wouldn't we?
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