Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DRM Is Toxic to Culture

meshedinsights.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 263 posts

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#91

Post by dasil003 »

izacus wrote: post #46
coldtea wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still agree with you, though; times change, and nobody "deserves" business-model protection. Is that true though? Because laws against theft (physical theft of actual products I mean, let's not get into whether "copying" is theft here) are a business-model protection too. As are most business laws (e.g. contract law). Why pay at a restaurant when you can just walk out and run for it? Isn't making it illegal a "bu…

You're making false comparison here. DRM is extremely invasive - it's akin to being forced to wear handcuffs inside a store to prevent theft, or perhaps being strip searched every time you walk past a store. Both of those actions can also be sold as "business protection against theft", but our legal framework currently says that we're ready to tolerate some amount of shoplifting and we're not going to allow stores to…

The risk to a shoplifter is unfathomably larger than the risk to a pirate, and the leakage is infinitely less.

Analogies generally don't serve this debate well. Saying DRM is like physically invasive security to your person is just as ridiculous as Studios' claims that piracy is the same as theft. Both attempt to communicate real issues, but are ridiculously inaccurate.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#92

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

rayiner wrote: post #85

I disagree with the characterization of all this media as "culture." They're entertainment products that exist for the sole purpose of generating a profit.

And as such they are at the very least displacing "culture" to some degree, and the argument thus still applies?

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#93

Post by problems »

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…

Ads I can see as they pay for content, DRM, not so much as the content has already been paid for.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#94

Post by pdkl95 »

type0 wrote: post #64
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the really weird part is that while the propaganda puts it as "protecting property", it really has exactly the opposite effect. When you buy a physical book, that book is indeed your property, and you can do with it whatever you want. Now, with DRM-infested ebooks, you are actually just licensing it for very restricted use. You might as well be claiming that making private home ownership illegal would strengthen…

The physical book comparison is interesting. Imagine there would be a way to publish physical books with DRM that all publishers would embrace. You open such a book without authorization and it's all gibberish. To read it you would need to have bought a special strip that you lay over the pages in order to read (don't matter the technical aspect, it's gedanken-experiment so let's consider such a strip magic for now).…

RMS has been warning[1] about that specific problem for decades. Unfortunately, very few people listened. Now we have the additional problem of people already giving up property rights for shiny digital baubles. -sigh-

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#95

Post by coldtea »

_jal wrote: post #77
coldtea wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to go down that path, you're going to be "picking winners and losers" - something I hear we are supposed to dislike. Which business models "deserve" protections? I'd say that should not be up to the availability of the relevant technology to decide, but up to society. Just because we can obliterate or replace something doesn't automatically mean we should, or that it would be better for us if we did. So…

> So I'm perfectly OK with society picking winners and losers, and not OK with a jungle race where "invisible hands" and market forces (including the one's people forget, like lobbies, monopolies and under the table deals) decide. Uh, I specifically called out lobbies and monopolies. And in theory I agree with you. In practice, "society" doesn't serve that role. The "invisible hands" are exactly the actors doing the…

>Don't get me wrong - I love me some theory, it is so much cleaner than the real world. But we don't get to live there.

Is that because it's impossible and unpractical, or because we are conditioned for the current situation?

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#96

Post by stale2002 »

klez wrote: post #58
AlphaWeaver wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've been giving some thought about this recently. I'd say that, at least for software, we'd still need the GPL and, therefore, copyright. Which clashes a bit with my anti-copyright sentiments, but whatever. Why is this? Because software is different from literature and visual arts. In a copyright-free world, once you copy a work of literature you have the whole work at your disposal to copy, modify and redistribute…

Them make it illegal to sell software without publishing the source code.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#97

Post by jimnotgym »

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…

some people used to record the chart show off Radio 1 and share the cassettes with their friends. It didn't stop me buying music, I couldn't afford to buy music and would have done without it. In fact it turned me into a music fan, and once older I bought a lot more music because of it.

Where the official sources beat the torrents is on convenience. Spotify and Apple whatever are easy to use and busy people will pay.

A similar effect is possible with TV shows and films. I have Amazon prime, and Netflix. Prime costs me £79 a year, Netflix costs me £7.99 a month I think. Now I have a Youview box. I can watch Netflix on it but not Prime. For prime I have to buy another device or use my laptop. I wanted to see what the 'Game of Thrones' fuss was about, neither has it (amazon charges per episode actually). NowTV from Sky does, so I got a trial subscription, but the NowTV app on the Youview box only works for films, not TV shows (!), and the NowTV pc app doesn't work on Linux.

So I pay for three services and still can't watch due to petty rights issues. I could watch them all on Kodi for free of course, but that would be wrong (even though I have paid for them elsewhere).

In summary, if they refuse to get with the 21st Century they will sell less shows. If they allowed easier access to the shows they would beat piracy with convenience. DRM just makes it harder. Don't get me started on HDMI DRM

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#98

Post by izacus »

eastWestMath wrote: post #86
izacus wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can wrap my mind around idea of licensing just fine. That in no way means I agree with current one-sided state of affairs in copyright law. I also don't see why did you bring torrenting into the debate - do you consider me sharing am movie to my friend from my iPad to his a crime? Is that the same as torrenting? Or why am I prevented from doing that due to DRM?

Strictly speaking, you don't have the right to do that under the licensing agreement for digital media. You're perfectly within your rights to lend your friend a DVD.

Indeed. Why is that acceptable state of affairs? Remember, we have a law that essentially tells everyone that lending / selling your DVD is legal. Why isn't there such a law for digital content? Why can I sell a Die Hard DVD but not a Die Hard movie file?

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#99

Post by zanny »

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #41
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…

And the really weird part is that while the propaganda puts it as "protecting property", it really has exactly the opposite effect. When you buy a physical book, that book is indeed your property, and you can do with it whatever you want. Now, with DRM-infested ebooks, you are actually just licensing it for very restricted use. You might as well be claiming that making private home ownership illegal would strengthen…

You say you can do whatever you want with a physical book, but you cannot - you are still restricted by the state from making copies of that book. You cannot take passages from that book and reuse them as your own, unless given permission by the author.

It is still not wholly your own property. It depends on the mires of the draconian copyright system, but there are things I can buy and then duplicate - if I buy a generic pill of a drug, I am fully within my right to use that pill to produce more pills like it, and nobody can sue me for infringing their IP.

Probably the scariest thing is that probably none of us can even reasonably conceive of how the world would be without this spectre hanging over everything. It influences our brain development extraordinarily fundamentally to contextualize that nothing we interact with is truly our own to learn from, because someone else almost always owns the idea behind it.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#100

Post by zanny »

stale2002 wrote: post #96
klez wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been giving some thought about this recently. I'd say that, at least for software, we'd still need the GPL and, therefore, copyright. Which clashes a bit with my anti-copyright sentiments, but whatever. Why is this? Because software is different from literature and visual arts. In a copyright-free world, once you copy a work of literature you have the whole work at your disposal to copy, modify and redistribute…

Them make it illegal to sell software without publishing the source code.

Without copyright, this concept actually has traditional grounding in right to repair laws. Not distributing the source code of software is the exact same battle that has been fought for decades between machine manufacturers trying to deny access to documentation about how their machines work. You can have a right to repair legal system wholly independent of copyright.
Post reply on HN