DRM Is Toxic to Culture • Hacker News Board

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#101

Post by zanny » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 4:41 PM UTC

samastur wrote: post #51

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Free software might collapse, but open source certainly would not especially since so much of it is under MIT and similar licenses which already allow anyone to do pretty much whatever with that code.

Free software would not go anywhere. The only difference is, without a right to repair law for software in a post-IP world, people writing software may or may not choose to withhold source code. But the trick is anyone who ever gets that source code can (unless under an NDA or contract not to) distribute it all they want. And the receivers of software will be able to distribute it however they want. The profit motive of artificial scarcity goes away, and if you try to use your holding of the source hostage as a way to keep users dependent on you all it takes is one leak to end your monopoly.

That being said, right to repair goes hand in hand with the abolition of IP to resolve these edge cases. The problem of not providing the manual to your distributed invention goes far beyond just intellectual property, and is largely an independent issue, but good right to repair legislation is all encompassing, and is a consumer protection that naturally fits with IP-less software as well.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#102

Post by rhino369 » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 4:42 PM UTC

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…

DRM and other anti-piracy measures are all about making piracy harder, not impossible. It's not an all or nothing venture.

Every little bit you make copying harder results in fewer people copying.

Cntrl C Cntrl V makes it so my mom can pirate. And she did during the Napster days. But she can't figure out BitTorrent on her own. Well, she could, but there is a learning curve, and most people aren't interested in it.

They don't have to make it impossible. They just have to make it annoying.

Easy piracy destroyed the music industry. The other media industries are rightfully suspicious.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#103

Post by jasonkostempski » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 4:44 PM UTC

RandomOpinion wrote: post #83

ivanbakel wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would there even still be a need for it? Releasing code without the approval of your managers would stop being a crime, and it's not like most people are only releasing free software because of licenses in the first place.

Businesses could prevent that by requiring employees to agree to a separate, permanent contract not to release any code as part of the conditions for being hired.

And they could all refuse to sign, or demand a much higher salary, due the high risk of that contract easily being broken by accident. 1 stolen unencrypted laptop, or source control checkout over an unencrypted channel, is all it would take.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#104

Post by barrkel » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 4:45 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #47

jws wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

press REC on your VCR and … make a worse copy of the already pretty bad copy you received over the air. Subsequent generation copies would be really bad. Sharing your copy with a friend involved physically transferring it and possibly not getting it back. It really isn't comparable to a directly copyable digital form. If you like the 1970s way, prop your phone up on a table and use the camera to record a movie off of…

VCR's where generally better recordings than the 'cam' footage of the latest blockbuster leaked on the internet. People sometimes are watching films before the special effects are done. The core issue is if a company can make 501 million instead of 500 million they have zero incentives to make less money. Which is why cable companies scrimp on backhaul even when it's a rounding error on their costs. And why companies…

You can say that, but I don't think the price levels of current media (particularly digital media) are set to maximize profit. I think they're set to embed an idea of high value, and I'm uncertain of the purpose. It could be for legal reasons, prestige, accounting, I'm not sure.

I recently got an Amazon Fire stick, attached to a projector, after many years without any kind of television. Naturally, a projector hitting a 100+ inch screen magnifies any flaws in compression or image quality, so you want to play back good quality media. Amazon generally serves up just about acceptable image quality (I'd say they're about 1 standard deviation worse than Netflix in encode quality), but the prices are just ridiculously high - they're about 10 times more than I'd be willing to pay. As a result, I don't watch anything that isn't available via Netflix or Prime, and haven't bought or rented any other content. I'd spend low thousands GBP on media - I have in other form factors - but not if it nets me only 200 hours or so of content. The prices are just ridiculously high.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#105

Post by eastWestMath » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 4:49 PM UTC

izacus wrote: post #98

eastWestMath wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because there's a difference between owning a physical copy of media and owning the rights to distribute it.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#106

Post by jasonkostempski » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 4:51 PM UTC

zanny wrote: post #99

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…

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 ge…

"you are still restricted by the state from making copies of that book"

Is that true or can you just not sell the copies?

"You cannot take passages from that book and reuse them as your own, unless given permission by the author."

Again, pretty sure that's only when selling things.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#107

Post by zanny » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 4:51 PM UTC

This is just the tip of the leaf of the IP tree that is destroying culture.

Since the advent of permanent copyright there is no more commons. The commons stopped in 1923. Disney will continue to buy the US government into guaranteeing there is no common heritage of America for as long as they are able.

It will be interesting to see how, in a thousand years, (hopefully) scholars of the time will reflect on how systemic the damage was to American society to artificially constrain creativity so fundamentally and for so long. It is human nature to take your experiences and reinterpret them in new ways. That is how creativity is defined. But copyright and IP, especially in perpetuity, prevent that, all for what is claimed to be the protection of profits by the original creators, even for decades after the creators are dead.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#108

Post by Retric » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 5:04 PM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #104

Retric wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VCR's where generally better recordings than the 'cam' footage of the latest blockbuster leaked on the internet. People sometimes are watching films before the special effects are done. The core issue is if a company can make 501 million instead of 500 million they have zero incentives to make less money. Which is why cable companies scrimp on backhaul even when it's a rounding error on their costs. And why companies…

You can say that, but I don't think the price levels of current media (particularly digital media) are set to maximize profit. I think they're set to embed an idea of high value, and I'm uncertain of the purpose. It could be for legal reasons, prestige, accounting, I'm not sure. I recently got an Amazon Fire stick, attached to a projector, after many years without any kind of television. Naturally, a projector hittin…

IMO, this is mostly around the pain of spending money not the actual cost of content.

Cable runs around 1k/year or more and has advertising, which used to be a fairly normal thing upper middle class people bought. Split that into into individual purchases and your likely spending far less. You just happen to notice that your spending money where subscriptions are a background thing.

Also, don't forget Netflix DVD is still an option.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#109

Post by Silhouette » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 5:06 PM UTC

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #19

Silhouette wrote: post #10

The problem with technology-enforced restrictions isn’t that they allow legitimate enforcement of rights; it’s the collateral damage they cause in the process. Indeed, but the problem with not making any effort to enforce restrictions technically is that typically you then aren't enforcing your legitimate rights. The metro analogy was interesting. If the system in Germany works, it is because people are honest and pa…

> set up their own redistribution channels and steal your customers and your revenues. And DRM prevents that how exactly? > A third lesson you will learn is that a lot of people may quite innocently assume that if they can do something then it's allowed I would take this as a hint that it probably should be allowed then. If lots of people innocently assume that something is perfectly legal, the way of tyranny is to b…

And DRM prevents that how exactly?

It depends on the form of DRM and its effects.

One practical scenario is that most of the revenue from a new work may be generated in the early days. This is often the case with things like computer games, pop music, and big ticket movies. If DRM delays those trying to set up copycat channels, even by a few days or weeks, much of that revenue may already have been collected.

Another is that fingerprinting techniques may allow for things like automatic takedowns on the major hosting services, or identification of the source of a major leak so full legal action can be taken against the right targets.

I would take this as a hint that it probably should be allowed then.

It's not that simple. To give an obvious example that upset a lot of people, Google added a video download icon in Chrome a few months ago, right there in the controls alongside changing the volume and so on. A lot of people running small web sites that provided video content saw a spike in people who were sharing that content in violation of their terms, and it turned out that many people assumed the download button was a new feature on the site without realising that it was Chrome that had changed. This caused big problems for web developers working in this area, and a lot of complaints to Google about actively encouraging people to violate copyrights. And simply changing the way videos were served so Chrome couldn't provide that facility in the same way then fixed the problem again.

If lots of people innocently assume that something is perfectly legal, the way of tyranny is to build a police state, the way of democracy is to make it legal.

Democracy only works when the population is properly informed and understands the implications. That's hardly the case in the sort of situation I mentioned above.

Re: DRM Is Toxic to Culture

#110

Post by Silhouette » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 5:10 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #25

Silhouette wrote: post #10

The problem with technology-enforced restrictions isn’t that they allow legitimate enforcement of rights; it’s the collateral damage they cause in the process. Indeed, but the problem with not making any effort to enforce restrictions technically is that typically you then aren't enforcing your legitimate rights. The metro analogy was interesting. If the system in Germany works, it is because people are honest and pa…

> Sadly, if you try to start a business creating original content and making it available online in the same spirit of trust, you will quickly learn that many people in the world are not so honest. Counterpoint: gog.com Moreover, I have yet to see a movie that wasn't available on an illegal streaming/downloading site the day it was released on Blu-Ray, DRM or not.

GOG is great. I buy from them myself sometimes. However, it's also an anomaly, and much smaller than the obvious comparison in this case, Steam.

And in terms of things being available immediately, the economics of mainstream movies are quite different. There's a whole world of niche content out there that doesn't generate gazillions of dollars and that won't be leaked when it's barely reached theatres. For smaller operators, deterring casual infringement even to a moderate degree can literally be the difference between making enough money to continue operating and going out of business.