The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations (2013)

Excuse me but what sort of theology mentions copyrights or how did you induce that? Quite the contrary, sharing what you have with others is an obligation in most belief systems, an argument can even be made that Copyrights infringe on the obligation one has to share posessions and content.

I didn't assert that.

> Easily duplicable cultural products? You’re suggesting that you should be able to take something someone else made because it’s easy to do?

No, I'm not. What's more, that's an easily disprovable lie: My duplicating of a file does not somehow delete the original. My downloading of this page hasn't done anything to your post.

> Movies often costs tens to hundreds of millions to produce, and they only take on that level of risk because of the financial return of people who pay to watch them.

Financial return that, according to themselves, is at best terrible? And that you, too, keep mentioning, despite loudly proclaiming they are of noone's interest?

> Do you have a job? Do you work for a company that makes money? Would you be okay with the product you’re working on being taken for free by people who insist they shouldn’t have to pay for it?

My job does not rely on handing copies of our product's binaries to people if they pinky promise they'll only use it in a way we approve of though. And if we, too rented garbled copies of it with time-limited access to the ungarbling machinery, we probably should disclose that beforehand so that prospective customers don't end up feeling like they've been defrauded.

> you’re also ignoring all smaller businesses that aren’t making enormous profits but can’t afford to give away their content for free

I'm not asking anyone to give anything away for free. And in any case the fact that the gatekeeping-culture-industrial-complex also exploits other smaller creators could easily also be considered problematic in and by itself.

> The amount of money someone makes is not any of your business

Oh but it is, specifically when they make it into a battle cry to invade my privacy and impede my agency in a deeply dumb search of unapproved copies of whatever they feel like claiming to own.

> Why should the creator, or an agent of the creator of that work get that power over me?

Well, you have no inherent right to the creator's work at all, so consider it one of the terms of the agreement in which you get access to the content and the creator gets some form of compensation.

But just to reiterate, this is how it would work under a use-based model. If you have something better to suggest, then by all means do, because I don't think we've uncovered the best solution yet. The comments about copyright require, as you noted, tracking too, but copyright itself only covers part of the problem, and that is not destroying the incentive to create and innovate in the first place (see below).

> Traditional economics don't require this tracking. E.g. I buy a car off of a car lot--the car lot doesn't need to know where and when I'm using the car.

Right, but traditional economic models also don't know how to deal with a situation in which you can buy a car, never have it wear out, and create an infinite number of exact duplicates for free that you could keep for yourself or turn around and sell to anyone else, which is basically the situation we have with digital works.

Games have (and more generally, all software has) a unique weakness that doesn't apply to other forms of media: they are entirely at the mercy of their playback technologies to exist.

So, just as an example... let's talk about the last major physical media format war: HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. The thing that killed HD-DVD was that Blu-Ray had better DRM. Switching between the two formats was as simple as copying a file from one encoder to another; so the movie studios picked the one that gave them the most control.

Switching between game consoles is like telling the director of a movie to change from shooting in 16:9 to 21:9. It's possible, but you're going to be spending a lot of extra time and effort to switch aspect ratios. Now, granted, people have gotten really good at porting games to new systems, but it still requires time and effort to do, especially when it comes to testing and certification.

A game developer porting a game to a system is, ultimately, a vote of confidence that the system will have a viable commercial software market 1-2 years down the line. Developers are at the mercy of console manufacturers, and thus they're very conservative with what platforms to develop on. So companies trying to enter the console business basically need to do half a decade's worth of business development and funding just to get a foot in the door. Which makes the few platforms that are successful that much more powerful.

Another interesting quirk of the games industry is that consoles are often manufactured by companies that also fund or develop games, and those companies specifically withhold their games from other platforms to make their own consoles better. There's no need for Nintendo to demand that they pay themselves a 30% platform royalty to publish games on their own platform; and they aren't going to start paying Sony 30% so that people can buy Mario on PlayStation.

Very, very early on in the history of American cinema, the US government made an antitrust case against movie studios that more or less banned them from owning the theaters that displayed their content. Since then, it's been the case that production and distribution were two separate specialties, with copyright law existing to ensure the latter can't screw over the former. Hence where we get "DRM exists to control player manufacturers". Games came along much later and their business models more or less never attracted antitrust scrutiny[0] until very recently when Epic decided to make a federal lawsuit out of it.

My gut feeling is that it doesn't actually make a whole lot of business sense as a publisher or developer to outsource distribution to a third party. That's why you've seen Netflix go from "everything streaming instantly for cheap" to original productions; and why every other publisher made their own streaming platform to cut out the Netflix middleman. The only remaining link in the chain from publishers to you are device manufacturers: Apple, Google, Samsung, Roku, etc. This business looks a lot more like game consoles than player manufacturing, which shifts the balance of market power to the companies making the players.

[0] Yes, the FTC sued Nintendo but that was more about the price of games and consoles, not the software lockout that prohibited you from otherwise lawfully making and selling your own Nintendo cartridges.