171–180 of 195 posts
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Because money. If 20 users are willing to pay $20, and 80 are willing to pay $5, Hollywood can make $20 20+$5 80=$800 instead of $5*100=$500.
It's not $20 per film. Not sure what you are calculating.
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You've drifted from your original claim that rentals don't make sense for digital goods, into railing against the effectiveness of DRM, while presenting your argument as railing against the idea of DRM itself. DRM is ineffective, yes, but that doesn't mean the concept is inherently bad. It just means the implementation is bad. It's certainly quite plausible that there is no way to produce good DRM, but that would be…
Two arguments combine and reinforce the conclusion that DRM is never needed. To clarify: 1. Rental of digital goods doesn't make sense for me (explained above). 2. Even if you can come up with sensible reason for rentals of digital goods, DRM is still ineffective so there is no point of using it anyway, which makes rental unenforceable which kind of makes it pointless even more and brings the argument back to #1. > I…
You mean "stated above". You never adequately responded to my comment, instead drifting off into the weeds of railing against DRM.
> Unethical nature of it makes it inherently bad.
You're taking it as a given that it's unethical. You haven't proved that yet, you merely made an analogy to a police state.
> treating all users as potential criminals by default
The perfect DRM would enforce the IP rights without interfering with legitimate use. Such a perfect DRM would not, in fact, treat users as potential criminals. Certainly not any more than, say, merchandise tags in retail stores. I doubt you rail against those.
What does treat all users as potential criminals is those unskippable FBI warnings at the start of movies. But that's not DRM.
Granted, DRM implementations in general are flawed, and those flaws do impact legitimate users. But that's not always true. For example, I wouldn't say that the DRM iTunes uses for movies/TV is crippling otherwise-legitimate uses. Which is to say, it's never stopped me from enjoying my movies or TV shows the way I wanted to. Granted, I've never wanted to watch my TV shows on, say, an Android device, but the ability to view iTunes content on an Android device is not something I purchased the rights to in the first place.
> Why not? Ethics has its logic.
And yet you haven't even attempted to use logic to defend your claim that it's unethical. You've just made sweeping generalizations and analogies, with the expectation that I would agree with you.
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In any case, I did say I'm not interested in debating DRM, and I'll say that again. If you want to try to make an argument for why rentals don't make sense, using some justification other than "because rentals require DRM and I believe that DRM is unethical", go ahead (but you should go back and reply to my original comment, not this thread). But you don't really seem interested in defending that statement, instead you just want to talk about DRM. And I would rather not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two arguments combine and reinforce the conclusion that DRM is never needed. To clarify: 1. Rental of digital goods doesn't make sense for me (explained above). 2. Even if you can come up with sensible reason for rentals of digital goods, DRM is still ineffective so there is no point of using it anyway, which makes rental unenforceable which kind of makes it pointless even more and brings the argument back to #1. > I…
> Rental of digital goods doesn't make sense for me (explained above). You mean "stated above". You never adequately responded to my comment, instead drifting off into the weeds of railing against DRM. > Unethical nature of it makes it inherently bad. You're taking it as a given that it's unethical. You haven't proved that yet, you merely made an analogy to a police state. > treating all users as potential criminals…
Which one? About no bearing (I didn't see what to respond there), or about risk of users downloading the whole catalog at once? I responded to that (the service can charge some fee per file to prevent such thing). Or you mean about that Netflix has to negotiate something? The discussion wasn't about what is handed to Netflix by the publishers, it was about the concept of renting of digital goods which I find to be illogical. So please point me to the comment you want me to answer to, because I'm not sure which one that is.
> You're taking it as a given that it's unethical.
For me it is. I can expect that some people have different view and find it normal. After all some people find extreme Orwellian policing of society acceptable. It's not normal for me and never would be.
> The perfect DRM would enforce the IP rights without interfering with legitimate use.
Perfect policing system would prevent all crime without interfering with legitimate activity and without suspecting innocent people. I doubt such thing can exist. Increasing policing to extreme levels of total surveillance is not perfect policing because it equals to suspicion by default and it clearly interferes with legitimate activity. That's what DRM is. Overreaching preemptive policing.
I.e. the logic of DRM goes like this:
1. All users are potential thieves.
2. We need to prevent all of them from doing anything that is not authorized.
3. Let's build some technical measures and deploy them on users' systems and devices (since there is on other way to achieve the goals of #2).
4. Let's enjoy piracy free world.
They eagerly do #3, while #4 obviously utterly fails (it doesn't stop them from doing #3 for some reason as we discussed above). Now, I see huge problems with 1-3. Firstly, all users are assumed criminals. It's insulting and disgusting and it's not comparable to a lock on a store or tags like you said. Because of #3 - i.e. users' private digital space is invaded for the sake of deploying the enforcement of all these policies.
Imagine some police claiming, that all people in the country are potential criminals, so they need to invade all people's houses with police cameras to prevent any potential crime. That's what DRM does in essence. House is one's private area. One's computer / system / program one uses is one's digital private area. Invading it with preemptive policing measures is unethical and overreaching and prone to all kind of abuse.
> And yet you haven't even attempted to use logic to defend your claim that it's unethical.
See above, I expanded on my previous brief explanations which I assumed were sufficient.
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It's not $20 per film. Not sure what you are calculating.
It's an example. The exact price can be used in the same formula. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
Related subject discussed on GOG: http://gog.com/news/getting_back_to_our_roots
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>There is completely no need to prevent users from retaining a copy once they watched it. For Netflix there's one big reason to: PROFIT
What profit? Netflix offers rentals only, and no sales. And Netflix DRM doesn't prevent any piracy since users who want to illegally retain the copy can do it either way. So what is the reason for them using it? They can simply use sales and have the same profit.
Nothing prevents mozilla if they would want to add a warning box similar to self-signed certificates every time a website tries to access DRM code outside the users control. It would serve the goal of objecting to the EME, while users can continue to access all content they want. It would also put the responsibility to the website if the black box called DRM causes problems, locks up, or cause havoc on the user. Thir…
>We have come to the point where Mozilla not implementing the W3C EME specification means that Firefox users have to switch to other browsers to watch content restricted by DRM. Then so be it. If Mozilla's mission is to improve and defend the "open" web, then EME should never have been considered for implementation. They shouldn't sacrifice their goals for the sake of market share.
Think about winning the battle vs. winning the war. Mozilla could draw a line here, and no further, and not implement EME. But the consequence might be that FF market share drop significantly, as "Mah netflicks don't werk." Suddenly Mozilla lose a large amount of revenue, development is scaled back, and the relevance of FF is reduced. Eventually FF is marginalised and Mozilla no longer involved in discussions about t…
You mean like it already doesn't in most of the world, because of arbitrary geographical restrictions?
I can't see this causing noticeable damage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an example. The exact price can be used in the same formula. Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
I find such price discrimination to be a despicable practice, unless we are talking about differentiating prices because of different average level of income in those markets. And even so, regional discrimination becomes even less relevant in the digital space. The fact that such practice leads to resorting to unethical methods in the digital world (DRM) implicitly proves the point that it's crooked. Related subject…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find such price discrimination to be a despicable practice, unless we are talking about differentiating prices because of different average level of income in those markets. And even so, regional discrimination becomes even less relevant in the digital space. The fact that such practice leads to resorting to unethical methods in the digital world (DRM) implicitly proves the point that it's crooked. Related subject…
I agree, but they have every financial reason to keep doing it. How would you convince them to sell one product for one price to everyone for less total money?
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You think most users will care if it ships EME or no? Like seriously?! I'd love to live in that world. Basically if Netflix doesn't work with Mozilla who's gonna be blamed? Netflix that works on Chrome? Google, whose browser plays Netflix or Mozilla that doesn't open Netflix? If you answered Mozilla, you live in real world :( No, this one is squarely on shoulders of those that supported that damned crud of W3C standa…
Who gives a fuck about Netflix? What percentage of the Internet population are ever likely to or are even interested in subscribing to Netflix/Hulu/Amazon Prime etc? What grates me most is that if Mozilla was really targeting the developing world, as per their aims with cheap FirefoxOS phones, then there would be no need to implement this, which simply panders to the needs of first/western world media companies deman…
Also I have no doubt that Google would DRM Youtube if that would: A) Prevent copyright holders from complaining B) Give Chrome bigger market share (or reduced FF to an outlier like Opera)
I'm not ambivalent, I'd like to see it as opt-in only, because DRM in Fx will be a major vector for viruses.