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Comment by Aelinsaar | Hacker News Reader

The only people winning in this equation are the people making and selling DRM products to suckers, who then inflict it (mostly) on their honest customers.

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Well, us pirates also "win".

Buying DRMed software is a fool's errand. If I want to keep it without being chained to servers that will go away, I break the law. See https://xkcd.com/488/ : Piracy is the correct answer for DRM works.

Better yet, purchase non-DRM works.

EDIT: How odd. High karma on al these posts (and the last few days), and still rate-limited. Perhaps my popular opinions are a bit too ... controversial, especially with SaaS and API opinions?

In 50 years the whole society will have realised the stupidity of DRMs in the early days of the Internet.

What we "need" to show how bad DRM are is the bankruptcy of something like Amazon or even Google, and look at the impact that will make if all of those servers were wiped.

This has already sort of happened. We just have short memories.

1) Microsoft kills MSN Music in 2008, removing access from users who purchased albums.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/04/drm-su...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PlaysForSure

2) Amazon removes access to purchased Disney streaming videos for Christmas season:

https://torrentfreak.com/amazon-pulls-access-to-purchased-ch...

https://boingboing.net/2013/12/15/amazon-takes-away-access-t...

The industry has moved to more of a subscription model which helps soften the blow when something disappears.

Yes, but I meant something like a real disaster like if Google stopped working, at all, all wiped, search algorithms, indexes, APIs, libraries, YouTube (what a sh*tshow that one would be, very large, very front facing).

All because we allowed something this big to own so much of our life and still be private, hidden. Suddenly Europe doesn't have a web search engine (it was 90% of europeans who use Google, isn't it?). Suddenly websites all over the world stop working because they used some CDN.

I was too young when people really talked and dreamt about everyone owning his own server, hostname. But I do believe in self-reliance, and DRMs are one of the blocks on the road to that goal.

People shouldn't have to rely on Amazon's existence to be able to read the copy of Dickens they bought from Amazon. Because in 50 years, I'll still be alive, but there's a high chance Amazon won't, because most companies don't last 70 years. And as all things eventually end, we have to know and anticipate that fact. DRMs think about the very short term, while we should already be thinking about the long term.

In 50 years the idea of ownership by individuals will be dead. Trans-genic organism have IP protects, tractors too. The whole of Agricultural production will pretty much become a licensing business.

The same will happen to large-scale mass manufacturing plants, small scale manufacturing, Automotive, logistics and communication.

If this was, say, Cambodia, they would have been crushed under the weight of competing markets, but we have international trade agreements, essentially allowing certain American laws to apply internationally and the clout to enforce them.

We already have this, just from (effectively) infinite copyright. DRM is just going to make it worse.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-ho...

I agree, but lets be fair, pirates are less "winners" in this equation than simply "Unfazed by" the situation in general.

Not really.

I'm a pirate. I have little compunctions about downloading whatever-have-you. Part is convenience, part is I've been burned before, part is I want to spend money on tangibles, part is literally just 'fuck you drm'.

Is it wrong? Well, it's certainly a tort. I'm not doing it for some morally superior good. I'm doing it for myself and my family.

We can curl in bed, and watch XYZ movie. And if it stinks, it gets the delete. I don't have to deal with any number of factors from screaming kids to DRM; I just double-click and it plays in VLC. I was watching MASH on netflix..... until they removed it from the live collections, 8th season in. Am I buying it? Nope. Downloading.

If anything, the biggest draw to me is open source stuffs. I can get and give it, and use it for my files. There's no reason for lock-in, so they play nice.

Edit: And yes, I do pay for Netflix. Bang for the buck, it ~is~ easier than finding links online. Even if I can't store and download locally, it's great for watching filler fluff I don't want a copy of. Media I want to have, I just download anyways.

I think the point is that you don't actually benefit from DRM, you just aren't adversely affected by it.

The only benefit to DRM for pirates is that it makes more people interested in consuming pirated works, and to the extent that there are network effects that's a benefit, but I suspect the number people turning to piracy because they can't get non DRMed content is minimal.

> If I want to keep it without being chained to servers that will go away, I break the law.

I was thinking of that today as I had to download (for the 6th time since I started) a Kindle book I'm reading to my Android.

I'm another 1-2 downloads away from going on a torrent site and grabbing a DRM free copy that will actually stay on my local storage, be read on an app that does not take 30 seconds to boot, and not require large downloads with every open.

The natural evolution of that is to buy a copy on Amazon to support the author and industry, then download a free copy somewhere so you can actually read it in peace.

It's a bit painful, but set up Calibre with the right plugins and you can strip the DRM easily enough. It's the only thing that keeps me buying Kindle books - the DRM goes of a few minutes after I've bought it. The moment I meet resistance in doing so will be the moment I stop buying stuff at the Kindle store.

If you are opposed to DRM, please do not encourage companies like Amazon by purchasing their DRM products. If you want to pay for the book, buy the paperback and then download a pirated copy.

I agree with you in principle. In practice, I've decided that as long as they don't escalate and make the current solutions more difficult I'll tolerate the current situation but buy elsewhere whenever I have alternatives (e.g. I have spent more on books at O'Reilly than Amazon over the last few years lately explicitly because of O'Reilly's DRM policy).

Meanwhile, DRM is the reason I've only ever bought one Audible audio book, and buy DVDs rather than "buy" downloadable video, for example. DVDs have the same consideration for me: As long as the protection is mostly ineffective and everyone knows it is mostly ineffective, they can continue to pretend to protect them all they way.

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