Comment by mavrc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mavrc | Hacker News Reader

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> Steam, Netflix, Spotify

I use and enjoy all of these things but the DRM they include isn't why they are successful - it's the fact that they make it so much easier to deliver content to anyone, immediately, bypassing the normal 'store shelves' systems of distribution. (well, as long as you're in North America or some parts of Europe.)

While I agree that the EFF's message is often more reactionary than necessary, the DRM in these services serves no purpose except to make to provide a placebo to traditional commercial content owners, to get the content on those services. Ultimately, this is only a placebo. Netflix exclusives appear on the Pirate Bay minutes or hours after they go up on the service. Yet Netflix not only survives, but thrives - to such a degree that people use VPNs to circumvent the region locks, not the payment system.

How many years has it been since iTunes music went DRM-free? Yet it's the most popular means of acquiring paid-for music. Build a successful distribution system, make it available to everyone, and people will pay for content.

There are two types of piracy--there's torrenting (or similar), and then there's black market illicit resale. Torrenting is dominated by people who aren't going to pay for the content anyways--at this stage, the largest barrier that might induce people to torrent is probably geoblocking, and it's not clear if ending that would be more profitable for the content producers.

The sort of DRM that Steam employs is however somewhat useful for targeting people selling effectively stolen keys, as it allows for key revocation. It's this kind of piracy that I (and many content producers) find much more odious, since people think they're buying things legitimately but the producers aren't seeing a dime.

There's a third, which is what was often mentioned by Netflix and others during discussions about EME on W3C lists: casual piracy, where people just download a file and send it to a friend. It sounded like that was the sort of piracy that the studios were predominantly wanting to block (because they fundamentally don't think they can affect torrents, because they know that things will likely get broken)—the goal is to make it sufficiently hard that people won't do it trivially). Targeting stolen keys is, as far as I'm aware, mostly dealt with through key revocation and the law: I don't think anyone's ever really proposed a particularly technical solution to it.

> There's a third, which is what was often mentioned by Netflix and others during discussions about EME on W3C lists: casual piracy, where people just download a file and send it to a friend.

This is irrelevant in comparison with torrenting. If someone is willing to pirate it, sending to a friend won't be the option they'll go with. So justifying usage of DRM with that is simply false.

they wouldnt be successful without DRM because content providers wouldnt agree for their work to appear on the services. Unobtrusive DRM is why they are successful.

False excuse. Where is their own content DRM-free?

They should setup a different streaming system to stream their own content just to placate the 0.001% (probably too high) of people out there who pay for media and also care about the very existence of DRM?

If they claim that DRM isn't caused by them, they should apply it only to those who demand it. But I don't buy their excuse anyway. They are a willing participant of this corrupted DRM infested system, and they can't pretend they don't bear part of the blame.

> 0.001% (probably too high)

Studies show otherwise.

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