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> What's terrible is Netflix could have used it's considerable influence to tell _that_ _Industry_ that we won't walk this walk anymore.

Why do you assume they didn't? And if they did and the industry said no, what should they have done? Walk away, lose access to all its content, see a large part of their subscriber base move to different services that do support DRM and therefor get the content and eventually have to start firing employees as their income drops?

Just about any streaming service has this exact same problem. They don't love DRM nor want to support it, it's annoying and cumbersome. But it's how you get access to the content. And unless you can survive purely on your own content you don't really have the option to walk away over your ideals.

If you want DRM out of the system, convince the content/rights holders that DRM isn't in their best interests, i.e they can make more money without it or at the very least won't lose money over not having it. If you're hoping that somehow a significant enough size of the population will boycott it for the industry to change, based on the ideals of the open web and open access, you'll be waiting a long time.

It's interesting that DRM is basically a "free market problem." In cases where there is a government-supported media production/distribution service, as with the BBC in Britain, no DRM is needed, because the success of the service is not dependent on income from licensing the content. Instead, the content itself is often put up for free on a government-hosted online archive, in as many formats as possible, to ensure it can reach all the citizens who paid for it.

About a 1 billion of BBC revenues of about 5 billion GBP come from licensing content worldwide. They utilize both geolocation access restrictions and DRM in an attempt to protect this revenue.

And yet, I cannot just simply stream BBC content in the US.

Aside from the fact that your wrong about the BBC

the issue itself is not a "free market problem" because copyright only exists because of government interference. Government created the "right" DRM is protecting against.

In a pure free market, there is no copyright, thus no need for DRM to protect a right that does not exist

DRM schemes effectively allow the implementer to invent their own rules well beyond what copyright law specifically reserves (e.g. restrictions on resale and lending, ability to create their own licensing regime to publish on a given platform), so I don't see how DRM depends on government intervention. DRM is already defined more by business and technical considerations than by the law. If anything, it seems to me that draconian DRM schemes would be more desirable to vendors if they didn't also have copyright lawsuits in their arsenal.

What keeps DRM in play though is it is illegal to distrbute tools to circumvent DRM

So company like Slysoft, Replay, the devs of DeCSS, etc get sued out of existence when they create software that circumvents DRM

the cat and mouse game of DRM only works if you have government legal backing hamstringing the anti-drm crowd.

With out Anti-Circumvention laws there would be software on the open market to bypass every known DRM about 48 hours after it is release if not sooner

I see how that's supposed to work, but I don't think that's how it happens in practice, and hence doesn't explain much about the motivation behind actually bothering to deploy DRM. Proto-DRM (copy protection, lockout chips, dongles) was in play decades before anticircumvention laws, and as far as I've seen those laws have little practical value in stopping circumvention anyway. They seem to be primarily used for extra charges against vendors of "fully loaded" hardware (e.g. consoles and media players preloaded with illegally copied content). When governments are leveraged to go after pure circumvention tools, the Streisand effect usually kicks in and ensures that the necessary code and keys are spread far and wide. The main place where DRM actually has teeth is in applications where connectivity and an account are required, such as streaming media services (i.e. the primary application of EME) and online gaming. In that case, the vendor can frequently update anticircumvention measures in the client and deactivate accounts (or, in the case of vendor-managed platforms like game consoles, ban the actual device) that fail enough checks.

> And if they did and the industry said no, what should they have done?

Distribute industry content with DRM, distribute their own content without, and see what the results are.

Somebody's going to have to perform the experiment to see what the outcome will be. Since Netflix produces tons of content now, they are in an excellent position to try this.

> Distribute industry content with DRM, distribute their own content without, and see what the results are.

The industry content will show up on the Pirate Bay, and Netflix original content will show up on the Pirate Bay.

Were you expecting another outcome?

Netflix content is already on Pirate Bay.

..which would indicate that the marginal value delivered by the DRM is zero?

Unfortunately, the cost for DRM is also zero for the content providers, as long as they are not distributors themselves.

Netflix creates tons of original content so it is both a producer and distributor. If Netflix really believed that the marginal value of DRM was zero they wouldn't use it on their own content since it has a nonzero cost on the distribution side.

The only other possibility that I can come up with is if Netflix's original content has multi-party rightsholder situations with contacts that legally require them to apply DRM even to "their own" content (IANAL and don't know much about how these things work, but it wouldn't surprise me).

From a purely consumerist standpoint, by far the biggest problem with DRM used to be how it was falsely advertised as selling copies, when it was in fact just temporary access that could end any day, even tomorrow (company/server shutdown, hardware token malfunction/loss, general incompatibility with new stuff). Now that "buying" has mostly been replaced by streaming subscriptions, this problem has disappeared: it is perfectly obvious to even the most naive user that access to the content will be gone if they cancel Netflix (or if Netflix disappears) and as a bonus, it has become just as obvious that the streaming provider knows what you stream, open, "natural" surveillance instead of hidden, deliberate. Now it is more like the cashier knows what you buy at the supermarket (how else could they do their job?), whereas before it was a bit like the loyalty card backend knows (ignoring the massive difference in centralisation between cashier and loyalty card).

I think you've perfectly summed up the problem the average anti-DRM advocate has: it's pretty easy to get people riled up when they paid a noticeable amount of money to “buy” something which goes away. In contrast, the Netflix/Spotify model where you pay a modest amount of money for all-you-can-eat accesss is hard to get much traction with since nobody thought they owned a particular work and the total price is so much lower that few people care.

I can't decide whether this is bad or a sign of progress towards training people that DRMed content is not worth much.

The major EME providers are PlayReady, which is Microsoft, and Widevine, which is Google.

You've already given those two companies pretty broad permission to run binaries on your computer (unless you use Firefox on Linux) so I'm not sure what the incremental security issue really is.

That's quite the invalid assumption. Additionally, if I let Google run binaries on my system in one spot, it does not mean I have given them full access to run binaries elsewhere.

I suppose but when you're already using Chrome using the Widevine CDM isn't a huge difference. When you're using Edge using the PlayReady CDM isn't a huge difference.

I see the general theory of the argument for Opera and especially Firefox but even so, why trust a CDM blob less than any other commercial binary?

The idea that Netflix could tell the movie and TV industries what to do is laughable and woefully ignorant of how those industries work.

Why do you think Netflix et al invests so much in original content ? Because they have zero leverage and are beholden to the whims of Hollywood.

>[...]pirates don't rip from Netflix anyway.

Tell that to the 4k webrips on the private torrent trackers; I'm sure they'll be surprised both by the fact that they exist, and have apparently gained sentience.