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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

What’s the alternative?

That’s kind of the saddest part really. We’ve allowed the convenience of streaming, packaged with these pesky copyright and privacy issues, to destroy any other legal repositories of digital media. Luckily as streaming has matured some of the more tech savvy artists are starting to do their own distribution.

My biggest fear is in what will be lost in the future. These companies haven’t been around long enough for consumers to know how they will retain media. Will they only keep up licenses on the most popular movies? How will you then ever get a legal copy or access to one of your favorite movies of 30 years ago that nobody else liked?

> That’s kind of the saddest part really. We’ve allowed the convenience of streaming, packaged with these pesky copyright and privacy issues, to destroy any other legal repositories of digital media.

To be fair that only applies to video. With music there's a wide range of digital, DRM-free, lossless purchasing options available. However I worry that this will become a much smaller niche considering the popularity of streaming.

Any DRM free, EULA free source. Probably won't get that from the publishers and its probably illegal in most cases. If you have a problem with that, obviously don't use it, but there are limited legitimate offerings from publishers out there. The only semi-mainstream one I've seen is on the Louis C.K. site. I was hoping he was going to inspire a publishing trend, but I dont think he'll be putting out any more content.

>Any DRM free, EULA free source. Probably won't get that from the publishers and its probably illegal in most cases

So no real legal alternatives then considering the paltry number of options you'll have.

We are not afforded a free'er alternative that is legal so I believe he probably doesn't watch much TV. DRM IS everywhere. There is no copying of modern media that isn't illegal. We lost that war.

Print books and VHS, I imagine.

Anything post-DVD would be problematic due to CSS and suchlike. Maybe whatever videos you can legally get in Ogg format.

If your openness threshold is as high as RMS's, the fact that there's no alternative is an ok tradeoff.

Depends how utilitarian your morals are.

I'd like video files personally, but publishers are probably not going to agree with me.

Spinning disks, I suppose

DVD and Blu-ray both have DRM, though. I guess there's always VHS.

DRM is not undefeatable.

The problem isn’t defeatability. It’s the principle of buying DRM-locked content.

It’s a compromise I’m willing to make under certain circumstances, but ultimately one that bothers me.

DVD DRM can be broken easily.

BluRay DRM is the worst thing ever - it demands that you are FULLY locked out of your own computer (this is why 4K HDR BR players are practically non-existent for PCs, since you need a fully locked out DRM stack from the drive to the display), it and demands internet connectivity to download keys. The number of devices that actually conform to draconian BluRay 4K spec is order of magnitude lower than devices that can play Netflix content.

Torrent.

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