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> So what is this DRM supposed to achieve?

It's a good point, but I believe DRM isn't just about piracy. It's also about control. I read a good article about this once, but I can't find it anywhere right now so I'll summarize what I remember.

As long as DRM exists, if you want to make a Blu-ray player you have to go and ask the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator for their blessing, so that you can decrypt and play (for example) AACS-protected media. It doesn't really matter that AACS has been broken since early 2007 and that pirates can easily circumvent it - as long as you want to sell a player above-board and not risk potential lawsuits, you still have to go and license it.

(This might not be true for AACS in particular, but AFAIK it is generally true of more recent content protection systems.)

That's when the control part kicks in. Good luck getting that Blu-ray player approved for content decryption if it allows the user to skip commercials, or make small clips of movies and send them to your friends, or other such features. I do believe there would be some amount of demand for those features - well, mostly the first one. However, I don't see the AACS LA ever approving such features while having Disney and Warner Bros as founding members[0].

I'll try to find the original article I got those ideas from. I'll reply again if I ever find it.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120218192257/https://www.aacsl...

That makes a lot of sense actually, I guess my take was a bit naive. I hadn't considered that it wasn't just about preventing piracy, it's about controlling how the content is consumed. Thank you for this insight.

I think you were probably trying to find this article:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190119000840/https://plus.goog...

That's exactly it! I've bookmarked it for future reference, thank you so much! =)

>How many decades do we have to suffer through this broken scheme and this technical debt until the right owners realize that they're wasting their time and their resources to push a system that only serves to make it harder for legit clients to consume their contents?

Where did you get the impression that this isn't what they actually want? The goal is control over users, not acquiring non-users (pirates).

> So what is this DRM supposed to achieve?

I think DRM in general was never really designed to completely thwart piracy.

The goal is actually to delay the pirated version as much as possible and to raise the barrier to entry when pirated versions are eventually released into the wild.

Instead of that, it's turned pirates into heroes of the common person. After all, why pay and be limited in the way you can watch the thing you paid for when unlimited access exists for free?

> why pay and be limited in the way you can watch the thing you paid for when unlimited access exists for free?

Oh I dunno... have you tried asking one of Netflix's 140M subscribers? Or the 26M people who use Amazon prime video?

The point of DRM isn't to make it impossible to pirate things -- it's to make it difficult enough to get pirated content that most people would prefer to pay a few bucks a month to watch things via a channel where rights holders are compensated. And by that measure, it seems to be working pretty well.

I'm not sure for how much longer it will keep working though. With the increased fragmentation of streaming services (and geoblocking), pirating content is starting to feel more convenient yet again.

When it comes to music, I can most of the time listen to it legally via Spotify or Google Play Music/YouTube Music. When it comes to movies (and especially for older movies), the rights holders give me no choice but to pirate because they simply don't make it available for me to obtain in a legal way.

As an extreme example: I was looking up an old childhood movie "Hugo: Djungeldjuret". The rights holder have stopped distributing the movie and they no longer sell it, but they do issue copyright claims and take-down requests towards anyone who hosts it. How am I supposed to watch a movie like that in a legal way when the only distributor has stopped distributing it?

My point was that, for movies and TV shows at least, this simply doesn't work. The delay is small enough that it's usually negligible (a few hours in my experience). For live events (especially sporting events) of course that's enough to make pirating impractical, but for the new episode of Game of Thrones it's really not much.

Furthermore I assume that most of that latency is not due to the time required for pirates to break the DRM but rather the time for the original riper to encode the file and share it through the pirate food chain until it reaches the public trackers that I use. You'd still have to wait a little while to get your pirate file if you don't have a subscription to the official streaming service.

> For live events (especially sporting events) of course that's enough to make pirating impractical, but for the new episode of Game of Thrones it's really not much.

I think you underestimate how many people prefer to watch the latest episode as it airs.

> not due to the time required for pirates to break the DRM

Even if the DRM is already broken, you can't just ignore the initial time spent to break it.

> until it reaches the public trackers that I use

Let's say you stopped 100 random people on a busy street and asked them what a "public torrent tracker" is. How many do you think would know what that even means? And of those who do, how many do you think would actually be able to download a movie through a public tracker?

This is why Popcorn Time was such a huge hit: it provided effortless access to movie torrents for the masses. Obviously, this also explains the rapid response by content publishers to crush the project.

Isn't it still live and well?

>I think you underestimate how many people prefer to watch the latest episode as it airs.

I don't, but even without any DRM you still have the delay between the moment the ripper manages to get the file and the moment it's available for download. DRM doesn't really change anything here. It's not like for games where DRM can delay the release of cracked version by days or even sometimes weeks.

>Even if the DRM is already broken, you can't just ignore the initial time spent to break it.

For movies and TV shows I think I can. It's just so full of holes and broken implementations that it's usually trivial to crack. I have yet to see the release of a good quality movie or TV show because they couldn't crack the DRM.

>Let's say you stopped 100 random people on a busy street and asked them what a "public torrent tracker" is. How many do you think would know what that even means?

I honestly don't know, but I do know that streaming solutions and direct download websites are pretty mainstream in my experience. Megaupload was huge for instance.

But even if you're right and it's obscure, doesn't that make DRM even more pointless? If people don't pirate because they don't know how why would they start ripping Netflix streams? Technically speaking it's even more involved.

> I don't, but even without any DRM you still have the delay between the moment the ripper manages to get the file and the moment it's available for download.

You're missing the streaming option. But alas, watermarking + ContentID + DRM have essentially conquered that realm. Acestream and IPTV are two surviving options, but the barrier to entry is not low for these.

> For movies and TV shows I think I can. It's just so full of holes and broken implementations that it's usually trivial to crack.

I don't know enough about current media DRM solutions to comment here. What I do know is that will likely change once TEEs/enclaves become more widespread on consumer devices.

> If people don't pirate because they don't know how why would they start ripping Netflix streams?

"Right-click > Download" versus, at the very least:

1. Finding a reliable torrent tracker

2. Downloading and installing a torrent client (viruses galore!)

3. Finding a torrent with enough seeders

4. Figuring out which version of the movie/show to download (what's a "nuke"? what's up with the quality (cam)? why is this movie split into 37 .rar files? where are the subtitles? why is the audio out of sync? etc. etc.)

You and I have already gone through all of this the hard way, but it's important to realize that it's not intuitive at all.

The UHD Blu-ray protection held up for several years.

In reality as long as possible is a few hours. In exchange everyone who doesn't pirate has to jump through hoops and gets a worse experience.