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Comment by nikanj | Hacker News Reader

Device manufacturers. Play nice, or we won't grant you the magic pixie dust to play our content in glorious 4k.

To clarify, this isn’t just a cynical comment. It’s actually why digital content producers use DRM. Generally speaking, they’re not idiots, they know it will have little effect on determined pirates and will cause some hassle for some legitimate customers. The point really is so that the digital content producers can maintain control over the providers of computer hardware and distribution channels.

Here’s an old article claiming to be a big revelation, but it’s pretty much common sense and has been fairly well recognized for much longer than that:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-engineer-drm-has-nothin...

Ian Hickson's insightful short essay about DRM was on Google+. But now it's gone...

Not entirely, actually, thanks to the Internet Archive!!!

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

So the purpose of DRM is to thwart the first sale doctrine?

It is absolutely one prime motivation. “The purpose” is essentially non-verifiable.

Reading that article, it seems to me that the arguments don't fit the conclusions. Media companies may be strong-arming software and device manufacturers, but they're doing so as a means to an end, not an end unto itself. Their motive for strong arming software and hardware manufacturers is their desire to control consumer behavior. That may be slightly more general than "piracy" specifically, but not that different.

Sure, of course they ideally want end to end control. The point, though, is that the argument “pirates will still be able to pirate and legitimate users will be inconvenienced,” while true, is not a great argument for why content producers should stop using DRM, because DRM still works quite well for establishing control over hardware and distribution providers.

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