Hacker News Reader

Honest question: What would be the alternative to DRM?

How would video streaming companies “protect” their content without DRM? Or is the debate that they shouldn’t be able to?

Having the ability to stream directly in the browser is definitely a good thing IMHO.

View on HN

The alternative is not pretending that DRM works. It's a giant layer of complexity that exists solely so that we can lie to the business people and tell them that we've protected our IP from piracy.

There is none. If we are going to have intellectual property, if we are going to incent developers of IP to produce, they should have some right to monetize their IP. The people who are against DRM present a certain selfishness and are never really able to answer the question of how developers, particularly of very expensive endeavors are supposed to recoup their costs and make a profit.

Like with OP you are making a lot of assumptions about consensus. Things that don't have one: intellectual property is not an oxymoron, we need to incent people to create content, right to monetize has to include strict technical limitations. Not being burdened with resolving your problem does not mean one is necessary selfish; they might just not see it as a problem worth solving.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com