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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

As usual, legitimate customers get shafted while piracy thrives.

I honestly don't get it, everyone knows that this will not stop piracy, there's no benefit whatsoever to it yet it has significant disadvantages for paying customers.

The benefit is that pirates won't buy the content either way, but legit uses locked out of the content they bought might buy it the second time.

It doesn't outright stop piracy, but making it more uncomfortable to play back on PC means people would either switch to streaming or buy set-top players.

Big tech long ago decided that the PC is a problem to them and they want to move to locked-down gadgets.

That's because piracy is the excuse, not the reason. DRM is very successful at what it should do: Protect the content middleman from the device makers (not the end users).

They can, for example, enforce market segmentation: You bought the DVD in the USA and play it in the EU. Legal, but DRM stops you. Wait for the EU release and pay the different price.

If the content middleman screams piracy, react as if a politician screams child porn. They want something else, but cant' get it without invoking the bogeyman. Hordes of (starving artists/concerned parents) will provide the necessary rope to hang themselves on command.

> They can, for example, enforce market segmentation: You bought the DVD in the USA and play it in the EU. Legal, but DRM stops you. Wait for the EU release and pay the different price.

Ok, but don't they risk discouraging people from buying disks? Who buys disks nowadays anyway?

The limitations enforced by the DRM are rarely disclosed upfront. "DRM" to non-technical people simply means anti-piracy protection which they don't mind because they don't see themselves as pirates, having just bought the media.

I buy disks all the time. Do not think streaming is going to make things better. That market is segmenting like crazy. They will enforce region boundaries and re-edit a movie if it suits them. Make no mistake they will edit movies to add pepsi/coke products all over the place. Then it will get very interesting and someone will pop off a hot take on twitter and they will be edited out of the movie. One of the 'uses' of VPN is to see movies in a different region that your service is not offering in yours. DVD DRM was designed for it (with its 7 regions). Bluray seems to be a bit more lax on it. That comes down to how a movie is budget is done and how the pricing split of who gets the money depending on where it is played.

The real problem with computers and disks is these days most computers do not come with any sort of DVD/BR/UHD drive. You can find the odd one here and there and sometimes in desktop format. But in the mobile space they have pretty much disappeared, except as USB addon. Once apple ditched them everyone else did too.

I had one of the cyberlink bits of software. It worked just fine for 6 years. The drive is fine. The certs on the software however expired. Once that happened no bluray would play at all. They wanted a decent amount to 'upgrade' so I could watch my movies again on my computer. So I used that money and bought some ripping software. So I rip and use things like VLC and KODI to play them now. Which is kind of 'meh' as the java emu layer is not there yet. Most of the time you can pick the right title out of the list. But sometimes (usually sony) they will throw several thousand titles on the disk that are not quite right but have the right size.

These companies have not totally worked it out yet (they are well on their way though). With 100% streaming digital they have a decent amount of physical control, probably prefect pricing, and re-editorial control.

> If the content middleman screams piracy, react as if a politician screams child porn. They want something else, but cant' get it without invoking the bogeyman. Hordes of (starving artists/concerned parents) will provide the necessary rope to hang themselves on command.

I never made the connection between these two ideas before. Now I am wiser. Thanks for this.

As was said by other smart person who is not me:

DRM has nothing to do with piracy of even control over end-user. It's all about media companies having leverage over hardware manufacturers of TVs, computers, game consoles, etc.

So media companies want extort money from hardware manufacturers. Manufacturer might choose not to pay, but then most of movies and Netflix (FullHD, 4K) wouldn't play on their devices.

There are two benefits in DRM:

1. Stopping "casual" piracy, that is, stopping a tech illiterate person (most of the population) from simply copying it to another tech illiterate friend (they don't want a repetition of the K7 mixtape era).

2. Create a walled garden were you have a monopoly that you can abuse to extract better deals from other stakeholders.

Widespread piracy is a function of access to user-friendly pirating services like torrents or warez sites, not the ability to generate a pirated copy. I'd wager that the number of people in the world who bypass Bluray DRM for non-personal use is in the hunderds, maybe thousands.

> Widespread piracy is a function of access to user-friendly pirating services like torrents or warez sites, not the ability to generate a pirated copy.

It's both. Easy generation of pirated copies also vastly increases the number of sources and the speed of propagation.

> everyone knows that this will not stop piracy

Disney CEO: "We want a DRM system that will make piracy impossible. Can you do it?"

Developer: "That's impossible, it can't be done."

Disney CEO: "My son is constantly asking for $70 games for his playstation/xbox, so I'm not convinced DRM is impossible. Could you do it if we paid you $300,000 per year? Or do you have nothing to offer the company?"

Developer: "Well, when you put it like that, I'm happy to try. We can certainly make something that doesn't have the holes previous systems had, and that will slow down piracy, initially."

Disney CEO: "Ah, so it might be possible after all...."

Once in a while, some DRM does work in buying some time for the copyright holder. Denuvo has sometimes led to games taking longer to be cracked, in some cases for a few weeks or even months, enough to perhaps capture some of the initial rush of purchases for a video game. Of course, there will be consumers who don't want to buy games with DRM as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denuvo

The currently model for digital media (film, music, etc) just doesn't work. Instead of preventing piracy, figure out a new way of making money for artists (not the organisations and administrators). Artists ought to be rewarded not the organisation and admin.

Thing is the organizations and administrators around artists are huge.

In the current world, they are no longer needed, and they know it. But they still have power. So they are doing everything they can to keep up their revenue streams. If they admit to progress, if they try and make a working ecosystems, they are working on something which, at best, requires massive downsizing for them.

So instead they are flailing about looking to construct ecosystems that still have a place for them.

I think they don't want people buying movies at all anymore, just to subscribe forever

To prove you wrong, one would have to take the position that those industries are making more and better content.

"Piracy will continue as scheduled."

I believe it's a good thing considering that "ligitimate customers" means customes supporting DRM.

Most customers don't know what DRM is, how it works and how/when it fails.

It's reasonable for a non-technical person to agree with a solution that claims to prevent piracy because they have no idea how these things work and their trade-offs. They don't mind it because they don't see themselves as pirates given that they just bought the media and are unaware of how the DRM scheme can backfire on them despite not being a pirate.

Very few people would agree to DRM if the DRM scheme explicitly had a disclaimer "we can, for any reason, prevent you from playing this in the future even on the same hardware that successfully plays it today".

As can be seen in this case ignorace does not help much. It's a lesseon that all of us have to learn from time to time.

As streaming becomes more common, the number of seeders seems to be steadily dropping.

And as streaming becomes more fragmented, it steadily goes up :D

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