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Comment by scythe | Hacker News Reader

>And I'd argue stripping DRM (no matter how easy it is) is, is in fact harder than not bothering.

But it's never, ever, necessary, not when gazillions of scene groups strip DRM from a work and upload it as soon as it hits the market, if not before; sometimes they just get hold of the studio version. It might make some obscure video games harder to pirate, since it's much harder to strip DRM from code than from data, but video? No way.

DRM makes it harder for me to put legitimate content on a device I own, but it makes it no harder to pirate that same content.

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You may be correct that DRM makes it "no harder to pirate that same content"...but it DOES make it harder for people to transfer files to each other through email/CDs/USB keys.

To you, it may seem trivial to load up a torrent program and spend some of the day browsing the trackers, but this is not at all trivial to the average person.

Think about it...DRM can be circumvented on iTunes music by burning it to a CD, giving someone the CD, and then ripping that CD. Or just burning to CD and ripping to your own computer and THEN distributing the files. Yet iTunes has been a huge success because people either do not realize this or because the few extra steps is not worth the effort.

Small extra steps make a huge difference between what is theoretically doable and what people actually tolerate doing.

iTunes music hasn't been DRMed in about two and a half years now, I think. And honestly, things have moved quickly. When iTunes music was still DRMed, I think we were still in the process of transitioning away from CDs as a playback medium.

That said, I think the biggest reason iTunes has succeeded is because it's easier to buy the damn song than it is to go hunt it down. I suppose if someone emailed you the song file directly that'd be easier, but only marginally. When it's equally easy/easier to do “the right thing”, I think most people tends toward doing “the right thing”. The problem with DRM is it usually actually makes it harder to do “the right thing”. Oops.

> Yet iTunes has been a huge success because people either do not realize this or because the few extra steps is not worth the effort.

Please be careful attributing the success of iTunes to DRM.

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPlay:

- Steve Jobs said that Apple didn't want to use DRM but was forced to by the music labels, who wouldn't provide the music w/o DRM.

- Apple announced in Jan 2009 iTunes was moving to DRM-free music.

Ah, you are correct. It is more correct to say that iTunes was a success despite DRM.

However, I did not mean to assert that DRM was iTunes's key to success, even if Jobs's actually wanted DRM. I'm only saying that significantly fewer people would pay 99 cents a song if sharing music was as easy as buying it off of a centralized source and sending it around by email.

DRM is a pain in the ass for all the honest people. But its role in making sharing less-than-frictionless for the average user probably pushed a good number of people to just sign up for an iTunes account to pay the measly $.99

For you, maybe. I've found AAC being proprietary is enough to make people buy iPods. Hell, I'm pretty sure you can convert it to MP3 within that piece of shit iTunes.

AAC isn't proprietary, at least not any more than MP3.

I suppose not, but my point is I think inconveniences are relative to the user.

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