Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

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I find your posts fascinating - after working in the content industry for awhile, it's very easy to see (and confirmed with repeated studies) that DRM doesn't significantly affect or prevent piracy. Not to mention that there's a constant stream of more and more anti-customer requests coming from content provider lawyers. Requests that would make your head spin at just how fundamentaly evil they are (most of them... for now... can be pushed back). Remember, those dudes had the idea to attempt to make physical media that rot away after few days of use.

You are hugely, hugely wrong in the basic premise that actual reality of piracy is something that even comes close to reasoning for people who put these anti consumer practices in.

Use your brain - DRM allows them to increase profits even without piracy (by taking away consumer rights like second sale doctrine and ability to share content with your friends and family). You're seriously implying it's a bit of piracy that's making them say "yes, let's make sure everyone buys their own copy of the movie"? Do you think copyright protection laws were extended to 70 years+death of the authors because there were too many pirates copying Mickey movies?

> a bit of piracy

Don't know about other content industry, but at least in video games, "a bit of" and "piracy" are oxymoron. Any semi-popular game has a significant number of pirated copy players.

Example: World of Goo claims 90% of players play pirated copies.[1] This is a game distributed without DRM and the price isn't high ($15 and region-based). 90% piracy rate is how customers respond to no DRM.

[1] https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/world-of-goo-vs-piracy

> we divided the total number of sales we had from all sources by the total number of unique IPs in our database, and came up with about 0.1. that’s how we came up with 90%

Did they account for dynamic IPs? If not that number is way off.

The price is quite high for a jobless minor, of which most gamers are.

Note that those % numbers don't convert into sales or profits. Those are just the biggest numbers found to defend DRM.

(Similarly how being able to share a BluRay with your family doesn't lose the content industry N sales of discs.)

This issue is a lot more nuanced than reading some skewed stats and declaring that it's a problem.

The core issue is that this is a hugely emotional issue - the content industry (and artists of course) are constantly playing the "oh poor us, everyone is stealing, those criminals!" note to make pirates look bad... while in the same sentence establishing outright abusive DRM practices and trying to extract maximum money of every single shmuck that actually bought their content legally.

DRM has a massive negative effect on legitimate consumers - instead of quoting "90% piracy that", instead think about just how much of that piracy ACTUALLY hurts anyone and how much the attempt to fight it ACTUALLY hurts people who legitimately pay for their content and hardware.

Have a look at http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-game-piracy

<large number>% of copies are pirated, but only <tiny number>% of players pirate, it is simply that (some of) those that do pirate will tend to pirate a whole lot more games. Meaning that that 90% piracy rate means e.g. 5% lost sales.

And if you follow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15319476 then 90% piracy rate could also mean 5% extra sales.

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