Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by Sophira | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Sophira·

While I agree in theory, this is never going to happen. There's too much DRM in use for it to work out.

View on HN

Repeal and outlaw drm. It was a mistake that violates everyone's constitutional rights.

“constitutional rights”

Words written on toilet paper. Only thing that exists today are “billionaire rights”.

Exactly. DRM isn’t going anywhere so long as copyrights exist.

Not even that. Companies are already lobbying massively for selective enforcement of copyright as to not harm the AI boom (immediate jail terms for individuals torrenting a movie, "it's a complex issue" for AI companies scraping the entire internet)

But even the DRM that is already there often only uses copyright laws as suggestions. E.g. YouTube's takedown guidelines are defined through their TOS, not through the DMCA.

Are there billionaires in the room with us right now?

DRM can still stick around and be popular. For example, consider an Apple TV. They make the hardware and software, so it can be locked down under the provided rules. Or a console. We might consider devices which are used for streaming or movies to not be general purpose computation devices. Which, historically, they haven't been.

Watching copyrighted stuff on general purpose computers is a very new phenomena, and it's still quite atypical IMO.

What there are is many people utterly convinced that this brings some security to end-users. See the other messages in this thread. DRM is only a fraction of the problem.

DRM is a barrier to legally protected purchasing digital media for me. I will buy an album from iTunes (no DRM), but I will not buy digital movies the same way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com