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Comment by fafner | Hacker News Reader

They don't need DRM. DRM does not work. Just go to pirate bay and you'll find every TV series, movie (with DVD/BluRay/Stream release), album immediately after their release. They think they need DRM. But in reality they don't. It doesn't stop piracy at all. It's a burden only to their legal customers and not to the pirates. It is all about easy and affordable access.

If a company insists on using DRM then they should simply create their own proprietary plugin like Flash. But there is absolutely no reason for us to destroy the open web and make it rely on proprietary binary modules.

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It stops plenty of piracy as without it piracy could be as easy as a single click from a place like Netflix, Google Music, etc.

Just because it's easy for you to circumvent doesn't mean it's easy for the everyday user.

But totally agreed that it doesn't belong in web standards.

It is now anyway, even with DRM.

Actually Netflix is easier then pirating, which is now why Netflix consumes more traffic than torrents.

"Just because it's easy for you to circumvent doesn't mean it's easy for the everyday user."

All it takes is for one person to circumvent it and the whole system crumbles. Which is the current state of affairs.

Everyday users fail at saving a youtube video. And someone who knows how to rip a youtube video usually also knows about pirate bay or other pirate websites.

Even worse, there's a whole bunch of malware Youtube downloader programs/browser plugins. It's pretty crazy but using TPB is at least easier and safer.

I don't know about "normal" people, but all the pointless shit they put on Blurays made me go BACK to piracy. I started my first real job 2 years ago, so i felt i should buy my movies. Turns out, Blurays are EVEN WORSE than DVDs. Nonstop trailers, that use your bandwidth to download new fucking trailers, a hundred warnings about piracy and a DRM that requires constant annoying updates and a crappy PowerDVD software.

If i sound angry, it's because i am.

> It stops plenty of piracy as without it piracy could be as easy as a single click from a place like Netflix, Google Music, etc.

It... actually is already at this point. I can find any song, any TV show, and any film, available to stream instantly on Youtube of all places. This isn't a shady torrent site, it's a Google-owned property.

In the music sphere, Grooveshark has every song you could think of, and is claimed to fail to comply with the licensing requirements of the copyright owners, and is thus being sued over it.

There is little or no reason that a similar service could not pop up for video, aside from the fact that bandwidth is costly, and I'm sure that could be resolved to an extent through some form of torrent-over-WebRTC system.

And I agree with you completely. But they believe that they need it and will not release content otherwise.

Then they can keep it and they won't get my money, and everyone will just end up pirating it anyway.

You don't combat piracy by locking it down and making a pain to access your content, you compete/combat piracy by making sure its always easier and more convenient to obtain your content legitimately, not punish those that are legit for the few that will go pirate it anyway. As long as I can purchase a song for $1 DRM free and have it in 5 seconds at a high quality from iTunes or Amazon, I won't ever be tempted to find a torrent for it, even if its free.

DRM creates artificial scarcity, and scarcity breeds a black market. Those black markets may always exist, but if you make it hard enough to access your product on the device they want at the time they want, they will have more incentive to go to the black markets.

wow, what kind of insights! Agree with you.

But we don't have to bend over for their believes! They can continue using Flash or Silverlight or write their own crap plugins. Why should we destroy the open web for them?

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