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Comment by finnn | Hacker News Reader

In other news, bittorrent continues to work on all platforms, without placing any restrictions on what viewers can do.

Including participating in massive copyright infringement.

I struggle with the sentiment that if offered no other way to legally consume media, BitTorrent will show them! I can't find "The Money Pit" anywhere but BT. Does that make it ok to download?

I don't know. Morally, legally, etc., I've never been quite so torn for quite so long.

It's a toughie because there are two evils at work here:

- DRM is its own kind of evil, but only implicitly because it erodes the rights and privacy of the users;

- Copyright infringement is another kind of evil, which is important because the law explicitly says so;

- Just not watching TV shows seems like the easiest option here, but it's boring and doesn't support starving artists.

Which kind of evil is worse?

Copyright infringement is another kind of evil, which is important because the law explicitly says so;

But the intent of copyright law was that society as a whole should be enriched.

Given how the law has been corrupted into a prison for cultural content and a right for the rich to profit, while society as a whole gets poorer and poorer arts-wise, I find it morally just to encourage civil disobedience.

> Copyright infringement is another kind of evil, which is important because the law explicitly says so;

It's not just the law that makes copyright infringement of various sorts immoral. It is the law, not morals, which gives GPL software strong copyleft, but surely you would agree that it would also be immoral to take GPL software proprietary without the permission of that software's authors?

You are comparing the act of taking a work and exploiting it for profit, and sharing a movie with a friend.

If try to commercial earn illicit profit by exploiting those people in society that gives software away for free and explicit allow you to run, modify and distribute. Then that is immoral. Comparing it to sharing a movie with a friend is just a shameful act of pushing an agenda.

A more correct comparison with GPL would be bootlegging a CD (ie, for profit) during a charity concert that has pay-what-you-want tickets. Anti-copyright people would likely support the claim that such behavior is immoral.

> Anti-copyright people would likely support the claim that such behavior is immoral.

Yes, that is my point.

But GPL works in practice because the immoral behavior it is meant to defend against is also illegal due to copyright.

The original point was that copyrights merely make things illegal, but that we shouldn't care because what is illegal would be something moral (I mean, is there an easier target to beat up on than RIAA and MPAA?).

I countered that in this case there are instances where copyright makes immoral behavior illegal—it is not simply true to state that any activity illegal under the Copyright Act would be moral to engage in, if not for those pesky IP Nazis oppressing the public.

I think OP's point was that DRM pushes people to pirate content, regardless of whether this is morally acceptable or not.

I sadly don't think that's true any more. Not that I want to promote piracy or am sad about the decline. But I fear that the upcoming generation of DRM will be good enough not to annoy the users. And that was really the issue with most DRM in the past. E.g., music is more commonly shared and copied to different devices. DRM there really had an impact. Flash/Silverlight are horrible plugins and they impact the viewing pleasure. But now that Restriction is integrated on top of the regular HTML5 stack in the top three proprietary browsers it will be as flawless as watching a HTML5 video for most users. Sure they can't save the video. But most users don't know how to do that even if the video doesn't have DRM. And as long as the business model of the content hosts is decent enough they won't feel bothered by the DRM. And unlike music where sharing and copying to different devices is what users expected long before MP3s, for videos the renting model is widely accepted and common since before computer video.

And that's one of the big issues with the EME proposal. It will ensure that DRM remains on video for a long time. It will make it impossible to view legal content in a complete free software stack. It will make the web depend on proprietary binary blobs from the three companies which are already controlling the majority web browser, operating system, and mobile device market share. Which means it will be hard to impossible to innovate in those areas if it's against the interests of those companies. This will have really damaging consequences.

Fundamentally, I don't think that DRM pushes people to piracy, I think poor user experience does. A lot of that has come out of poor DRM implementations, which is where the problem is. Spotify on the other hand, is based on a form of DRM but as they provide a good app for every platform I want to use (including Linux), and allow you to sync offline (for when I have no internet), I will quite happily give them my money and have no intention of pirating music ever again.

I think his point is rather that DRM asks more from the user (a specific browser, a specific plugin, a specific string to enter in a box) for essentially the same experience.

Oh and you can do less things with a DRM'd media than with a non-DRM'd. Even though you technically have the same rights.

Oh and you can do less things with a DRM'd media than with a non-DRM'd. Even though you technically have the same rights.

None of the big streaming-services supports the HW I have in my home-stereo rig. All of them supports H264 video and HDMI.

Not offering me H264 content uncrippled is leaving me, as a potential customer, no reason to sign up.

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