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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Yes, this is truly the sad part of DRM: the people that actually pay for content are the ones whose experience is most degraded. Pirates don't have to buy monitors with HDCP. Pirates can watch their collection when the authorization servers are down. Pirates can back up their media. Pirates can take screenshots. (Though I've never had this particular problem even with "DRM'd" media on Linux.) The list goes on.

The content industry wonders why they can't stop piracy. Maybe they could start by providing a product that's as good as what the pirates get.

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The most egregious: Pirates can skip the FBI warning and previews.

We got a portable DVD player to add to our arsenal of distractions for our toddlers on long road trips. One of the DVDs we purchased—an Elmo sing-along—prohibits the viewer from skipping the five-minute donation plea that plays before the menu. This is especially frustrating because the kids will inevitably bump something requiring playback to be restarted (even with the button lock enabled, the disc door can still be opened) at least once an hour.

Whoever made the decision to set the "unskippable" flag on that track must have absolutely no familiarity with their customer base. For the vast majority of parents, I'm sure the effect is exactly the opposite of what they intended: if I was ever considering donating to Sesame Workshop, I'm certainly not anymore.

The problems with DVD DRM are nicely summed up by this rather popular image: http://i.imgur.com/GxzeV.jpg

Yeah, exactly. I'd also add this xkcd as a general comment about DRM: http://xkcd.com/488/.

Do what I did for a few friends, rip them and edit them to remove that crap.

Example: If you rented "The Interview" on Google's video service (in HD) and played it back on a software/hardware stack that didn't have the latest DRM(1), you were limited to SD.

You paid for HD. You got SD.

Of course, you could go pirate a full HD copy of the movie and play it back anywhere. The effectiveness of these inconveniences is overwhelming.

(1) I'm not positive it was even possible to redeem an HD rental in HD. I don't know anyone that didn't get forced to play in SD.

I always get forced to watch Google Play movies in SD and I have a late 2013 MacBook Pro. It's the main reason I use iTunes more than Google Play.

when I rented it, HD and SD cost the same amount. but your point is taken

I looked into this and you could get HD on locked down devices (phones, tablets, TVs), but not computers, regardless of operating system. This was weird to see given that EME made it into Chrome recently and now Netflix works without silverlight. I ended up renting it on Youtube, then googling for an HD copy. Found one hosted on Google Drive (!), which produced quite a chuckle.

> Though I've never had this particular problem even with "DRM'd" media on Linux

The intel video driver on Linux is open-source. I am sure there would be forks disabling this functionality in case it would be implemented. I find it outrageous that there's software that disables a functionality like screenshot taking, that's malware to me. I own that framebuffer, not intel.

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