This is a good spot to place the pin.

The "theological" view is that (1) copyright is a moral right. (2) The Law just protects right against wrong, and(3) economic side effects of laws are incidental.

Real life is a lot less naive, so to speak. The commercial intellectual property concerns at stake are are record labels, apps, stores/distributors, large music & film portfolios and such. These exist, don't exist, have huge potential or not depending largely on the IP/DRM legislation and enforcement environment.

DRM is, IMO, an industrial policy. It gives shape and dimension to the music & film industry. Negotiating the leverage party type X has over Y is always a key feature of such policies.

How have I regretted purchasing Blu-Rays in the past. They require an update to the drive firmware, they require their own GPU driver version, they require an update to the player software, and they try to sneak spyware onto my PC anyway. It is almost impossible to legally watch an authentic blu-ray on a Windows PC.

Similarly, how have I regretted allowing my TV to connect to the internet. The first thing that happened was that it started shoving ads into my face. So I did a factory reset and disconnected it. Now, Netflix and Prime TV are unusable. Plus the YouTube app never managed to play back 4K videos on a 4K TV without crashing.

I don't quite know why they hate me so much, but whenever I try to be nice to movie companies and purchase their stuff, they treat me like shit. And DRM is their legal whip to fuck me over. Blu-Ray? doesn't work. DRM. Offline iTunes? doesn't work in 4K. DRM. Prime TV? mandatory internet for DRM. Then ads. Netflix? mandatory internet for DRM. Then ads.

On the other hand, an mkv file on a USB stick "just works", has exceptional audio and video quality, doesn't buffer, and I can skip all the ads.

FWIW, I think movies need to take the same route music did. Ever since I found out I could just buy DRM-free high-quality audio at a reasonable price, I have happily paid for the music I like, because it was so very convenient. If it was as convenient to legally buy copies of movies / TV shows, I'd be happy to spend some money for that.

Even Disney & Universal, themselves enormously valuable companies, are greedily eying the platform model. It has everything they want. Recurring revenues. Content pushing abilities, which is usually the most strategically important asset. Platform monopoly potential, where most artists/studios take your take-it-or-leave-it terms.

They don't hate you. They just do whatever is most valuable to them. They don't care about you. They may or may not value your custom, but that's about it.

This is sharply contrasted with the so-called "purchase" model of Amazon or iTunes video, and even more with the way physical media works these days (comment above about Blu-ray).

I vastly prefer those services because I don’t have much interest in managing my own library.

What the what? Discover on Netflix? If you mean accepting what they think you want to watch based on their curated lists of what they want you to watch shoved into your face in their carousels of boredom, then I'm going to have to disagree with you.

Download Netflix app on pretty much any device, subscription is affordable, scroll and click to play. New content gets added each week or whatever which is more than one can consume.

it's a bit like cooking vs going to a restaurant. how can someone with a sense of real taste and care for health/nutrition understand the millions of people who regularly hit fast food chains. Convenience. It simply has to be 1/ affordable 2/ saving time, and bingo.

of course learning how to cook, going shoping to 7 different local suppliers, having a large range of stocked spices and other condiments, spend 1h and half putting things together and appreciate a great healthy meal is a better approach to eating, but not everyone accept the burden, some don't even understand the actual pro/cons of each option.

At the end of the day I can hunt around and curate the perfect library of movies and shows, but I can also find plenty of good content on streaming platforms. It’s not like I’m eating empty calories at the end of the day.

Netflix has reality tv, but that doesn’t mean you’re watching reality tv on Netflix by default.

I want to "discover" by browsing not the most current titles available in this current licensing window. I want to be able to browse from the evergreen catalog. I want to see the things that don't have a high dollar marketing campaign guaranteeing prominent placement. Maybe these platforms don't have a large inventory of evergreen content??? There are times I want to find some title that is older. The content that wasn't along the outer walls of Blockbuster.

But you pretty much answered your own question. The platforms don’t have giant catalogs of evergreen & niche content, because that is extremely expensive to license. That’s not really a discovery problem, though.

The trade off is of course, the old buying/renting model. But that’s oriented much more towards the enthusiast consumer, which I am not and it would seem you are.

However, finding these titles on the various studio services is also not as easy to discover. Mainly because these nascent services know they have to get their A-list content out first to attract users. The process of bringing the back catalog stuff onto these new services will take time. In the meantime, we're just stuck being force fed what the studios want us to see.

It would be trivial for Netflix to show imdb/rotten tomato scores, but they don't want you to easily see the masses of mediocrity in their selection.

My wife's friends watch Emily in Paris. My friends watch Expanse and Silent Sea. So I already know the 3 series that I'm watching in the near future so that we can gossip about them with our friends. And if I want a movie, I can ask that one friend who has been giving me great movie recommendations for the past 10 years...

When I think about using Netflix discovery and going down the rabbit hole of watching random stuff recommended by a robot, it kind of makes me feel pity for the lonely people who have nothing better to do than watch TV alone. I really can't imagine how that could be beneficial to the human doing it.

I mostly do it because it's cheaper than a cable subscription, and the player is easier to use than Kodi.

It's called "paying the Danegeld".

"if once you have paid him the DRM-geld, you never get rid of the DRM".

I think it's noteworthy that game consoles do this in the opposite direction: give creators of playback devices leverage over content providers. This was basically why console DRM evolved in the first place (in the early forms of the 10NES lockout chip and the Atari 7800 signature scheme). Accordingly, console DRM schemes are typically stronger against unauthorized publishing of novel works than they are against unauthorized copying of already-published works (the latter being encrypted and signed in the expected way, thus only requiring subversion of a weaker "authentic disc" check). Apart from norms differing by industry, I would guess that the key to the directionality is which side thinks they can control access to a greater number of customers.

So, just as an example... let's talk about the last major physical media format war: HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. The thing that killed HD-DVD was that Blu-Ray had better DRM. Switching between the two formats was as simple as copying a file from one encoder to another; so the movie studios picked the one that gave them the most control.

Switching between game consoles is like telling the director of a movie to change from shooting in 16:9 to 21:9. It's possible, but you're going to be spending a lot of extra time and effort to switch aspect ratios. Now, granted, people have gotten really good at porting games to new systems, but it still requires time and effort to do, especially when it comes to testing and certification.

A game developer porting a game to a system is, ultimately, a vote of confidence that the system will have a viable commercial software market 1-2 years down the line. Developers are at the mercy of console manufacturers, and thus they're very conservative with what platforms to develop on. So companies trying to enter the console business basically need to do half a decade's worth of business development and funding just to get a foot in the door. Which makes the few platforms that are successful that much more powerful.

Another interesting quirk of the games industry is that consoles are often manufactured by companies that also fund or develop games, and those companies specifically withhold their games from other platforms to make their own consoles better. There's no need for Nintendo to demand that they pay themselves a 30% platform royalty to publish games on their own platform; and they aren't going to start paying Sony 30% so that people can buy Mario on PlayStation.

Very, very early on in the history of American cinema, the US government made an antitrust case against movie studios that more or less banned them from owning the theaters that displayed their content. Since then, it's been the case that production and distribution were two separate specialties, with copyright law existing to ensure the latter can't screw over the former. Hence where we get "DRM exists to control player manufacturers". Games came along much later and their business models more or less never attracted antitrust scrutiny[0] until very recently when Epic decided to make a federal lawsuit out of it.

My gut feeling is that it doesn't actually make a whole lot of business sense as a publisher or developer to outsource distribution to a third party. That's why you've seen Netflix go from "everything streaming instantly for cheap" to original productions; and why every other publisher made their own streaming platform to cut out the Netflix middleman. The only remaining link in the chain from publishers to you are device manufacturers: Apple, Google, Samsung, Roku, etc. This business looks a lot more like game consoles than player manufacturing, which shifts the balance of market power to the companies making the players.

[0] Yes, the FTC sued Nintendo but that was more about the price of games and consoles, not the software lockout that prohibited you from otherwise lawfully making and selling your own Nintendo cartridges.

I like this take from a high level because it’s true. But, DRM is also an industrial technical attempt to enforce copyrights, not primarily against an industrial party, but primarily against consumers. Copyright law itself is a ‘rights management’ system, it just isn’t targeted at digital assets, and the truth is that copyright law doesn’t come with built-in or automatic enforcement, and a large number of consumers and businesses are perfectly content to ignore the law and consume/copy/distribute without permission or payment.

Let’s momentarily ignore the fact that a: many DRM implementations overstep copyright and prevent some kinds of consumption that are legal under copyright law, and b: many DRM implementations are technically bad and make some kinds of legal and legitimate consumption difficult, annoying or inconvenient.

It doesn’t seem like the author’s claim is correct or justified that DRM gives content creators leverage over playback device manufacturers. Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but it seems like the claim is backwards and inside-out.

DRM is a symptom of the existing leverage, it isn’t the cause. DVD player makers reluctantly put DRM in because they’ve been asked/forced to, because the MPAA and licensing groups already have leverage, not because DRM itself is bestowing more leverage. The very control and leverage that content makers want over playback manufacturers is the ability to force them to implement DRM!

Not with intellectual property. This isn't ten-commandments stuff, protections against evil. Intellectual property law is an openly commercial law meant to increase the profitability of innovations.

I remember an article from way back about what the Bible would think of copyright "piracy". It is such modern set of laws that anyone mentioned in the bible would probably stare in bewilderment at the concept. It would be like asking about the morality of air traffic control regulations.

The idea (again, this is just in theory) is economic benefit to society overall. The idea is that if there's no copyright then creators would have no economic incentive to create anything, so they wouldn't bother. Profit to copyright owners is just a mechanism to incentivise them to create benefit to society.

Actually, that's the theoretical reason for all profit, not just for copyright.

A consequence of this is that there shouldn't be any increase to copyright term that only increases profits but doesn't increase benefit to society. But obviously political lobbyists don't follow that theory.

And yet, we've had creative works from all of human history, despite copyright being barely a hundred or two years old, and our modern effectively-infinite conception of copyright is only now reaching 50 years old. This theory doesn't hold up to even a couple seconds of scrutiny.

The only “art creation” scenario copyright seems to promote is “Corporation hires army of workers to make $100M 17th Spider-Man Sequel”. No, those specific kinds of work probably would not exist without government-mandated monopoly, but to say it promotes art in general is kind of exaggerating.

I think you are under-estimating the extent to which these people are seeking to "make it" and become profitable later.

There are also lots of SV start-ups that never make any money, yet it doesn't prove that they would still exist if NONE of them EVER made any money.

I think this is the origin and principle aim, to allow production of works professionally - with all the skill and devotion that implies - whilst protecting the creators. Copyright seems to have been steered heavily away from that aim by the usual suspects who rent-seek in preference to adding value to society.

Pre-copyright, content was either commissioned by patrons or done by bored independently rich people. Artists didn't have some burning desire to paint rich ladies and religious works, that's just what was demanded.

We could go back to that system. But it won't be a prolific as our current system. If copyright ended for TV/movies, we'd probably get some BBC/PBS content, some indie movies, but we'd probably just have a bunch of reality TV with an insane amount of product placement.

[Edit: just be clear, people working on side projects on their own and huge multimillion dollar projects are two extremes of a large spectrum. I chose the opposite extreme to make a point but almost everything in the middle also only exists because of copyright.]

Maybe some would still exist to some level through alternative mechanisms e.g. government or charitable funding, or a group effort akin to open source. But I think it's clear that you're talking orders of magnitude less output.

Don't forget copyright also applies to software. It's even more clear that open-source movements work for software! But it's still the case that without copyright there would be some software that wouldn't get written. Certainly, speaking personally, my software economic output would be lower if it weren't my full time job!

The scarse resource is not that song or that movie. It's the time of the people that created that song and that movie. That's is part of the cost of production.

This is similar to there are millions of houses but only a few in the most scenic places. Want one of them, pay more. It could be the same for the most popular songs and movies. The time of their creators is more valuable than mine. When writing software probably the other way around.

Of course they don't sell songs and movies like that and creators sometimes only get peanuts. I'm not a very good Devil's advocate.

That's not really valid, though. Time is not the thing being exchanged -- it's impossible to do that -- so isn't a resource, scarce or otherwise, in the sense we mean. On top of that, the previous commenter made an error -- property rights aren't a solution to disputes over scarce resources, they're a solution to disputes over rival resources, regardless of how scarce they are. Since time is not transferable, it's not rival.

More to your point, though, the consumption of time engaged in a productive activity is a capital expenditure, with the risk borne by those expending it, as with any other capital expenditure -- your investment lets you bring a product to market, but no one is obligated to do business with you, and whether people compensate you enough to generate a sufficient return is up to them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_currency

We do not "trade" time in jail between society and an individual. We deny certain freedoms for a period of time. There is no economic equivalent when it comes to time.

Learning is a process that consumes time now for improved capability or efficiency in the future.

[1]: https://virginica.substack.com/p/the-printing-press-nfts-and... (it also talks about NFTs but that part is not relevant for this discussion)

I love IA and have donated to them before but this is slowly sliding into the dark UX patterns making web unusable.

This is ironic because the internet archive made this just last year https://wayforward.archive.org/

A quick search shows that the lawsuit is currently in the discovery phase, which is around the time that lawsuits start to get really, really expensive. And apparently the two sides are fighting, leading the judge to extend discovery while they work out the issues. $$$$

But can it please be without the annoying banners, "we need to talk" or similar email subjects and so on? I'm sure it helps convince some people, but doesn't it discourage more?

Had to zoom into the corner so I could tap the microscopic close button on the timeline so I could then close the donation banner.

I often hear arguments that its “easier to pirate movies than use DRM’d software”. But I don’t think this is actually the case for the average non-tech-savvy person. If you can operate a torrent client or even know what one is, you are much savvier than the average Netflix/Roku/etc user.

DRM means that there isn’t a point-and-click app for my mom to send her sister a movie. This is the average person who buys movies. Not some geek on a tech forum.

This is how it goes in other countries, too, where you cannot even legitimately get disks or downloads, much less be able to afford them.

It is true it's simpler to just stream content for those that have the money and tech, but if you've seen how the media giants have split the market it's not affordable to most people to have Hulu live tv, Netflix, Disney+, Spotify, etc - all to watch a few specific movies. Piracy is a natural result.

Don't underestimate the amount of tech knowledge people have nowadays, especially if it will save money. They themselves may not know, but they know someone that does. The internet has become a beautiful resource to learn absolutely anything. VPN's are advertised everywhere on YouTube. Necessity is the mother of invention after all.

Oh yes, thank you for remembering that. It's truly an exception around here.

Pretty much all streaming services refuse to accept my money or provide access to 0.1-1% of their catalog (compared to what is available in the US, literally a few to a few dozen shows/movies) for exactly the same price per month, so who would even bother? Of course, you can always try to find a working VPN, if they weren't getting blocked all the time.

I believe Spotify is the only service that gives access to the same selection as in every other country.

So everyone "pirates" everything, especially if you want content in its untranslated original form.

Edit: except for games. Most games are available from Steam and other major platforms, and those are very popular.

The person in your anecdote likely wasn’t a profitable customer anyway. Their goal is to make money from the masses who have it, not to try to squeeze blood from a stone.

Because that's apparently the only way to watch legitimate DVDs.

This works also in the opposite direction. I know of some couples, who can easily share even 200USD/month on streaming services, however they consider "the alternatives" to "save money", who are of course illegal here in Europe.

Nowadays "saving" let's say 20USD for Netflix per month is - in my opinion - a very bad bargain considering the fact, that you can end up paying a lot of punitive damages.

Pirated software/movies always added some sort of value to the product. For example, DVDs forced (and still do) you to watch a couple of minutes of FBI warnings, anti-piracy trailers etc. instead of just letting you instantly watch the movie you paid (!) for. Pirated DVDs just offered the movie, full control to the user - like in streaming nowadays.

So if you have the money, I do not get people who want to "save money" on streaming.

Funny thing is that pirated content is the only ethical content I know of, that doesn't rely on ads (streaming services have ads too, even if you pay)

anyway, if I pay for Netflix who has produced their own content, why should I also watch the ads for other Netflix content?

Isn't it enough to pay for it?

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/music-news/tv-film-co...

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/oct/26/squid-g...

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-57838473

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-57382459

https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/scarlett-johansson-sues-dis...

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-56815282

Also, streaming services are swimming in cash and using it to monopolize the market, instead of rewarding creators.

theft is when you take something from someone, when you download a movie, Netflix users can still watch it, Netflix can still stream it and they don't lose anything.

In fact their profits have gone up, despite helping piracy by releasing more and more content easily sharable outside of their platforms.

Netflix alone made 7.5 billions in the third quarter of 2021, up from 6.4 billions in the third of 2020.

someone really believes that leaks are unfortunate? have you seen a single image leaked from the next Indiana Jones movie? Do you know the title?No? you know why? because they'll work next year on the post production and are keeping everything under rigorous control. leaks will be useful only when they are ready to launch. When Luca..ehm Disney wants to take secrecy seriously, they absolutely can and will.

Anyway: I pay for prime video, because it's included with prime. I rarely watch other streaming services nor download their content.

Last exception was Foundation from Apple, thank god I did not pay for that!

Usually it works like this: I wanna watch an old movie, say Total Recall, some streaming service bought it for Christmas or whatever occasion together with all Schwarzenegger movie, to release a "member berry" bundle

I probably already have it, ripped from DVD, when it comes out I download it again because I'll probably find the x265 version which is smaller or the 2160p (or 1080p) restored version.

If someone ever one day invents the Star Trek replicator, it would end scarcity of physical goods overnight! This would be an amazing thing for humanity (and would likely be opposed/outlawed by the same moneyed interests that oppose the sharing of non-physical goods). This hypothetical invention would utterly change humanity for the better.

I would download a car! No question. If the alternative is needlessly spending money on the exact same product, of course I would, and so would nearly everyone posting here. What an absurd campaign that was! In a world without physical good scarcity, there would be nothing ethically wrong with doing it.

Oh, and we’ve only been talking about cars and movies—luxury goods. Notice how the argument is never “would you download food?” Or “would you download insulin?” I think even EvilStudioExec might have a hard time arguing against downloading necessities or life-saving medicine.

If you go to the hospital in my country you can "download inulin" because it's free for everybody who needs it, rich or poor.

Yes, such as when you use someone's creative work contrary to their express desire. Digital goods don't work the same way as physical works, it's true, but all of the people involved in making them still need to get paid.

The principled, ethical stance is not to watch things you don't want to pay for. Nobody's life is impoverished by making the percentage of entertainment they don't watch go from 99.9987% to 99.999%.

No, that's not theft.

That's infringement of rights.

But I speak with many artists and creators, they are more mad than me, I have a job where I get paid no matter what the result is, because they pay for my time.

they are between a rock and a stone: accept to work for these platforms and get paid shit, while they nmake billion, or don't and get paid shit, but at least own your work. Guess which way many are starting to take...

> The principled, ethical stance is not to watch things you don't want to pay for.

according to what ethical stance, exactly?

yours?

do you really think it is so relevant?

or the ethic of corporations, which is objectively something to stay way from.

Again, I'm not saying that the current situation is great but if you were really concerned about artists being fairly compensated you would not take the action which results in them not getting paid. You could buy directly from the artist or you can go without, but taking advantage of their work without the agreed upon compensation calls your motives into question.

Are you saying that if I ask an artist to make a painting for me and the painting get stolen AFTER they made it, I am allowed to not pay the artist?

That's a really strange POV.

Media companies should pay artists, not me.

I am only paying for their services, not for the content, which I can get in many other ways or not get it at all, which is an option too, but by your logic not watching the content would lead to artists not getting paid so I should feel bad about that too...

I am not the one monetizing artists' work and they are not doing it because I am paying, but because media companies hired them to do their job.

Again: sorry, not sorry!

That’s not the situation being discussed. What you’re arguing is more along the lines that it’s okay to sneak into a concert because you don’t like the guy selling tickets.

Not at all.

I'm arguing that you could listen to an unofficial bootleg if you don't like the guy selling tickets.

If you want to help the band, you can buy their merch from the stand.

If people working for large media companies had a merchandise stand, I would buy it, if I liked what they do.

Most of my friends are artists, writers, comic writers, painters, musicians, director, actors etc.

I've worked in the music business for a long time myself

What my friends say is that people working for streaming services today have lost the status of artists, they are employee of those companies and are doing a job, it's the company's responsibility to pay their salaries, they are not interacting with the audience anymore, they are not gifting the World with their creations, they are making products.

Just like coders who work at Adobe.

Do they mind if someone installs a cracked copy of Photoshop?

No, they do not.

Why should they?

Interesting point. Did the people who made the content get paid too? And is the value of the DVD in the physical object or the content?

No, they chose to opt-out of this market.

Usually yes, because those would be the actors/cameramen/directors/editors/etc who would be paid for their work before the finished work then would be sold on to consumers. The question here is really "Did the people who fronted the money for the content get paid?" For simplicity I'm ignoring royalties here.

> And is the value of the DVD in the physical object or the content?

If we agree that copies of digital content are zero-cost, then the monetary value of the DVD is in the physical object.

Obviously that's only half the argument because nobody's watching blank DVDs.

But how do we fairly compensate the group that fronts the money for the content to be created? IMO, this is the genius of crowdfunding and why I'm bullish about it being the economic future of content. If a content creator can convince enough people to give them money to make something, then there is nobody who needs to profit from distribution. The content is fully paid-for up-front.

It's also not a new idea. Rich patrons funded works of art in the Renaissance. Rights management would have actually been counterproductive because the point of the art was the aggrandizement of the patron.

I admire your intellectual honesty about admitting that royalties exist. Anyway, the question here is where did the money for up-front salaries come from and does does it keep coming when the if the publisher's profits are reduced?

I have participated in a few crowdfunding campaigns and I agree that it could work for a specific niche: where the content creators are already well known enough that they can attract a sufficient audience that trusts them to do something sensible with their money. It's going to be hard for newcomers. Just look at failed kickstarters: there is a lot of trash there but there could be some unpolished gems there.

> Rights management would have actually been counterproductive because the point of the art was the aggrandizement of the patron.

This is kind of the point. If I have to choose blindly between a show that's made because Jeff Bezos wants to fund it and meddles with it personally or a show that Jeff's firm funds because some professionals believe it's going to attract paying viewers, my bet is on the latter.

- Something not being available in your country

- The version that is available is a "helpfully" translated one when you would rather watch the original with subs

- Your device isn't worthy of receiving a high-quality stream despite you paying for one and your hardware being capable of decoding it

- The player is just shitty and you can't use your own

- There are ads despite you paying a subscription

- You "bought" a movie, then it was taken away from you because the seller lost the license. In other words, your continued access to something you allegedly own is still contingent on the seller and its whims.

It's surprising how much people are willing to tolerate, but in general, around me torrenting something is still the default. Some people do have Netflix or other subscriptions, but they are a minority. Just no one is having this whole "you get the same exact movie but you pay AND you get a worse UX" thing.

And DVDs? I don't think I've ever seen an actually licensed and encrypted DVD. Many players ignore all those "no fast forwarding" flags as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time

Unfortunately now there are so many streaming platforms piracy will gain in popularity again. Lots of people don't mind paying for one or two, but probably not five or six. Especially when some just have one or two good programmes.

'Subscription rotation' may become a thing: you pay for a service for a few months, catch up on any shows that were released on it that you haven't seen, and then cancel and move onto the next one. A year later you come back to the first one and do a new catch-up.

There may be one or two that you stick with (e.g., Disney if you have kids).

Unless there's a continuous series of releases that people will want to watch, I'm not sure they'll want to subscribe for an entire year: it surely adds up.

Probably depends from where you are. In Poland some 15 years ealier, it was quite a common skill, even for people who rarely used anything else on the internet. Many people had crappy and unstable connections and torrenting was the only viable option for them to watch anything from the Internet.

1 https://flixtor.to/home

But Netflix has 213 million users. If pirating was really so much easier and DRM made legal options unusable, they wouldn’t.

DRM sucks, but Netflix isn’t going out of business any time soon

I am willing to bet there are more than 500 million people pirating, so I don't think this argument carries much weight. Netflix is a very 'rich western country' thing. The rest of the world exists.

The rest of the world exists but that doesn't mean they were going to be paying customers anyway.

Nitpicking, but Netflix has 213 millions subscribers, not users.

We don't know how many of them are active or how many people are using them.

We simply know they paid one time.

Pirating skyrocketed as well during 2020

The two things are not adversaries as much as one might think

Theatrical releases on streaming services have helped piracy, now you can download a movie mere days after it came out and the quality is gonna be perfect.

> More people are pirating movies during the coronavirus lockdown During the last seven days of March, there was a 43% spike in Americans visiting sites that pirate movies compared with the last seven days of February. Italy, which went under lockdown orders on March 9, saw visits to piracy sites spike 66%

If you know more, I'm curious to listen.

I don't know many folks that actually torrent things now. If you want to be able to see it offline, sure, or if you want the physical file. It isn't necessary, though. Even if it was, the last torrenting software I used was pretty easy and you didn't need to be that tech savvy to use it.

It doesn't matter because this isn't necessary. Streaming sites exist, and they are definitely easy to use. So long as you have a decent internet connection, there is no real reason to download anything.

Perhaps though the real friction is not exactly technical but that the piracy sites don't have the same attention-capturing "feed" or recommendation mechanisms set up. Just the friction of having to make choices.

Popular movies were always on top of the list because the default sorting was by seeders and these movies would load instantly

At the time it was the best streaming experience existing, paid or free combined.

[edit] oh and install was just dropping an all-in-one app somewhere on your computer and launch it.

The allure of Netflix is simply legality, but for selection it is a step backwards from a decent streaming site.

Part of what people don’t seem to remember is that one of the benefits of iTunes was its huge selection. Netflix is becoming more and more like BandCamp, not iTunes, in terms of selection. I don’t go there to find something to watch anymore. I only go there if I want to watch one of the few things worth watching on it.

There is currently no legal video platform for watching all the things. (And that’s ignoring the DRM crap.)

also, no ads.

there is nothing inherently difficult in watching unlicensed content.

and downloading has been a thing since I can remember.

Everyone in my age range or younger than me (mid 40s) should know exactly how to do it.

the main two reasons people watch paid services nowadays are:

1 - they have kids and don't want to do parenting, because it's hard, so they buy Disney+ and leave the kids in front of it

2 - they are young and have been educated to them by their parents (AKA they don't pay for it)

3 - go back to one

As you age (30s-40s), generally your can afford more and so access some of these most popular cultural artefacts without copyright infringement; so you should pay. Also, it may become less important to establishing and maintaining friendships and status (like if you find your niche in society).

I don't think those following such a social progression need be aware of it.

At my age I have no FOMO, truth is I never had it before either, it might be me or the fact that I am naturally immune to most mimetic tactics, I simply get no reward from social acceptance.

Anyway: at my age I have developed my own moral compass,I pay to go to the movies, I pay for concerts, I pay for records, I pay for books, I pay to watch and listen online content that I think it's worth it (I buy a lot of music from Bandcamp) I have no ethical problem boycotting VC funded services that want to build a monopoly (growth, they call it) and have fragmented the market in ways that "excluded [people] from the principle cultural medium film/television" of their times.

sorry, not sorry.

But who has the disposable income? Who is being catered to, really?

"magistv"

1) it only considers two of the three main actors in the DRM sphere - content "providers", by which the author seems to mean content distributors, and manufacturers of playback devices. It completely ignores why content creators, the people who actually make stuff, might want to use DRM. Yes sometimes these are the same entities as the content distributors. But not always.

2) it ascribes intent(purpose) to actors without examining what those actors say about their intent. The closest it gets is criticising the arguments of fellow opponents of DRM. This isn't even strawmanning. If you want to understand the purpose behind your opponent's acts its generally a good idea to look at the arguments of said opponents rather than the arguments of your allies.

Ignoring 2, let's look at why content creators might want to use DRM, knowing that it can eventually be circumvented. If you're a content creator then delaying pirates by just a week or two can have a massive effect on your revenue. For example on steam roughly 1/4 to 1/2 of a games revenue for the first year will be earned in the first week[1].

The movie business and book publishing is similarly skewed to opening weekends. While sleeper hits and cult classics do exist they are the exception, not the rule.

So from a content creator's (mine) point of view, the purpose of DRM is to delay pirates long enough to earn that crucial opening weekend or weeks revenue, and this continue eating. Creators know that pirates will likely crack the DRM at some point, and its not unusual to remove it after a time, since by that point it no longer matters.

I frankly don't care a jot about some imagined power struggle between distributors and manufacturers. What I care about is being able to make a living.

I know there will always be parasites who want everything for free despite being able to pay, and people who genuinely can't afford to pay for content (fair enough, but do you actually need a copy of generic superhero movie pt. XII to live a fulfilling life. No), and I accept that. But I don't have to make life easy for them.

[1]https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/steam-the-state-of-long...

I could go along with that argument for movies that have been available for weeks on download sites. But I don't see how DRM would prevent a film from leaking way before its release date. If that happens, I'd venture you have a different problem.

For creative works with a longer "main revenue" window that are consumed on a computer (i.e. games), I can go along with this reasoning for top-priced titles. For games that are $15 on steam, dunno. Doesn't seem worth the effort to deprive the creator of some revenue, just to save 15 bucks. But what do I know, I don't make & sell games.

E-books seem different yet again - but again, I don't write and sell ebooks. Except for a handful of well-known titles or titles receiving universal praise and prize considerations, I'd guess you'd be lucky to be noticed in the book market. I have no clue whether more popularity will drive sales more than downloads will cut into sales.

More fundamentally, DRM is a bandaid whose need arises from trying to apply traditional economic models (of buying and selling physical, tangible things) to digital assets that never wear out and cost /essentially/ nothing to duplicate and distribute. Even basic concepts of ownership and having possession of something don't really apply in the traditional way.

If we could start from scratch, what might work is a purely use-based model, where e.g. every time you listen to a song, you pay a tiny, tiny fee for it. This creates a much stronger correlation between creators providing value and consumers deriving value from what they created, which in the long term makes more sense anyway. There are a lot of hurdles to getting there, though. On the consumer side, the concept of paying-means-owning is pretty ingrained, so we balk at the idea of continuing to pay for something after we already bought it. On the creator/provider side, the price for each use is going to seem far lower than what they think is fair, again for largely the same reason.

We need to embrace the digital model, not fight it. Detach ownership and control from the output, there are plenty of business models that work when the product is freely reproduceable.

Because right now we've created a hellscape where consumers have zero control or agency over their media, and we are erasing the old ways of physically possessing it.

This requires something track me each time I listen to something. Why should the creator, or an agent of the creator of that work get that power over me?

Traditional economics don't require this tracking. E.g. I buy a car off of a car lot--the car lot doesn't need to know where and when I'm using the car.

IMHO royalty is a concept that is a burden on society and the legal system when we live in an age where it is so easy to create certain types of works - never in any point in society have there been so many writings, songs, artworks, games/software, and motion pictures produced. For copyright to really work as it's intended, all avenues of human communication need to be MITMed and massive data stores tracking everything any human being creates need to be maintained. Various cartels actively work for this.

Well, you have no inherent right to the creator's work at all, so consider it one of the terms of the agreement in which you get access to the content and the creator gets some form of compensation.

But just to reiterate, this is how it would work under a use-based model. If you have something better to suggest, then by all means do, because I don't think we've uncovered the best solution yet. The comments about copyright require, as you noted, tracking too, but copyright itself only covers part of the problem, and that is not destroying the incentive to create and innovate in the first place (see below).

> Traditional economics don't require this tracking. E.g. I buy a car off of a car lot--the car lot doesn't need to know where and when I'm using the car.

Right, but traditional economic models also don't know how to deal with a situation in which you can buy a car, never have it wear out, and create an infinite number of exact duplicates for free that you could keep for yourself or turn around and sell to anyone else, which is basically the situation we have with digital works.

True and a creator has no inherent right to my physical property or location info. If I hear a song over public airwaves and record it, or download it from a consenting party using bandwidth I pay for, the fact that I'm supposed to obey some license terms that I haven't consented to is an infringement on me. Creators can limit how things are released if they care so much. Supposedly Wu-Tang Clan did it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_in_Shaolin.

> If you have something better to suggest, then by all means do

The sustainable path is commission-based works which could extend to patronage. I want something from an artist, I ask them to do it, then pay them for it. Musicians are already doing this with concerts.

For things that are beyond the reach of a single person, there's no reason why this can't be done group-style a la Kickstarter-type services. If the artist wants more money, they can make more works.

The mass-market motion picture and TV industry might collapse, but with the advent of streaming services it doesn't matter anymore.

FWIW I do think trademark and patents are needed and do benefit society.

> Right, but traditional economic models also don't know how to deal with a situation in which you can buy a car, never have it wear out, and create an infinite number of exact duplicates for free that you could keep for yourself or turn around and sell to anyone else, which is basically the situation we have with digital works.

That's because an economic model resolves scarcity and is the wrong tool/framework/mindset when scarcity doesn't exist. If the above existed, then everyone should have as many cars as they want.

I'd be curious to see how this would play out - maybe it'd be great, I dunno. I do wonder, though, if approaches like this discourage people from paying and instead encourages hedging their bets to see if everyone else pays. For example, if there is a Kickstarter for a movie idea you find interesting, but you know that once the movie is made that you can get a copy for free (since there is no control over media in this model), you are incentivized to wait and see if it will get funded without you.

Similarly, without any content control, there is little incentive for anyone to sign up for streaming services, so relying on them for funding doesn't seem like it'd work either.

Possibly, but for the people who really want it, they'll pay, and exactly two entities should be controlling this whole apparatus - the people who want it and the creators, not advertising or bloated-overhead distribution pyramids. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't.

No, it's not going to produce the same volume of output as mass-market music, movies and TV that we have currently.

Some people who are very passive media consumers may miss the old days and refuse to consume media that isn't handed to them on a silver platter, but the old days are dying anyway. US culture could be fracturing to the point where mass-market movies and TV may be impossible, something that was really obvious at least in music in the early 90's.

> Similarly, without any content control, there is little incentive for anyone to sign up for streaming services

This is only true if the experience is much worse than torrents, filesharing programs etc. and if people know someone who can get that in their preferred viewing/listening format. If there were no such thing as music copyright I'd still pay for a service where I can have a guarantee of getting specific music I want rather than rely on the goodwill of someone with that song to be connected on a p2p network.

And we sort of have this use-based system now, but with unlimited uses per month of active subscription.

Yes and no. In order for the scheme to work, yes, you'd always need something that encourages people to play by the rules, but it would look very, very different from many of the DRM systems of today, whose focus is on shoring up the ill-fitting concepts of ownership and possession. For example, in today's DRM, it's typical to have mechanisms for granting a license to allow playing the media N times, or being able to play the media from startDate thru endDate. Most (all?) of that would go away.

Ideally the new system would not have any noticeable friction for end-users, but as a practical matter, things can still work if we at least get to the point where the friction is significantly lower than just stealing it (much like today - if it's easy enough to just consume the media legitimately, for many people piracy just isn't worth the effort).

> And we sort of have this use-based system now, but with unlimited uses per month of active subscription.

It's definitely a partial step in that direction, yes, and I'm encouraged by the fact that I don't buy DVDs or music anymore because it shows consumers are being weaned off the concept of digital media ownership (and I hope the NFT fad dies out, because it runs counter to this).

A couple of big hurdles that remain are (a) content distributors are still way too bent on gatekeeping and content control - for this to really work they are going to have to dial that back quite a bit, and (b) too little of the compensation is making it back to the content creators and/or the compensation is still often one or a few transactions (Bruce Springsteen recently sold the rights to all his music for half a billion dollars) instead of an ongoing compensation for as long as people are using it.

That was what they thought it was for.

Turns out it gives the creators of playback devices leverage against content providers, e.g. iOS App Store.

I think it is interesting that this is the case now since 5+ years ago games were cracked within days, always.

Also, with sales going on all the time, there is much less incentive for many people to torrent. It's also more convenient to own the game on Steam due to automatic updates, mods, etc.

As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service problem. Provide a better service and it'll go away. I think this is largely what has happened here. Same with streaming services like Netflix.

The "high number of new games coming out every day" are overwhelmingly indie titles that don't use denuvo. It's not like crackers are being overwhelmed with hundreds of indie titles per year.

I used to work in DRM. I implemented, I believe, the first DRM for practically every major and minor record label in Europe and North America. The only reason any of them stated to me that they required DRM was to prevent copyright infringement. Yes, I pointed out the insanity of their solution. The firm I worked for didn't have the muscle of the one that came on our heels (Apple) and managed to temporarily remove DRM from music.

They hate piracy because it does cost them. How complicated does it need to be?

Now if you were an executive on any level on such a corporation, would you want to continue doing the minimum effort thing of keeping everything the same? Or would you recommend completely changing everything, including replacing you with someone with different skills. Itunes did not hire the same distribution of people as the old record companies had, not even close. They could not fight it forever, and the change is still in progress, with more artists than ever using alternate crowdsourcing, etc.

https://torrentfreak.com/eu-piracy-report-suppression-raises...

> “In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements,”

> That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect.

Absence of evidence != evidence of absence.

Instead of the usual hypocrisy.

There was never any hint of any conspiracy or any other motivation than to limit piracy. They saw that DRM files could not be traded on Napster or any other file-sharing system du jour and that was all they wanted. Sales be damned.

Here is an interesting related story: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree...

Once we'd opened the door to each label, Apple would breeze in right behind us and find no resistance. Later they used the Cult of Jobs as their leverage to get rid of DRM on their downloads. It looks like DRM is creeping back in again to their lossless and Atmos downloads now Jobs is no longer around to use his muscle to keep the labels honest. It's like an addiction for them, they can't stay away from it.

Which wouldn't even be a thing if intellectual property rights, which are at the core of the whole debate, were untransferable and only endured for the lifetime of the creator.

If anyone were able to lobby those simple, clear changes into law, the effects of that would probably be Earth-altering.

I also don’t understand your suggestion for fixing copyright law. What constitutes a ‘creator’ in the case of a company that makes something? (Same question for a band, or any group of multiple people.) How would you handle accidental death? What about a company acquisition? How do you define ‘untransferable’? Are you saying it should be okay for a company creator to hold the copyright forever as long as the company is in business, but individual people can’t give or sell copyrights? That would be a boon for Disney and very bad for individual artists. It doesn’t seem like your suggestion is prepared to deal with the realities and complexities of business and life…

Yes, I often cut deals with the people you refer to as "corporate ghouls". While I often lament the terms, they aren't horrible. In the end, I make enough money to avoid searching for a job with other corporations trading in material goods.

I would feel differently about the system if it weren't performing relatively well for most people. You say these ghouls "cheated" you into "renting" things. I'm not disputing the various philosophical sophistries that people use to complain about artificial scarcity etc. I just know that this evening, I"ll be able to get a nice movie that cost millions of dollars to make and spend only a few dollars to watch it in my living room. That only works when piracy doesn't.

Do you understand that your being more or less content with the results of a deal does not have a bearing on how good, or decent, or moral, the system overarching that deal is?

Tons of people seem more or less into Nestlé products despite their long track record of profiting from slavery, do you believe that being the case makes agricultural slavery a good thing?

On your last statement, how exactly do you think not paying for a thing you wouldn't pay for anyway prevents that thing from existing? Like, if I torrent "Superheroes in Body Gloves 27" instead of, you know, ignoring it, then a time travelling ghost will materialize in the set and kidnap the directors? Or how would that work

Parent’s valid and legitimate point is that if nobody pays for the content then it’s not a viable business model and it won’t get made in the first place. You can’t pirate a movie that doesn’t exist.

"Piracy", which in reality is probably better called "online jaywalking" as it, too, is a made up faux-pas created so as to allow a couple soulless drones to make more money, hasn't to date represented an obstacle to content creation, they still happily churn products all the time, so I don't see any reason to think it will become an existential threat to the studio suits any time soon.

And maybe it should. Which is kind of core to the whole debate; is it actually good to anyone in any way to have a business based around forbidding free access to easily duplicable cultural products? Should such a thing even be allowed to thrive?

Do you have a job? Do you work for a company that makes money? Would you be okay with the product you’re working on being taken for free by people who insist they shouldn’t have to pay for it?

Your language feels really very hyperbolic to me. There are many real people with real jobs trying to make livings, even if the corporations they work for are greedy. DRM can indeed be shitty and it often oversteps copyright, but we can ignore DRM here because the argument you’re actually making is one against respecting copyright law and against respecting artists.

> is it actually good to anyone in any way to have a business based around forbidding free access to easily duplicable cultural products? Should such a thing even be allowed to thrive?

Yes. The answer is yes, without question. This has been debated by scholars and lawmakers and artists and business people for hundreds of years, and we have a compendium of laws that protect the people who make content precisely because it does, in fact, do them some good.

See Chesterton’s Fence: you don’t get to nuke the existing system until you actually understand why it’s there and how it got there. If you believe it serves zero people but still manages to exist, that means that your belief is wrong and you need to do some research.

The biggest problem with your argument is you’re blindly focused on the execs and profits of only the very largest media conglomerates, and you’re ignoring not only the tens of thousands of artists they employ, but you’re also ignoring all smaller businesses that aren’t making enormous profits and can’t afford to give away their content for free.

> movies lose otherwise hilarious amounts of money all the time and they seem to still exist somehow.

The amount of money someone makes is not any of your business, and it does not justify stealing the things they make without their permission. Copyright law can and does apply even to works that don’t cost money, and it also applies equally when someone’s enjoying handsome profits. You are not legally invited to copy anything based on someone else’s income.

Studios sometimes do lose money on movies and they survive because they make multiple movies. Studios also sometimes report misleading sales figures. I’ve worked in films and games as an artist, and watched studios do “creative accounting”. Reports of losses don’t prove anything, and don’t justify breaking copyright law.

No, I'm not. What's more, that's an easily disprovable lie: My duplicating of a file does not somehow delete the original. My downloading of this page hasn't done anything to your post.

> Movies often costs tens to hundreds of millions to produce, and they only take on that level of risk because of the financial return of people who pay to watch them.

Financial return that, according to themselves, is at best terrible? And that you, too, keep mentioning, despite loudly proclaiming they are of noone's interest?

> Do you have a job? Do you work for a company that makes money? Would you be okay with the product you’re working on being taken for free by people who insist they shouldn’t have to pay for it?

My job does not rely on handing copies of our product's binaries to people if they pinky promise they'll only use it in a way we approve of though. And if we, too rented garbled copies of it with time-limited access to the ungarbling machinery, we probably should disclose that beforehand so that prospective customers don't end up feeling like they've been defrauded.

> you’re also ignoring all smaller businesses that aren’t making enormous profits but can’t afford to give away their content for free

I'm not asking anyone to give anything away for free. And in any case the fact that the gatekeeping-culture-industrial-complex also exploits other smaller creators could easily also be considered problematic in and by itself.

> The amount of money someone makes is not any of your business

Oh but it is, specifically when they make it into a battle cry to invade my privacy and impede my agency in a deeply dumb search of unapproved copies of whatever they feel like claiming to own.

You’ve made several snarky and strawman replies about money, but ignored the actual point I made; the fact that copyright laws do not depend or discriminate based on profits. This is a fact, not a debate. Your opinion about any given studio’s claimed losses is completely irrelevant to the question of whether you should be allowed to break the law.

> My job does not rely on handing copies of our product’s binaries to people if they pinky promise they’ll only use it in a way we approve of though.

Yes it does. You’re wrong. Does your product’s use come with a EULA? Does your company have any security? Does your product get paid for? Are you putting your code in the public domain? If you write code, your code is covered by copyright law, and you have both legal and technical mechanisms in place to protect people from taking your code and your product for themselves without your company’s permission. You are doing the same things as DRM, you’re being hypocritical.

> I'm not asking anyone to give anything away for free.

Then I’ve gotten the wrong impression, please clarify what you mean. You’ve argued above that you (and everyone) should be able to watch movies for free because they’re easy to duplicate and they are cultural assets. What are you asking for then?

And yet here you are, claiming that "pirating" something is somehow bad.

Look, I think our disagreement comes down to definitions. So, let's clarify some things.

For me,

    "A thing" is an entity that is capable of being described as "being". For instance, your phone, a bottle, a trip, a word, love, inertia.

    "Good" is a desirable quality of "A thing" that by being attached to it adds to its value. 

    "Bad" on the other hand is an undesirable quality of "A thing", which detracts from it. 
    
    "Control" is the ability to do with a thing whatever I want,

    "Selling" "A thing" is relinquishing "Control" over it for money, 
    
    "Buying" "A thing" is receiving "Control" of a thing in exchange of money

    "Renting" "A thing" on the other hand is relinquishing "some" control of that thing for some time in exchange of money.
    
    "Promising" something is agreeing to do that thing; doing the thing that was agreed upon is generally considered "Good".

    "Cheating" is "Promising" "A thing" and then doing a different one, which is "Bad"
    
    "Copying" "A thing" is creating "A thing" that is fundamentally interchangeable for "Another Thing"

For you on the other hand all of those terms ostensibly appear to mean "whatever lets me sleep at night" and it seems that this gap is bothering you a lot.

I also see you seem to be conflating your opinion on things with their legality and their moral qualities, which are three entirely disconnected things. It is legal in some countries to kill perceived deviants in a kind of ritual show. Would you call that good? Does that being "legal" make it any better?

Yes, I do agree that pirating something is somehow bad. I don’t see the point you’re trying to make by quoting me. You’re going to have to state it rather than expect I can read your mind.

I don’t agree with your snarky summary of my position. What you’ve demonstrated here is that you 1) didn’t listen to and/or didn’t understand what I said but believe you do, 2) don’t understand copyright law, why it exists and what shapes it, and 3) what the boundaries and distinctions are between copyright law and DRM.

Instead of being vague, can you give some specific examples of movies you paid for where the language used in the actual transaction said you were purchasing a copy of the movie, but it ended up being a rental? I’m not aware of any streaming service that uses either of those words, but it seems like you might have expectations that are outside of what the thing being offered was. Please give an example of how you were cheated by linking to the product.

Cheerio!

Here are some definitions that seem more reasonable:

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sell

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/buy

(Note neither of these involve use of the word “control”)

Here is the text of US copyright law, I recommend reading it:

https://www.copyright.gov/title17/

Yes...and?

The problem with this discussion is that it looks at this issue from one side only. It is kind of implied that content providers and creators are bad guys whilst us consumers are clearly the good guys, needlessly oppressed and restricted in our supposed "right" to consume all of the content in the world in the way we see fit.

Maybe, just maybe, this leverage is a necessary evil to actually keep the lights on. If you look at Netflix, they deliver a tremendous amount of value whilst only recently becoming profitable. We're talking single digit billions, which sounds like a lot, but really isn't. Content costs a fortune to produce and is risky.

As Netflix tries to monetize, yes they will experiment with arbitrary business models that can appear consumer-hostile. It may not make sense to you to pay more for using multiple screens. It is wrong to assume though that this "harm" is because Netflix enjoys harming you. It may simply be a model because other models fail.

A very "fair" model would be entirely usage-based. You pay for how much you match as well as taking account the value of the content you watch (the production cost). This model would completely fail. It's a morally pure and fair concept, yet would be rejected by consumers. It just shows how neither party is interested in fairness or morality.

Likewise, consumers normalize account sharing, VPN into low cost countries, and buy accounts from Alibaba. All to undermine the business model.

Let's not kid ourselves as if we're doing this as part of some human rights struggle. We're just trying to get access to commercial entertainment in the cheapest way possible. We're in absolutely no position to preach or lecture.

What you may consider a massive issue as a series/movie fanatic may not be an issue at all to a casual that watches their favorite series after work. Content platforms base their business model on casuals, not a needy extremist.

In reality the DRM technology isn't that important its more akin to the questionnaire you get for car insurance that says do you have a thatcham alarm.

Too much analysis looks at this from technical angle when it's really an insurers tool to lower their risk (only to lower it!).

It's not a big deal when a device/content is compromised merely a policy pays out in the background to the provider to the effect of % lost revenue. All normal insurance ruled apply, payout decided by expert witness, higher premiums for less secure devices etc.

Do you have any evidence of such insurance policies existing? I've never heard of them before. It seems strange considering that most pieces of content are leaked fairly quickly.

The leaking of content doesn't matter that much unless it really affects revenues in the scale of the revenues.

It's ironic really. The absolute prevention of leaking content isn't expected. DRM is more like making sure the front door isn't wide open.

* https://www.manning.com/

* https://pragprog.com/

But is there something like Amazon which has a huge library of DRM-free ebooks for sale?

[0] http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1363672582&count=1

I don't see that at all in the article. Anywhere.

What I read in the article is that it says that the purpose of DRM isn't to prevent _unlawful behaviour_, it's to enforce _lawful behaviour_ to be performed in a specific way. The actual _act_ of copying (or distribution, or playback, which are all a form of "copying", sure) is not as relevant to the author as the way that it is being done.

Early in it makes a strong and specific claim :

"The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices."

This is explicitly stated and I believe a meaningful hypothesis to explore and base an article around. It frames the argument instead of just "creator vs pirates" as "one industry vs another" which is a sufficiently different ballgame. I found it quite in line with title.

What does this actually mean, though? What is it that the playback devices are doing that they don't want other than playing unauthorized material?

Framing the problem as "it's not about copying, it's about unauthorized playback" is meaningless. That's just another word for copying in this context. They want control over when and how their IP is played. The word 'copying' has always been shorthand for this.

Yes, that is indeed the case. Who is in a position to enforce those controls over playback? The device manufacturers! So we are in a scenario where device manufacturers want to commoditize the content ("play anything on as many of our devices as you want"), while content providers want to restrict the content so they can monetize access to it.

The point this article is making is that DRM, as it works, is highly conducive to "platform" power. Whether or not this is the "true purpose" is a rather meaningless question, beyond casual rhetorical usage.

The language of the legislation, legislators, perhaps judges will likely refer to protecting the moral rights of creators. IRL, "creator" can be whoever owns the Beatles catalogue. IRL, the who and how of controlling "playback and distribution," dictates what kind of a company will make the commercial gains.

Those irl concerns exist, effect legislation and its details a lot. You could call those the "true purpose," but IMO there ain't no such thing as a generally true purpose. Different actors have different purposes.

Yeah. It's even arguing against itself. If I interpret it correctly,

* The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations. (Implied to mean: Ensure exactly 0 copies exist online).

* The purpose of DRM is to prevent copyright violations. (Implied to mean: by our paying customers)

If your monitor displays it and your speakers play it, it can be recorded.

I wonder what kind of hoops you have gone through in helping your friends with something as simple as this to have such an opinion.

That said, downloading Bittorrent + a VPN, browsing the Pirate Bay, and clicking a magnet link isn't some Herculean effort, either. If you can figure out how to download software on a computer, it's not hard to figure out how to pirate it, too.

Depends on the value of your time. If you get paid less in the amount it takes you to learn all that (like living in a 3rd world country), then it's not worth the $15.

My local currency is currently exchanged for USD at a factor of nearly 6 to 1, making that $15 nearly 10% of minimum wage where I live. And that's before taxes.

DRM raises the bar to casual copying from "copy a file to a USB stick" to "figure out how to run bittorrent, and find a reputable pirate site that doesn't have viruses". In order to receive pirated content, you will have to pass that hurdle, or have someone in your friend network who can pass that hurdle. If none of them can, then you're blocked from pirating.

If people think that isn't a hard hurdle to pass, then they just need to step outside the silicon valley echochamber, and spend more time around normal computer users.

What prevents distribution is taking down the sites that host content, leaving old-school torrenting as the most viable option, which is a hassle to most people.

I really do think that DRM has won folks. We have seen the 4K HDR future, and what we find on torrent sites is the same aXXo “encoded to be burned to a CD-R” bullshit I used to download as a college student. We aren’t getting 4K, we’re not even really getting 1080p. Whatever the DRM people are doing, they have succeeded in creating a gulf in quality between what you get on a streaming service, and what you get via torrents.

It all depends on how much effort the people involved put into it.