DRM Is Toxic to Culture

https://meshedinsights.com/2017/07/09/drm-is-toxic-to-culture/

by jrepinc • 9 years ago

394 250 9 years ago

meshedinsights.com

gaius3• 9 years ago

We offer research reports and white papers for your management and Board from experienced advisors

Strangely, I couldn't find any of these reports available for free download and in the public domain...

AlexandrB3• 9 years ago

Not sure what you're getting at. Lack of DRM does not mean not getting paid for your work.

gaius3• 9 years ago

"All intellectual property should be free! Except the IP I create which I should be paid for!" is problematic. The author of this piece contributes to the (perceived) necessity of copy protection.

Also those armed policemen in Paris aren't there to shoot fare evaders...

_jal4• 9 years ago

If only snappiness were logic, that would be a stinging rejoinder.

comex2• 9 years ago

Strangely, I couldn't find any of these reports available for free download and in the public domain...

No, but I bet if you pay for them you get them as PDFs, unencrypted, which you can view on a vast breadth of devices and OSes and applications, annotate/modify, clip parts out of, convert to other formats, and otherwise manipulate as you please, with no arbitrary technological restrictions getting in the way. (Compare to, say, Adobe Digital Editions wrapped PDFs, which can only be read in designated apps and limit you to the capabilities of those apps.)

gaius3• 9 years ago

with no arbitrary technological restrictions getting in the way

How does the arbitrariness of those technological restrictions differ from the arbitrariness of the legal restrictions which I'm sure the author would insist upon, should you decide to republish their work? To me they are the same thing - mechanisms for saying "you might've bought this but the original owner still has a say in what you do with it".

The world IMHO is a better place because there are mechanisms by why IP creators can be paid. Yes there is poorly written DRM (Sony, we're looking at you) but that is a problem of execution, not one of concept.

nerdponx• 9 years ago

It’s like checking the lift ticket, yes, but also the guy checks you are only wearing gear hired from the resort shop, skis with you down the slope and trips you if you try any manoeuvres that weren’t taught to you by the resort ski instructor; then as you go down the slope he pushes you away from the moguls because those are a premium feature and finally you get to run the gauntlet of armed security guards at the bottom of the slope checking for people who haven’t paid.

How is this at all an accurate analogy for DRM?

tjoff• 9 years ago

How do you play your blu-ray discs on linux btw.?

Bonus question if you succeeded: did you break any laws doing so?

ioquatix• 9 years ago

1. Realise that you don't have a blu-ray drive. 2. Install Transmission and download a rip.

Bonus answer: I probably broke laws making my morning coffee.

0xcde4c3db5• 9 years ago

This is probably an analogy for frameworks like the Protected Media Path [1] [2], which revokes authorization/decryption when "untrusted" components are detected.

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_Media_Path

makecheck• 9 years ago

DRM and advertising tech have a similar problem of bad execution. Sure, there exists a way to do each of these that many may consider "reasonable" but in practice industries have shown that they would rather be obnoxious and make everything annoying or just much more difficult than necessary. This means they can't be trusted to do it well, and the solution must be to avoid it completely (DRM-free content and ad blocker).

izacus11• 9 years ago

I don't get this - why is DRM is friggning' NECESSARY? What makes it this forced law of nature?

The current multi-billion media conglomerates grew at times when being able to copy a piece of content from TV was encoded in the LAW. Content providers earned billions of dollars at times when you could press REC on your VCR and ("THE HORROR" now every content provider shill screams) rewatch the show many times and (GASP) give the tape to your friends to watch too!

What exactly was so horrible at being able to rewatch, store and borrow a movie to a friend that now seems to completely incomprehensible to people here on HN and outside? What kind of irreversible damage is done by existence of torrents when WB, Netflix and other content providers earn record profits?

Why are we even debating DRM as something that has a right to exist and helps anyone?

EDIT: Ergh, sorry for the tone, by DRM is something that really touches my nerves a bit.

DanBC2• 9 years ago

The current multi-billion media conglomerates grew at times when being able to copy a piece of content from TV was encoded in the LAW. Content providers earned billions of dollars at times when you could press REC on your VCR and ("THE HORROR" now every content provider shill screams) rewatch the show many times and (GASP) give the tape to your friends to watch too!

TV and Movie industry spent considerable effort tackling exactly that type of home taping. You might want to have a look at Disney, who wanted to have "single use" video tapes that would need to be sent back to a factory to be rewound, or special DVDs that were sent in sealed packs and would oxidise to uselessness within 24 hours of being opened.

_jal4• 9 years ago

Well, to be fair, the VCR didn't have a distribution system attached that allows sharing worldwide.

I still agree with you, though; times change, and nobody "deserves" business-model protection. The legacy copyright industries already get massive state subsidies through the legal enforcement of artificial monopolies - degrading everyone's computing to prop them up further is insane.

jws• 9 years ago

press REC on your VCR and… make a worse copy of the already pretty bad copy you received over the air. Subsequent generation copies would be really bad. Sharing your copy with a friend involved physically transferring it and possibly not getting it back.

It really isn't comparable to a directly copyable digital form.

If you like the 1970s way, prop your phone up on a table and use the camera to record a movie off of Netflix. You will have a much better result than we did with VHS tape in the 1970s. You can probably find a filter to crap up the video to look like VHS.

ThrowawayR23• 9 years ago

What exactly was so horrible at being able to rewatch, store and borrow a movie to a friend that now seems to completely incomprehensible to people here on HN and outside?

You're forgetting that VCRs and other analog tape-based media had generational losses; every copy made degraded the quality noticeably and put wear on the tape which, from the studios' perspective, kept copying under control. That isn't so for digital recordings.

Beyond that, one can't be against DRM and for GPL enforcement at the same time and remain logically consistent. Both hinge on the owners being able to enforce certain rights granted by law on intellectual property. (Note that I'm not defending DRM here, just pointing out the facts.)

coldtea8• 9 years ago

The current multi-billion media conglomerates grew at times when being able to copy a piece of content from TV was encoded in the LAW. Content providers earned billions of dollars at times when you could press REC on your VCR and ("THE HORROR" now every content provider shill screams) rewatch the show many times and (GASP) give the tape to your friends to watch too!

Yes, but you couldn't give the content to everybody in the world. And you had to waste 1 hour or so in real-time to make a copy (which was degraded anyway).

eastWestMath5• 9 years ago

There's a huge difference between lending your friend a VHS and uploading a torrent. And the idea of owning a license to a piece of intellectual property shouldn't be a hard thing to wrap one's head around if you work in software.

panic• 9 years ago

Music downloads are largely DRM-free these days, but piracy is still as low as ever. It really is just powerful media companies abusing their power to make a little more money.

jimnotgym• 9 years ago

some people used to record the chart show off Radio 1 and share the cassettes with their friends. It didn't stop me buying music, I couldn't afford to buy music and would have done without it. In fact it turned me into a music fan, and once older I bought a lot more music because of it.

Where the official sources beat the torrents is on convenience. Spotify and Apple whatever are easy to use and busy people will pay.

A similar effect is possible with TV shows and films. I have Amazon prime, and Netflix. Prime costs me £79 a year, Netflix costs me £7.99 a month I think. Now I have a Youview box. I can watch Netflix on it but not Prime. For prime I have to buy another device or use my laptop. I wanted to see what the 'Game of Thrones' fuss was about, neither has it (amazon charges per episode actually). NowTV from Sky does, so I got a trial subscription, but the NowTV app on the Youview box only works for films, not TV shows (!), and the NowTV pc app doesn't work on Linux.

So I pay for three services and still can't watch due to petty rights issues. I could watch them all on Kodi for free of course, but that would be wrong (even though I have paid for them elsewhere).

In summary, if they refuse to get with the 21st Century they will sell less shows. If they allowed easier access to the shows they would beat piracy with convenience. DRM just makes it harder. Don't get me started on HDMI DRM

rhino369• 9 years ago

DRM and other anti-piracy measures are all about making piracy harder, not impossible. It's not an all or nothing venture.

Every little bit you make copying harder results in fewer people copying.

Cntrl C Cntrl V makes it so my mom can pirate. And she did during the Napster days. But she can't figure out BitTorrent on her own. Well, she could, but there is a learning curve, and most people aren't interested in it.

They don't have to make it impossible. They just have to make it annoying.

Easy piracy destroyed the music industry. The other media industries are rightfully suspicious.

JadeNB• 9 years ago

DRM-free content and ad blocker

While I agree with the rest of your post, I think that comparing these two is not quite accurate. DRM-free content should, I think, be compared to ad-free content; and blocking ads should probably be compared to stripping DRM. (For the record, I'm not making any moral judgement here; I do the first two as much as possible, and the last two all the time.) My point is that the consumption of DRM-free content shows the seller that you approve of it, and encourages the production of more; whereas the use of an ad blocker doesn't (or at least doesn't seem to, in any direct way) discourage the use of ads.

0xcde4c3db5• 9 years ago

They also have a problem of delivering more than was traditionally available, normalizing greater intrusiveness. Ad tech allows a staggering amount of control and analysis that never existed with traditional media advertising. DRM lets you not only prevent user copying like old-school "copy protection", it lets you enforce any arbitrary scheme of "rights" that you can code into the DRM system (e.g. you could make viewing video on high-end displays exclusive to a "premium" option). Advertisers and publishers are now accustomed to these and will fight any attempt to take them away.

problems• 9 years ago

Ads I can see as they pay for content, DRM, not so much as the content has already been paid for.

the8472• 9 years ago

Well-done DRM is even worse, because it normalizes usurping control from your machine in the name of protecting the interests of a 3rd party.

audi100quattro5• 9 years ago

As others have mentioned, music is almost copyright free. Book publishers like springer will sell you watermarked ebooks, and you can find almost any game actually worth your time on gog.com.

If producers and consumers wanted, the same could happen for movies. If creators and consumers wanted, copyright and patents could be reformed to stop the gouging of culture, creativity, and entrepreneurship for short-term profit.

audi100quattro5• 9 years ago

*music is almost DRM free.

Silhouette12• 9 years ago

The problem with technology-enforced restrictions isn’t that they allow legitimate enforcement of rights; it’s the collateral damage they cause in the process.

Indeed, but the problem with not making any effort to enforce restrictions technically is that typically you then aren't enforcing your legitimate rights.

The metro analogy was interesting. If the system in Germany works, it is because people are honest and pay for what they are using without physical compulsion.

Sadly, if you try to start a business creating original content and making it available online in the same spirit of trust, you will quickly learn that many people in the world are not so honest.

You will also learn that unlike a citywide metro system, it is all too easy for someone of less noble intentions to not only take your content for themselves without paying but also set up their own redistribution channels and steal your customers and your revenues.

A third lesson you will learn is that a lot of people may quite innocently assume that if they can do something then it's allowed, particularly if they speak a different language and don't necessarily understand the deal being offered. DRM can be quite effective at deterring this sort of casual and often unintentional infringement.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC33• 9 years ago

set up their own redistribution channels and steal your customers and your revenues.

And DRM prevents that how exactly?

A third lesson you will learn is that a lot of people may quite innocently assume that if they can do something then it's allowed

I would take this as a hint that it probably should be allowed then. If lots of people innocently assume that something is perfectly legal, the way of tyranny is to build a police state, the way of democracy is to make it legal.

Silhouette12• 9 years ago

And DRM prevents that how exactly?

It depends on the form of DRM and its effects.

One practical scenario is that most of the revenue from a new work may be generated in the early days. This is often the case with things like computer games, pop music, and big ticket movies. If DRM delays those trying to set up copycat channels, even by a few days or weeks, much of that revenue may already have been collected.

Another is that fingerprinting techniques may allow for things like automatic takedowns on the major hosting services, or identification of the source of a major leak so full legal action can be taken against the right targets.

I would take this as a hint that it probably should be allowed then.

It's not that simple. To give an obvious example that upset a lot of people, Google added a video download icon in Chrome a few months ago, right there in the controls alongside changing the volume and so on. A lot of people running small web sites that provided video content saw a spike in people who were sharing that content in violation of their terms, and it turned out that many people assumed the download button was a new feature on the site without realising that it was Chrome that had changed. This caused big problems for web developers working in this area, and a lot of complaints to Google about actively encouraging people to violate copyrights. And simply changing the way videos were served so Chrome couldn't provide that facility in the same way then fixed the problem again.

If lots of people innocently assume that something is perfectly legal, the way of tyranny is to build a police state, the way of democracy is to make it legal.

Democracy only works when the population is properly informed and understands the implications. That's hardly the case in the sort of situation I mentioned above.

AlexandrB3• 9 years ago

Sadly, if you try to start a business creating original content and making it available online in the same spirit of trust, you will quickly learn that many people in the world are not so honest.

Counterpoint: gog.com

Moreover, I have yet to see a movie that wasn't available on an illegal streaming/downloading site the day it was released on Blu-Ray, DRM or not.

Silhouette12• 9 years ago

GOG is great. I buy from them myself sometimes. However, it's also an anomaly, and much smaller than the obvious comparison in this case, Steam.

And in terms of things being available immediately, the economics of mainstream movies are quite different. There's a whole world of niche content out there that doesn't generate gazillions of dollars and that won't be leaked when it's barely reached theatres. For smaller operators, deterring casual infringement even to a moderate degree can literally be the difference between making enough money to continue operating and going out of business.

skywhopper• 9 years ago

I would say that DRM is merely an inevitable outgrowth of our society's enshrinement and worship of the idea of "intellectual property". That word, "property", gives the opposite connotations of "copyright"--permanent rightful ownership vs a temporary grant of monopoly on an idea.

But yes, it's definitely the case that the cultural idea that humans and corporations have the right to own a copyright for a length of time greater than the duration of any human life means that for 99.99% of all works, the effective duration of copyright truly is forever, which reinforces the idea that copyright should be forever. And if it's forever and it's "property" why shouldn't strong, user-hostile DRM exist? It's the barbed-wire, severe-tire-damage, border-wall of electronic media.

ThrowawayR23• 9 years ago

I would say that DRM is merely an inevitable outgrowth of our society's enshrinement and worship of the idea of "intellectual property".

If intellectual property rights cease to exist, then there's no longer any legal basis to enforce the GPL and similar licenses and the Free Software ecosystem would collapse. Are you sure you want that?

EDIT: Replaced "open source" with "Free Software". My thanks to other posters for the correction. Yes, BSD-style open source would still survive.

AlphaWeaver2• 9 years ago

If intellectual property rights ceased to exist, we wouldn't have a need for the GPL, wouldn't we?

ivanbakel• 9 years ago

Would there even still be a need for it? Releasing code without the approval of your managers would stop being a crime, and it's not like most people are only releasing free software because of licenses in the first place.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC33• 9 years ago

Yeah, obviously, the whole open source ecosystem would collapse because BSD licensed software could now also incorporate GPL code into their code base ... WAT?

samastur• 9 years ago

Free software might collapse, but open source certainly would not especially since so much of it is under MIT and similar licenses which already allow anyone to do pretty much whatever with that code.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC33• 9 years ago

And the really weird part is that while the propaganda puts it as "protecting property", it really has exactly the opposite effect. When you buy a physical book, that book is indeed your property, and you can do with it whatever you want. Now, with DRM-infested ebooks, you are actually just licensing it for very restricted use.

You might as well be claiming that making private home ownership illegal would strengthen property rights.

TeMPOraL12• 9 years ago

Indeed it would, for the parties that would argue this.

In business, property rights seem to be seen primarily, if not only, as a money-making asset - if you own something then you can license it and thus make money from it.

It works well for media companies, which is why I feel their primary business is moving property rights and licenses around, with any end-user benefit being a side effect.

type03• 9 years ago

The physical book comparison is interesting. Imagine there would be a way to publish physical books with DRM that all publishers would embrace. You open such a book without authorization and it's all gibberish. To read it you would need to have bought a special strip that you lay over the pages in order to read (don't matter the technical aspect, it's gedanken-experiment so let's consider such a strip magic for now). You buy this strip and enter a user agreement to only use it for yourself (you are not allowed to lend it - even to your children), it could easily be reverse-engineered but no-one would do it because that would be a felony.

No sane person would agree to such state of affairs but somehow now because our books are digital it's all off a sudden okay with almost everyone?

zanny5• 9 years ago

You say you can do whatever you want with a physical book, but you cannot - you are still restricted by the state from making copies of that book. You cannot take passages from that book and reuse them as your own, unless given permission by the author.

It is still not wholly your own property. It depends on the mires of the draconian copyright system, but there are things I can buy and then duplicate - if I buy a generic pill of a drug, I am fully within my right to use that pill to produce more pills like it, and nobody can sue me for infringing their IP.

Probably the scariest thing is that probably none of us can even reasonably conceive of how the world would be without this spectre hanging over everything. It influences our brain development extraordinarily fundamentally to contextualize that nothing we interact with is truly our own to learn from, because someone else almost always owns the idea behind it.

jdormit3• 9 years ago

A better analogy would be to landlords rights vs. renters rights. DRM sets conceptually equivalent restrictions on protected media as leases set on rented property.

The difference, of course, is that it is very hard/impossible to break the restrictions set by DRM, whereas the restrictions set by leases are hard to enforce.

The problem that I see is that the language around DRM needs to change - you aren't buying that Kindle book, you are renting it from Amazon under a digitally-enforced lease.

So DRM is protecting property - it's just not protecting consumers' property, since they effectively don't actually own the media in the first place.

anigbrowl6• 9 years ago

That's all true, but these analyses always seem to skate over the fact that the copyright system exists because without it it's hard for authors to get paid. Don't talk to me about a world free of intellectual property rights unless you can also offer practical suggestions for what creative people are supposed to live on while they're working. Regrettably, the cult of celebrity has blinded people to the fact that cultural work requires as much time and effort as any other variety.

A good place to start the analysis would be an assumption that all software is freely copyable, so suddenly nobody wants to pay for any of it other than for bespoke purposes. Consider how projects like NumPy and so on are only now getting funding after becoming so widely used that people are dependent on them and it takes a threat to retire from further work on it to make people put their hands in their pockets.

If you're against copyright, then you need to be for something like a basic income and universal service availability, to create the conditions in which creativity has an opportunity to flourish free of market pressures. Otherwise you're just saying you want media to be free as in beer. The biggest barrier to creativity is not the inability to iterate on existing work. People already do that, it's fun and some of the results are great, but innovation is more complex than that.

xg15• 9 years ago

And the really weird part is that while the propaganda puts it as "protecting property", it really has exactly the opposite effect.

I think the comparison is entirely fitting if you remember that in this model you (the consumer) don't own the property and therefore DRM is not about protecting your rights either.

Viewed from the perspective of a non-owner, the effects of DRM look quite similar to the effects of physical property protection.

People are working on fields, in factories and in offices they don't own, with equivalent they don't own and produce things they don't own. They live in space they don't own and increasingly use transportation they don't own. I don't find it hard to imagine at all they'll also consume entertainment and knowledge they don't own.

Continuing the private home ownership example, the landlords would certainly see it as a bold defense of (their) property.

zokier2• 9 years ago

That word, "property", gives the opposite connotations of "copyright"--permanent rightful ownership vs a temporary grant of monopoly on an idea.

I'd point out that generally copyright protects only executions of an idea, not the idea itself. This is pretty much on what for example the existence of GNU and Linux hinge on; they implement the idea of UNIX despite AT&T claiming copyright on UNIX.

Patents, on the other hand, do extend to ideas, and are completely different story.

microcolonel• 9 years ago

Just don't use it, today it is entirely within your power not to use DRM. If you want it to stay that way, you'll have to be the demand you wish to see in the world.

cygned3• 9 years ago

Lately, I wanted to buy an eBook. I usually buy prints, but this time I needed it as soon as possible.

Upon searching, every book store told me, I would need to install some Adobe stuff on my computer to read the file. I am neither a fan of Adobe nor of the idea of being locked in to an application to view a book. After realizing that there is no other digital way, I simply bought the printed version and waited the two days it took to ship.

It's a very frustrating situation for someone who just wants to read something.

2OEH8eoCRo• 9 years ago

Yeah that's how it works I had to do that when I rented an eBook from the library. DRM removal tools are a godsend.

gordaco• 9 years ago

I was in the same position a few months ago, and there was no printed version. My solution: pay for the damn book, use the required Adobe product to be able to unlock it, use a tool to create a DRM-free pdf (IIRC it was Calibre), and finally unistalling the Adobe product. I wish I didn't have to give money to DRM sellers, but in this particular choice I had no option.

Apparently this makes me a pirate, despite having paid for the product and not having any intention of releasing it.

asdfpoiuqwer• 9 years ago

Did you consider pirating the e-book?

To check the ethical box, I would've just used the pirated e-book version immediately and ordered a hard-copy.

cygned3• 9 years ago

Yes, I considered it out of my frustration, but I always try to give back for good work.

zokier2• 9 years ago

Reading Kindle books does not require any Adobe stuff. You can just read them on your browser, or via a Kindle app on your PC/device. Sure, it is still DRMd, but at least the UX on the happy path is halfway decent.

cygned3• 9 years ago

My option would be to buy it on Apple's iBooks. My tech setup is Apple-only, so that would be okay, even though there's DRM. Same story as with Amazon basically.

I basically have to choose my golden cage. That's frustrating.

Veratyr• 9 years ago

That's actually the best case for DRM, since Adobe's has been cracked for ages.

Just buy the book, do whatever Adobe wants, then run DeDRM [0] on it and enjoy your DRM free ePub.

[0] https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/

ctulek• 9 years ago

My only concern with DRM in browser is that, as far as I understand the technology, any website can put a small piece of arbitrary DRM content and your browser will send information to that website uniq to your device, and your device will be tracked by DRM providers and probably also by that website.

Firefox gives you the option to disable DRM in the settings. Chrome also has it but it is buried deeply in advanced settings. Safari does not seem to have it at all.

abecedarius• 9 years ago

I think I found this as "Protected Content" in the Chrome advanced settings. (Searching for "DRM" didn't work.)

rayiner2• 9 years ago

I disagree with the characterization of all this media as "culture." They're entertainment products that exist for the sole purpose of generating a profit.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC33• 9 years ago

And as such they are at the very least displacing "culture" to some degree, and the argument thus still applies?

harryh• 9 years ago

Shakespeare didn't write all those plays for free.

rayiner2• 9 years ago

If a modern day Shakespeare wants to create "culture," they can license their works appropriately. But for the most part the stuff that people want to copy are entertainment products.

DonbunEf7• 9 years ago

Welcome to your modern culture, which is centered around neoliberal consumerism.

floatboth• 9 years ago

Everything is culture.

But yeah, the stuff produced by copyright mafia/Big Entertainment/Hollywood/whatever is far, far from the only culture that exists.

A lot of culture is happening on DRM-free places like YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, DeviantART, Tumblr, itch.io, etc.

Especially YouTube. It's huge. And it's full of people who download other videos and remix them in interesting ways.

musesum2• 9 years ago

Some background: I developed a software binary sandbox, in the 90's; patent cited 500+ times ... mostly by developers of DRM. Now, I am working on an open source project.

IMO, DRM extends a presumption of scarcity. Hunters share their meat, whereas farmers guard their harvest. For the hunter, the kill is a short term abundance of value; if it isn't shared, it will spoil. For the farmer, the harvest is a long term store of value. Scavengers exploit the asymmetry of effort in which to obtain that value.

Once value became easy to copy, the symmetry of effort has shifted. As a result, culture is shifting with it. Freely copied recorded music shifted the value back to live concerts. Back to a short term abundance of value. When was the last time you posted on Twitter or FB? These are freshly hunted moments. Wait too long and that muse will spoil.

eropple• 9 years ago

Freely copied recorded music shifted the value back to live concerts.

Overall, I get what you're saying and I don't disagree with the premise (though I'm ambivalent about the conclusion), but the word "shifted" doesn't usually mean "eradicated"--most live concerts net vanishingly little money and that's a real impact on creators. Whether that's a net societal good or not can be argued about, but "shifted", IMO, paints a misleading picture.

0xbear• 9 years ago

Most other distribution methods for those artists have also been shown to net vanishingly little money. If you can't make money with a live performance, you sure as heck aren't making any selling CDs through a record company.

musesum2• 9 years ago

Live music exceeds the revenue of the top 2 music publishers, Universal and Sony, as per: http://variety.com/2017/music/features/live-nation-concert-b...

[Addendum] For a perspective on independent musicians, here's Steve Albini: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-...

TheOtherHobbes• 9 years ago

There is no presumption of scarcity, because scarcity is a real phenomenon.

There is a vast qualitative difference between the output of ten thousand amateurs and one highly trained and exceptionally talented artist (working in whatever medium.)

This an immensely unfashionable idea. But the real problem with DRM isn't that it does or does not enable copying, but that it presupposes that artistic output is a commodity that can be copied.

In fact artistic output - considered as the cultural influence of an entire career, and not as a series of copyable files or performances - is not fungible.

Not all content creators are equal. If you want quality as opposed to quantity, you need to set up a feedback function that makes some effort to reward and support quality, based on a more sophisticated metric than a lowest-common-denominator unit sales count in a mass market.

This is even more true of science. Ten thousand PhDs do not add up to one Newton or Einstein.

And politics. Ten thousand mediocre politicians do not add up to one Nelson Mandela or Gandhi.

By the time everyone is having the DRM or no-DRM argument they've already missed the point - which is that commodifying cultural output as "content" for industrial distribution mechanisms (including live tours) is to misunderstand how culture propagates and evolves.

And if you can't invent a system that finds and rewards talent - without reducing every transaction to the vapid foolishness of markets - then your culture, science, politics, art, and general joy in invention will stagnate and eventually disappear.

DRM is barely a footnote here. It's nowhere close to being the main problem.

TeMPOraL12• 9 years ago

But the real problem with DRM isn't that it does or does not enable copying, but that it presupposes that artistic output is a commodity that can be copied.

But does it? I thought one of the bigger arguments studios use is that art is not a commodity, hence licensing (enforced by DRM) and copyrights and please pay us.

This is even more true of science. Ten thousand PhDs do not add up to one Newton or Einstein.
And politics. Ten thousand mediocre politicians do not add up to one Nelson Mandela or Gandhi.

I'm less and less convinced of that. "Breakthrough discoveries" in sciences seem to be very incremental steps. That's, I think, the reason so many of those achievements were made simultaneously by different people in different parts of the world. When scientific knowledge reaches a given level, some discoveries become ripe for the taking, and they get plucked by whichever smart guy manages to figure it out first. I suspect the similar may be true of politics - even though history lessons tend to focus on individuals, it seems to me that big events were always much more about the environment than any individual decision.

That is to say, if anything, science is much bigger a commodity than creative arts - by very virtue of being constrained by reality. All practically useful maps of the same territory will look alike, after all.

DRM is barely a footnote here. It's nowhere close to being the main problem.

I'm having trouble seeing what is the main problem you think about. If I try to do a root cause analysis of DRM, I always end up concluding the main problem is that content creators have to create content for a living - i.e. if creative work were to be entirely decoupled from monetary interests, more people would have access to more and better cultural works.

nine_k2• 9 years ago

Considering your views, how would you describe the great rises of (European) culture e.g. in 15-17th centuries? What kind of system collected and rewarded talents like Michelangelo or Mozart? (Both made numerous gigs.)

confounded• 9 years ago

It depends on which part of the process you attribute "scarcity" to. If I drink your beer, it is gone; I have deprived you of it. If you send me a song you have enjoyed, you still have it, and no-one is deprived of anything.

Scarcity on the production side is different and real, but I'm more optimistic. The primary problem seems to be allowing high quality creators to survive full time.

Increasingly, it seems to me that people do want to reward other people for stuff that they care about. To return to the song sharing example, I've now been exposed to a creator I might care about, and decide to support in some way.

However, this is very different to people wanting to pay rights-holders groups (in money, surveillance capabilities, or attention) for stuff that they're not sure if they care about yet.

The brightest future I can imagine involves platforms which facilitate transactions (designed by the creator) and discovery, while having no stake in the IP itself. And it seems possible.

chx• 9 years ago

Patreon is an interesting model here. Not sure whether it rewards talent but I pay my creators because I want them to create more and I would suggest this will only happen if their creations find an audience. If that's not talent, I am not sure what is.

sedachv• 9 years ago

Your entire comment boils down to repeating Sturgeon's Law over and over, which can be summarized as "ninety percent of everything is crap," which is to say, your comment is obnoxious and off-topic to the discussion of Digital Restrictions Management and its negative consequences (DRM only has negative consequences).

However, there is an idea there. HN user https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=maxxxxx made a very astute observation as to why so many "industries" (rich people that control companies) are so adamant about ramming DRM down everyone's throats:

Copyright and IP (and probably real estate) are pretty much the only way for capitalists to make money the more things like internet, 3D printing, AI, robotics and so on are available to the masses. To me it's the only way to keep the current power structures intact so for a lot of powerful people copyright laws are probably the most important laws. They don't need the state for personal protection (they can pay for security guards instead of police) but they need the state for protecting their livelihood.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12514611

The system you propose to invent is redistribution of wealth and socialism: free education for those that want to advance their abilities, and universal basic income to allow them the time to express those abilities. Liberating knowledge from rent-seeking should be the prerogative of everyone that wants to improve the human condition and advance humanity.

Bjartr• 9 years ago

If you want quality as opposed to quantity, you need to set up a feedback function that makes some effort to reward and support quality, based on a more sophisticated metric than a lowest-common-denominator unit sales count in a mass market.

This only holds true if you start with the assumption that the output of those driven only by passion of the art is insufficient in either quantity or quality and must be supplemented with additional output driven by capitalism.

I know I don't know which is the "better" system, but I do believe a sincere discussion must be had along that spectrum ought to happen.

ue_• 9 years ago

it presupposes that artistic output is a commodity that can be copied.

In the Marxian sense, artistic output is a commodity, however every subsequent copy is a commodity with very little value, depending on the value of the copying machine etc.

audi100quattro5• 9 years ago

If you only used fingerprinting/watermarking instead of DRM, you could very well imagine an alternate model where creators are rewarded, and can find an audience a bit better, piracy is kept to a minimum, and culture is better off. There will still be sites like solarmovie, popcorntime, and perhaps some rental revenue will be lost because it will be easier to watch my neighbor or friends copy that he downloaded and walked over to my place with, but no one will be able to share it widely on youtube with anyone's fingerprint/watermark. The upside to culture? Anyone is free to edit/mix/use/peruse their fingerprinted/watermarked copy that they bought/rented. Unlike the consume-only model of the current Netflix/Amazon/Hulu/CBS/etc..

This is a long-term choice that I think both creators and consumers can make, but it probably won't happen as long as AT&T can make money off selling 4K copies of all Time Warner movies again, and as long as Disney never lets the copyright on Mickey Mouse expire. Copyright also has an important part to play in culture.

audi100quattro5• 9 years ago

If this were true in media, Mickey Mouse wouldn't still be copyrighted. DRM is recent, very recent, compared to analog media. It seems like the industry binged on copyright a little too much and by the time digital distribution came around, instead of using it to develop new talent and audiences, they decided to lock everything down with DRM. Must protect our copyrights! Prevent theft! Nevermind that DRM is mostly an added cost for the consumer, in exchange for no benefit, and the profits all seem to flow upwards regardless.

Social media is much better, and the cultural pay-off is much better in that what I create isn't being locked down and is available through APIs. Have you followed a twitter hashtag recently? People are as creative as ever. This does have it's own challenges as we saw in the last election. No substitutes for media literacy and good content...

zanny5• 9 years ago

This is just the tip of the leaf of the IP tree that is destroying culture.

Since the advent of permanent copyright there is no more commons. The commons stopped in 1923. Disney will continue to buy the US government into guaranteeing there is no common heritage of America for as long as they are able.

It will be interesting to see how, in a thousand years, (hopefully) scholars of the time will reflect on how systemic the damage was to American society to artificially constrain creativity so fundamentally and for so long. It is human nature to take your experiences and reinterpret them in new ways. That is how creativity is defined. But copyright and IP, especially in perpetuity, prevent that, all for what is claimed to be the protection of profits by the original creators, even for decades after the creators are dead.

scarface742• 9 years ago

The usual spiel about DRM is that you don't own what you "bought" but in the case of subscriptions and rentals, why would anyone think they have a right to ownership when they are clearly paying for access?

Why should I have a problem with paying Apple for DRM free music from iTunes and paying for a subscription to DRMd music for Apple Music?

I haven't pirated music since the iTunes Store opened in 2003. Even from 2003-2008 when it was DRM encumbered, there was a simple built in way to remove the DRM -- burn it to a CD and rip it.

I also don't have a problem paying to rent a movie from Apple/Amazon, but I would never "buy" a movie from Apple/Amazon with restrictive DRM. I also wouldn't have thought about buying a physical disk without an easy way to rip it to my Plex Server and use in the way I see fit.

TeMPOraL12• 9 years ago

I suppose people in general are not yet used to have everything in their life be some kind of service. With DRM, the part of the issue is how quickly we went from ownership (buying paper books, or even music/video on physical media) to renting.

Personally, I'm not sure what to think about it. On the one hand, one could argue that everything becoming a service is a sign of a maturing society. On the other hand, it makes individuals less autonomous, and society more fragile. Currently I lean more towards thinking that service-oriented economy is a problem, and in particular that SaaS and DRM are cancer.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC33• 9 years ago

it makes individuals less autonomous

Really, I think the problem is not so much the decreasing autonomy of the individual, but rather the increasing concentration of power. In a modern society, you are already massively dependent on other people, in a normal day you get into contact with the direct result of the work of thousands of people (as in: not just people who had the idea to bake a bread, but actually people who contributed to the specific bread that you are eating now), and I think that's perfectly fine. What is problematic is if a small group of individuals/companies get a massive amount of centralized control over a large part of the population.

scarface742• 9 years ago

Currently I lean more towards thinking that service-oriented economy is a problem, and in particular that SaaS and DRM are cancer.

How is * aaS anything more than the specialization of labor?

I am the architect responsible for design and maintenance of an in house software platform with a very small staff. We run everything on AWS and use as many of Amazon's services as we are contractionally allowed to - messaging, hosting, logging, security, etc. and outsource other non specialized software to other companies -- mail, source control (github), project management (Version One), time tracking, expense reporting, etc. It's much better than the bad old days where you had to maintain all of your own servers and host everything in house. It lets me concentrate my efforts on my team's core competencies - the platform we are trying to build.

Almost anytime we have a choice between supporting it in house or paying someone else to do it, we lean toward paying someone else to do if it meets our contractual requirements.

erikpukinskis• 9 years ago

All forms of DRM can be defeated by pointing an iPhone at them.

Buge• 9 years ago

It depends on what the goal of the DRM creators is. If their goal is to prevent copies that most people would consider watchable, then they would not consider the iPhone to defeat the DRM. But some screen recording technique with framerate sync would defeat the DRM. If their goal was to prevent sharing of the original compressed stream, then they would consider even screen recording to not defeat the DRM.

audi100quattro5• 9 years ago

Why do you need a car when you can walk? Why use encryption when you can physically hide things? The answer to these questions and more is that when it isn't about faster/better/cheaper, it's about improving quality of life. Be it increasing privacy, or removing undue burdens.

rmrfrmrf• 9 years ago

I would love to see some use cases of what people want to be able to do with DRM'd media that 1) can't be done with current DRM limitations and 2) is within the guidelines of what the distributor allows (or within the rights given by the user's local government).

For example, my local library buys a set number of digital licenses for ebooks, so there's a waitlist system for ebooks and each digital copy is time gated to a certain number of days before becoming unusable. In that time, though, you can read the ebook offline once downloaded through the library's app. Annoying sometimes, but overall seems reasonable.

How would that example translate to a non-DRM version while making sure that the library isn't distributing an unbounded number of licenses to customers?

josteink• 9 years ago

I would love to see some use cases of what people want to be able to do with DRM'd media that 1) can't be done with current DRM limitations and 2) is within the guidelines of what the distributor allows (or within the rights given by the user's local government).

Simple. Play it on any device I own, now and in the future.

None of the drm formats sold 20 years ago live on today. Had my collection been based on those, and not open formats, it would be dead now.

What makes you think today's DRM will have a different fate?

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC33• 9 years ago

I would love to see some use cases of what people want to be able to do with DRM'd media that 1) can't be done with current DRM limitations and 2) is within the guidelines of what the distributor allows (or within the rights given by the user's local government).

Play it on my linux machine?

Copy it to a different medium for my own personal use?

Inspect it for security vulnerabilities?

Build and sell a device that allows you to split the video signal into multiple parts so I can watch it on multiple screens arranged into one large screen?

Buy a device that allows me to inject home automation information onto the display on which I am watching it?

Do you need more?

pdkl953• 9 years ago

more?

How about the highly experimental, expensive, poor-user-interface, precursors to whatever the next truly innovative killer app will be? We don't know what the really important use cases will be; we don't even know[1] which events or innovations are in the general direction of the next killer app.

The very idea that some ideas - aka information, intellectual works, or (bleh) "content" - can be owned is already offensive enough. For DRM to make any kind of sense you first have to presume you can enumerate the ways an idea will be used. If we knew that, we could skip most R&D.

Instead of trying artificially re-create scarcity, the Silicon Valley startup culture should be worried about of DRM fencing off next-decade's products.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29#Co...

kuschku• 9 years ago

Sell an ebook I bought on Amazon via ebay to someone else. Gift an ebook I bought. Refund DRM’d content I bought within of 14 days after sale without significant usage.

These are all things that the law says I have the Right to do, yet DRM providers frequently violate these rights.

TeMPOraL12• 9 years ago

I don't think this is a well-formed question, because DRM is generally code implementing 2). That is, things DRM prevents you from doing are pretty much by definition things that are not within the guidelines of publishers.

But to treat the question charitably, here's one use case: I want to view the media on whatever devices I happen to own. That is, I want to e.g. start reading a e-book on my PC, continue on my Kindle, and then finish it on my smartwatch. Or my laser projector. Or my fishbowl. Also maybe I think the book's font is simply ugly, and I want to change it. Oh, and my Internet connection is pretty shitty, because I live in a developing nation and/or US rural area, so I'd love to be able to do all of that off-line at times[0].

That was a basic use case. To step it up, imagine I'm doing research. I want to do notes and cross-referencing, and I want to efficiently move around the text. Regular DRM-ed formats tend to make that nigh-impossible[1].

How would that example translate to a non-DRM version while making sure that the library isn't distributing an unbounded number of licenses to customers?

It wouldn't, because DRM is by definition designed to limit you to only a very narrow way of consuming a piece of digital media. Any kind of additional flexibility will make it possible to "distribute an unbound number of licenses" for free.

Here's the fundamental conflict - as a consumer, I want to buy/rent a piece of content, as narrowly constrained as possible. In particular, I want the publisher to stop messing with the way I use it and the format I chose to consume. OTOH, publishers have exactly opposite interests - they want to have as much control over my consumption as possible, whether to make more money, to protect against copying, or both.

[0] - Related, it's kind of ridiculous to have to stream a book from the Internet all the time. DRM does encourage some pretty shitty engineering decisions.

[1] - Consider just how much economic damage is being done to society by using DRM to make media usable for lowest common denominator of consumers, while making it much more difficult to use in a specialized way for interesting or important work. It's a huge waste, to take a general-purpose computer and use its power to restrict its own functions.

jonhohle• 9 years ago

For 1) Do you remember the Walmart music store (hopefully not, but it was a thing about a decade ago). It sold Plays For Sure™ Music with DRM servers operated by Walmart. Then Walmart shut it down and from that point forward users could no longer activate new devices that could read the files they had for.

So the use case is simple: play the music they licensed.

For 2) why is that an intermediary's responsibility? Can you photocopy a book from the library or book store, copy a CD, strip macrovision from a VHS cassette and record it on a second deck, or hand write a copy of sheet music? Sure. Does it violate the license. Maybe, maybe not. Get get the courts involved.

Relatedly, what about the right of first sale? All changes for DRM'd media have benefitted copyright holders. There needs to be a return to balance. (Having to own DHCP enabled products increases cost to the consumer, BD+ makes it difficult for most to backup blu-rays, SACD audio cannot be transported digitally, unencrypted, etc.).

DRM (and crazy long copyright extensions) hinders preservation at both the personal and societal levels. Copyrights intention was a limited monopoly in exchange for eventual free access to culturally relevant works. It no longer serves that purpose.

hyperdunc• 9 years ago

That situation with library ebooks is widespread and is a prime example of imposed artificial scarcity. It seems silly to force tech that effectively provides unlimited supply to conform to the traditional library model of lending.

I much prefer a donations based model where anyone can read whatever they like, and then donate to the author if they feel inclined.

Phenomabomb• 9 years ago

DRM only hurts legitimate customers. It seems increasingly rare that people aren't able to crack DRM's fairly quickly. So the only people that even see the DRM are the paying customer, and there is always some sort of inconvenient drawback for them.

3dk• 9 years ago

A good example of this is the Denuvo DRM for games. As I understand it, game data was temporarily decrypted, while playing which led to poor performance. Denuvo games were cracked and the pirate versions performed better. Developers paid a lot for Denuvo DRM which didn't even fulfill the promise of stopping piracy.

kgbier• 9 years ago

Once the game has been cracked some publishers/devs have opted to release an update that removes the DRM and the potential performance hit (eg. Mass Effect Andromeda, Hitman, DOOM). The performance hit in question, however, is an implementation detail that some developers handle better than others (Rime comes to mind as a game that performed Denuvo DRM checks many many times per second, it's speculated it was tied to per-frame update calls).

Denuvo still has a place (if it stays effective) in reducing the number of day-one pirates, which is its main selling point at this time. On Steam, interested players have a choice to put money down on release (with the potential to refund), or wait an indeterminate number of days (weeks?) to download the cracked version. This uncertainty period has a conversion rate that Denuvo clients balance against the costs of the DRM.

jancsika• 9 years ago

Thus your children won’t get to play your music, show your favourite films, read your books, share your culture, with your grandchildren because they won’t inherit anything digital from you that’s usable. Historians won’t be able to track the influences on an event because the sources have digitally corroded. You’ll not even be able to share what you like with your friends.

Even Kodi assumes by (sane) defaults that the user does not want to save their own particular copy of the relevant media on their own particular device.

Imagining a future where grandchildren can't inherit the digital libraries stored on their family devices is early-2000's futurism that somehow skips completely over the year 2017 where the greater bulk of these future grandparents are streaming everything.

tomcam• 9 years ago

It's all true--but it does nothing to explain how artists can be paid for their stuff at prices they set.

mcbobbington• 9 years ago

Interestingly the DMCA prohibits creating software to bypass DRM. It is completely unconstitutional, violating freedom of the press. That part of the law should be struck down.

ucaetano• 9 years ago

"Travelling frequently in Europe, I’ve had the chance to use two approaches to the underground/metro/subway, the Paris Metro and the U-bahn in various German cities."

The author failed to understand the actual cultural issue driving the two approaches: In Germany you don't need a gate to have people pay the ticket, most people will do it anyway. In Paris, most people won't pay and just ride for free, and tragedy of the commons ensues.

So by his own argument, DRM is a product of the culture of a people.

DRM Is Toxic to Culture

Related Stories