How does that analogy make me "incorrect for the most part"?
True or false:
(1) Google/Chrome have pushed new protocols as replacements for established standards (e.g., SPDY to replace HTTP).
(2) Google/Chrome frequently implement bleeding edge "standards" in ways that don't work in many/any other browsers/engines (e.g., numerous posts on sites like Codrops illustrating new effects that actually only work in Chrome because they rely on non-standard features).
(3) Google/Chrome have dropped support for older functionality, only to replace it with new tools to do the same things (e.g., basically any popular plugin now).
(4) Google/Chrome produce a browser that in principle supports lots of new CSS features but in practice has numerous rendering bugs if you deviate from the most basic use cases (e.g., radial gradients that are mostly unusable due to banding/pixellation issues).
You're moving the goalposts by insisting on only Chrome and no other browser. That isn't what I said, and I'm not playing that game. But for things that worked in Chrome and not several other major browsers, you need look no further than some of Google's own properties.
A typical example is that basic page layout in Google Analytics was totally broken on iOS Safari (and therefore any other iOS browser as well) for years, and still was the last time I checked.
Another is Google Docs. For months, I was attending meetings with a variety of people bringing a variety of laptops, and the clients preferred to track everything in shared documents/spreadsheets that could be displayed on a projector during discussions. We never had a single meeting where it worked for everyone there, not once. Always at least one non-Google browser would be totally broken, it just changed which one from time to time. But Chrome always worked.
OK, I give up. You seem completely unable to grasp that there are more people involved in creative industries than the big media giants and that the same rules apply to the little guys too. If I haven't convinced you that there are more possibilities than Big Media vs. The Heroic Pirates by now, or that some things that might make sense at one scale don't necessarily work at another, I doubt I ever will.
You do realise that what you described from the bad old days is almost exactly what Google have been doing with Chrome for some time? The modern Google playbook seems to include custom protocols, supporting perma-beta or "living" standards that are implemented a certain way in Chrome but not actually supported or implemented quite the same way elsewhere, and dropping support for older but widely used functionality. How is this not like Microsoft's playbook from the end of the first big browser war?
This comment is best viewed in Chrome with a bland, flat design (because there are so may bugs in our rendering that "advanced" CSS like gradients, shadows and rounded corners will break if you look at them the wrong way and they'll break differently in six weeks' time even if you work around the current issues).
Oh come on, obscurity is way more deadly than casual piracy.
Ah, so the next cliche from the book is that everyone who rips off some content is actually free advertising and so a good thing? Have you heard of pyramid schemes at all?
Here's what actually happens when it's a small, obscure project being ripped by casual pirates: the pirates tell their casual pirate friends, who copy the content and also say how useful the content is and like and upvote stuff and mostly don't give you any money, and then their casual pirate friends copy the content and say how useful it is and like and upvote stuff and mostly don't give you any money, and after this continues for a bit someone has the great idea to just set up a free source of everything they've got before you kicked the accounts who were blatantly copying as much as they could after signing up for the minimum possible commitment, and now you have a copycat site hosted in somewhere like China where you basically can't do anything about it, and in the meantime you spent a lot of time doing very little other than trying to contain the problem rather than having the time and money to make new content, which is all you ever really wanted to do. The icing on the cake is when you get an email from someone you've never heard of, who has never contributed anything to the cost of the project, saying how fantastic your stuff on is and how much they've been enjoying it for the past few weeks and asking when you'll be publishing the next update. Not that this has happened multiple times to people I know or anything.
IIRC, we no longer had control of the old site at that point. Everyone's access had been transferred to the new system but the old one wasn't removed from the hosting service as quickly as it should have been for some reason, so it was just sitting there as a misleading zombie for a few weeks. That was why we wanted the link updated.
As for volunteers, lots of things on the Web are updated by volunteers (including the site I was talking about) but if you're knowingly screwing things up for other people then I think it's fair to call you out for it.
Yes, it does. That's the point. At smaller scales, for independent content, there is a lot that you can do to deter casual infringement and cheap attempts at copycat sites, and those are your big problems. And any decent DRM scheme of this kind is almost completely transparent these days and very unlikely to inconvenience any legitimate customer.
I'm happy for you that your approach worked for you with the books, but I've spent much of this year dealing with these issues for real with various small businesses affected by them. Customer numbers are up, and so is customer retention, and so is revenue. In contrast, time spent filing takedown notices and dealing with infringers is down to near zero, and complaints from customers about being affected by the changes are exactly zero. I never thought I'd be the one making this argument, but the fact is, making copying harder does work, at least in this context. The data does not lie.
Much of what you and others here are writing makes sense up to a point for large businesses with very widely available content, but not for all the smaller businesses or individual creators. In the latter case, casual infringement is a real problem, casual plagiarism (to follow your terminology) is also a real problem, it's quite likely that no super-hacker actually will bother to break a decent DRM scheme, and even if they do, there probably won't be a critical mass of people to operate clandestine P2P distribution so dealing with rips on public sites like YouTube is the bigger problem.
Interesting note about the gallons. I had forgotten that, and yes, it would explain large differences in the figures I found. I'm not sure it really changes my position, though, since we're still talking about modern cars that are superior in numerous other ways getting fuel efficiency comparable to the best old cars you could find.
Also, I agree with you on not wanting a car that has excessive amounts of technology crudely thrown into it. "I know, let's put remotely accessible non-essential systems on the same bus as vital vehicle control and security signalling, and use a protocol where everything trusts everything. What could possibly go wrong?" But at the same time, the cost overheads for those systems are really nothing like a factor of 2 on the vehicle. I'd happily take a car that was a little cheaper and didn't have the remote connectivity features but still had all the other modern driving aids.
That's the whole point. The "pirates" do not steal your money. They would not have bought the movie either, if it wasn't available via download.
The thing is, that's another thing people often say that isn't necessarily true.
There are few things more disheartening to someone creative than seeing something you worked on for a long time and are selling for a modest cost somewhere being plastered all over someone else's site or channel or whatever with their branding and in some cases also with them monetizing the content. In some cases, clearly people do appreciate the material and are willing to pay for it, they're just giving the credit and the money to the wrong person.
As I mentioned in another post, this isn't such a big issue if you're a big record label or movie studio or famous comedian or something. But for all the little guys making their own content -- and there are a lot of them -- this sort of copycat culture can be very damaging.
Or do you think that reducing access to a certain information amounts to censorship?
But the point of copyright is to increase access to information, through economic incentives.
Saying you can have something but only if you're prepared to pay a market rate for it isn't censorship. You can tell this because the same economic arguments apply to physical goods where censorship isn't even relevant.
Even with an unlimited download ability for DRM'd content, I'd still have an incentive to keep up the subscription, because a lot of the value I get is from access to new content.
(I assume you meant non-DRM'd there.)
And in my experience, many subscribers agree.
The trouble is the amount of time you spend dealing with the other people, the ones who will sign up for as short a time as they can get away with, just sit there all day downloading as much as they can get, and then put it up on YouTube with their channel's branding and ads all over it or whatever.
If you're a big movie studio, this isn't such a problem. No-one is going to think JonnyRipz on YouTube made Moonlight. But what people often forget is that the same laws and the same economic concerns apply to countless small businesses and independent creators, who are making some sort of specialist content in whatever niche market they work in. At that end of the scale, we might be talking about a weekend band who are really good at playing some unusual style of music, or someone who makes videos from their living room teaching how to knit different patterns for kids' clothes.
The Internet is full of people running their own little sites or channels where people do this stuff and are just trying to make a bit of extra money to cover their costs or bump up their incomes a little. Hardly anyone is getting rich off these kinds of activities, and they're often part-time gigs, so time spent chasing down copycats is time wasted and money lost to someone else putting up duplicate content on their own channel can be significant. I know several people, in completely different contexts, who fit this broad pattern, and people ripping them off is a significant problem and it is a significant disincentive to carry on. That's too bad, because it's often these kinds of people who make a lot of the most interesting or useful content in their particular niche.
Some years ago, a site I was involved with was moving. Someone contacted DMOZ with a simple request not to keep listing the old address, because their influence on search engines was distorting the rankings and putting the old, soon-to-disappear, out-of-date site higher than the new, up-to-date one. That was creating significant problems for people getting the wrong information, and that in turn was causing a lot of hassle and wasted time for our volunteer organisers who had to clean up the mess. The DMOZ rep basically told us they wouldn't change anything because they were there for users not site operators. They couldn't seem to understand that what we were asking was in the interests of those users, nor why we blocked all traffic giving their site as a referrer from both sites afterwards. From our perspective, it might have been a well-intentioned idea, but it was run by people with a terrible attitude and ultimately did more harm than good.
Almost everything is cracked immediately these days.
You keep saying things like that, but it's just not true. If anyone does have a crack for several of the major online DRM schemes, other than crude things based on the analog hole or the like, they're keeping it extremely close to their chest.
As I said elsewhere, the pirate content is typically coming from other sources now, such as the Blu-ray rips you mentioned.
Given that copyright-supported creative industries employ millions of people, I think it's safe to assume that at least some of the benefit is because everyone isn't just free to let those people do all the work and then leech off the results.
And copyright is more analogous to respecting private property rather than communal ownership than to having a monopoly in the usual economic sense of the term. If only one organisation could produce any works subject copyright, then it would be more like a normal monopoly.
DRM did what the EFF and FSF tell you: It stopped people from using their music.
And yet it is also the foundation for arguably the most successful innovation in the music industry in decades: Spotify.
The (even 4k) rips of netflix movies started, because people wanted to see netflix on settop boxes / sticks, which do not support netflix.
Who do you think is ripping 4K movies from Netflix?
People do not have a problem to pay $10 per month.
As someone who has actually run businesses in this market, I can promise you that many people do have a problem with paying $10/month. The number of people today who think everything should just be available for free, or that any new content should be a $1.99 download from some App Store regardless of economics, would blow your mind.
So you may only delay it by a few weeks, if you're lucky. Is that a reason to make watching movies a PITA for all honest custumers?
Ideally, no. But of course good modern DRM schemes do actually work transparently almost all of the time, inconveniencing very few honest customers, and delaying widespread infringement by even a few weeks can make a huge difference to the commercial success of say a new film or game.
Just to be clear, I have no time for those, particularly in the gaming world, who attempt to use heavyweight DRM schemes that do screw up and hurt legitimate customers, and I am in no way defending them. However, they are also the exception, not the rule.
But the anthropomorphic metaphor is a succinct way of describing a phenomena
It might be a succinct way of describing something, but obviously I don't think it's a particularly accurate metaphor in this case.
Any DRM of static media will be broken, given sufficient time and attention, and once broken, the static media can be distributed throughout the internet unimpeded.
Maybe, though rather like car theft, it's become difficult enough to break the security systems directly that most people are working around them, in this case by finding a different source for the material.
In any case, during the time-and-attention stage, the DRM is inhibiting illegal distribution, and even after it's been cracked it's still inhibiting illegal distribution for some people, who don't know where to find illegal sources, are concerned about the dangers of downloading them, or simply didn't realise that downloading to keep wasn't allowed if it was easy to do.
The pro-dissemination side has an inherent long-term advantage even when the anti-dissemination side has vastly greater resources, whether it's Chinese dissidents, terrorists, child pornographers, bored hackers, or pirates.
Interesting choice of examples, given that there are relatively few people who do get away with most of those things, and the penalties for those who do not can be severe.
If anything, piracy is the major exception, but given the degree of surveillance that routinely happens online these days, that is more because the authorities and the major copyright holders turn a blind eye up to a point, presumably fearing a popular backlash if they suddenly started actually enforcing what the law says and modern technology allows on a large scale. If whatever DRM they're applying to the new movie/show/game/whatever delays widespread piracy by a few weeks, they've probably already collected most of the extra revenue that was available from potential customers who would have been lost to piracy anyway.
Far fewer works were created, and they were far less widely distributed, in that time. Perhaps more significantly, many of those that were were funded through the patronage of wealthy individuals.
The whole point of introducing intellectual property is to apply Smith-style free market economics, and in particular the incentives to provide supply to meet demand, to creative industries, thus promoting the creation and distribution of new works without relying on a small group of very wealthy benefactors to fund everything.
The content is something we will find with or without them.
Then why do pirates keep ripping the latest Hollywood blockbuster, Game of Thrones season or Adele single, instead of all the other stuff that was around before?
You might not need the content, but apparently plenty of pirates want it, and certainly plenty of people will pay to get it in other ways that maybe aren't so amenable to ripping it off.
We've had broadband fast enough to stream HD movies or TV shows in real time for several years in many countries, but the same has yet to happen. I don't think your bandwidth argument holds up under scrutiny.
Similar to how nature abhors a vacuum, the net (and largely, information in general) interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
Seriously, is this the cliche of the month club and I missed the memo?
No, the Internet does not interpret censorship as anything. The Internet is not alive, and the actions taken to distribute works illegally are ultimately taken by people.
Also, comparing measures to prevent infringement of copyright, which is merely against laws that are widely applicable throughout the world, with the sometimes very real problems of actual censorship is just a propaganda move designed to attract an emotional response that is not otherwise justified.
You're just repeating industry shill "the sky is falling" garbage.
Someone who has a different point of view to you is not necessarily a shill. And if there really isn't a problem if we stop creating and distributing new works, why is the vast majority of piracy ripping those new works, instead of just sharing the "orders of magnitude more media than any human could possibly watch" that we already have? Apparently most pirates disagree with you about which work is more valuable.
There is no money to be made in trying to scare pirates straight. There IS money in providing a convenient service, and DRM never adds convenience.
It would be lovely if that were true, but I have been following this issue for a long time, and the evidence so far seems to say otherwise. How would you run a service like Netflix, which obviously a great many people find more convenient than other models for watching movies and TV shows, without DRM or some other system with a similar effect? You're trying to separate DRM from what makes a useful service and treat the two separately, but they aren't independent issues.
We've done this song and dance with music, and DRM-free mp3s won despite all of the exact same arguments being made.
But as I pointed out in another post, music is basically the only creative sector where that has happened widely, and there are reasonable economic arguments for why that is.
No, it doesn't. This is one of those nonsense sayings that gets trotted out every time, but it makes no sense economically. A lot of creative content wants to be paid for, because otherwise there's no commercial incentive to create and distribute it. How that payment works is open to debate, but millions of creative professionals still need to pay the rent, and if creating won't do that, they're going to have to do something else instead.
If piracy/DRM-free is the most universal platform, we win.
Only if there's still stuff to pirate, and only if you don't suffer real world consequences for breaking laws when you rip infringing content. Neither of those is an inherent truth in the world.
By making DRM harder and more inconvenient, you make it less profitable,
Slightly, but the cost of a reasonably effective DRM scheme relative to the scale of deals that the likes of Netflix and major movie studios are making is probably pretty small.
which puts non-DRM media at an advantage.
That only follows if you assume the DRM doesn't have a beneficial effect that justifies its cost. If that were true, the executives running Big Media businesses would have switched tactics long ago.
It might not be a popular sentiment around here, but the reality is that a lot of copyright infringement is done casually and often by people who don't even realise they're doing anything against the rules. Copy protection technology doesn't have to be perfect to be effective. Even a relatively simple barrier can make quite a big difference here.
In contrast, if you look at the issues raised in the bug trackers after Chrome 55 added that download icon to the controls on HTML5 video elements, you'll find one comment after another from web developers whose clients were extremely unhappy about it. It wasn't just because it made it more obvious that people could download and save unprotected videos; obviously web developers knew this was possible before. It was also because the mere existence of the icon was causing visitors to those clients' sites to think that downloading and keeping the videos was permitted, even if it was totally against their terms. If you've never run a web business, you might not appreciate how much of a business finance and customer service problem even such a little change can cause, and equally how much hassle and abuse can be avoided just by making casual infringement a bit less easy/obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
How does that analogy make me "incorrect for the most part"?
True or false:
(1) Google/Chrome have pushed new protocols as replacements for established standards (e.g., SPDY to replace HTTP).
(2) Google/Chrome frequently implement bleeding edge "standards" in ways that don't work in many/any other browsers/engines (e.g., numerous posts on sites like Codrops illustrating new effects that actually only work in Chrome because they rely on non-standard features).
(3) Google/Chrome have dropped support for older functionality, only to replace it with new tools to do the same things (e.g., basically any popular plugin now).
(4) Google/Chrome produce a browser that in principle supports lots of new CSS features but in practice has numerous rendering bugs if you deviate from the most basic use cases (e.g., radial gradients that are mostly unusable due to banding/pixellation issues).
You're moving the goalposts by insisting on only Chrome and no other browser. That isn't what I said, and I'm not playing that game. But for things that worked in Chrome and not several other major browsers, you need look no further than some of Google's own properties.
A typical example is that basic page layout in Google Analytics was totally broken on iOS Safari (and therefore any other iOS browser as well) for years, and still was the last time I checked.
Another is Google Docs. For months, I was attending meetings with a variety of people bringing a variety of laptops, and the clients preferred to track everything in shared documents/spreadsheets that could be displayed on a projector during discussions. We never had a single meeting where it worked for everyone there, not once. Always at least one non-Google browser would be totally broken, it just changed which one from time to time. But Chrome always worked.
OK, I give up. You seem completely unable to grasp that there are more people involved in creative industries than the big media giants and that the same rules apply to the little guys too. If I haven't convinced you that there are more possibilities than Big Media vs. The Heroic Pirates by now, or that some things that might make sense at one scale don't necessarily work at another, I doubt I ever will.
You do realise that what you described from the bad old days is almost exactly what Google have been doing with Chrome for some time? The modern Google playbook seems to include custom protocols, supporting perma-beta or "living" standards that are implemented a certain way in Chrome but not actually supported or implemented quite the same way elsewhere, and dropping support for older but widely used functionality. How is this not like Microsoft's playbook from the end of the first big browser war?
This comment is best viewed in Chrome with a bland, flat design (because there are so may bugs in our rendering that "advanced" CSS like gradients, shadows and rounded corners will break if you look at them the wrong way and they'll break differently in six weeks' time even if you work around the current issues).
Oh come on, obscurity is way more deadly than casual piracy.
Ah, so the next cliche from the book is that everyone who rips off some content is actually free advertising and so a good thing? Have you heard of pyramid schemes at all?
Here's what actually happens when it's a small, obscure project being ripped by casual pirates: the pirates tell their casual pirate friends, who copy the content and also say how useful the content is and like and upvote stuff and mostly don't give you any money, and then their casual pirate friends copy the content and say how useful it is and like and upvote stuff and mostly don't give you any money, and after this continues for a bit someone has the great idea to just set up a free source of everything they've got before you kicked the accounts who were blatantly copying as much as they could after signing up for the minimum possible commitment, and now you have a copycat site hosted in somewhere like China where you basically can't do anything about it, and in the meantime you spent a lot of time doing very little other than trying to contain the problem rather than having the time and money to make new content, which is all you ever really wanted to do. The icing on the cake is when you get an email from someone you've never heard of, who has never contributed anything to the cost of the project, saying how fantastic your stuff on is and how much they've been enjoying it for the past few weeks and asking when you'll be publishing the next update. Not that this has happened multiple times to people I know or anything.
IIRC, we no longer had control of the old site at that point. Everyone's access had been transferred to the new system but the old one wasn't removed from the hosting service as quickly as it should have been for some reason, so it was just sitting there as a misleading zombie for a few weeks. That was why we wanted the link updated.
As for volunteers, lots of things on the Web are updated by volunteers (including the site I was talking about) but if you're knowingly screwing things up for other people then I think it's fair to call you out for it.
Here's the thing: DRM doesn't stop any of that.
Yes, it does. That's the point. At smaller scales, for independent content, there is a lot that you can do to deter casual infringement and cheap attempts at copycat sites, and those are your big problems. And any decent DRM scheme of this kind is almost completely transparent these days and very unlikely to inconvenience any legitimate customer.
I'm happy for you that your approach worked for you with the books, but I've spent much of this year dealing with these issues for real with various small businesses affected by them. Customer numbers are up, and so is customer retention, and so is revenue. In contrast, time spent filing takedown notices and dealing with infringers is down to near zero, and complaints from customers about being affected by the changes are exactly zero. I never thought I'd be the one making this argument, but the fact is, making copying harder does work, at least in this context. The data does not lie.
Much of what you and others here are writing makes sense up to a point for large businesses with very widely available content, but not for all the smaller businesses or individual creators. In the latter case, casual infringement is a real problem, casual plagiarism (to follow your terminology) is also a real problem, it's quite likely that no super-hacker actually will bother to break a decent DRM scheme, and even if they do, there probably won't be a critical mass of people to operate clandestine P2P distribution so dealing with rips on public sites like YouTube is the bigger problem.
You understand the irony that if everyone had pirated that music the way some did, it would have killed the supply of that music, right?
Interesting note about the gallons. I had forgotten that, and yes, it would explain large differences in the figures I found. I'm not sure it really changes my position, though, since we're still talking about modern cars that are superior in numerous other ways getting fuel efficiency comparable to the best old cars you could find.
Also, I agree with you on not wanting a car that has excessive amounts of technology crudely thrown into it. "I know, let's put remotely accessible non-essential systems on the same bus as vital vehicle control and security signalling, and use a protocol where everything trusts everything. What could possibly go wrong?" But at the same time, the cost overheads for those systems are really nothing like a factor of 2 on the vehicle. I'd happily take a car that was a little cheaper and didn't have the remote connectivity features but still had all the other modern driving aids.
That's the whole point. The "pirates" do not steal your money. They would not have bought the movie either, if it wasn't available via download.
The thing is, that's another thing people often say that isn't necessarily true.
There are few things more disheartening to someone creative than seeing something you worked on for a long time and are selling for a modest cost somewhere being plastered all over someone else's site or channel or whatever with their branding and in some cases also with them monetizing the content. In some cases, clearly people do appreciate the material and are willing to pay for it, they're just giving the credit and the money to the wrong person.
As I mentioned in another post, this isn't such a big issue if you're a big record label or movie studio or famous comedian or something. But for all the little guys making their own content -- and there are a lot of them -- this sort of copycat culture can be very damaging.
Or do you think that reducing access to a certain information amounts to censorship?
But the point of copyright is to increase access to information, through economic incentives.
Saying you can have something but only if you're prepared to pay a market rate for it isn't censorship. You can tell this because the same economic arguments apply to physical goods where censorship isn't even relevant.
Even with an unlimited download ability for DRM'd content, I'd still have an incentive to keep up the subscription, because a lot of the value I get is from access to new content.
(I assume you meant non-DRM'd there.)
And in my experience, many subscribers agree.
The trouble is the amount of time you spend dealing with the other people, the ones who will sign up for as short a time as they can get away with, just sit there all day downloading as much as they can get, and then put it up on YouTube with their channel's branding and ads all over it or whatever.
If you're a big movie studio, this isn't such a problem. No-one is going to think JonnyRipz on YouTube made Moonlight. But what people often forget is that the same laws and the same economic concerns apply to countless small businesses and independent creators, who are making some sort of specialist content in whatever niche market they work in. At that end of the scale, we might be talking about a weekend band who are really good at playing some unusual style of music, or someone who makes videos from their living room teaching how to knit different patterns for kids' clothes.
The Internet is full of people running their own little sites or channels where people do this stuff and are just trying to make a bit of extra money to cover their costs or bump up their incomes a little. Hardly anyone is getting rich off these kinds of activities, and they're often part-time gigs, so time spent chasing down copycats is time wasted and money lost to someone else putting up duplicate content on their own channel can be significant. I know several people, in completely different contexts, who fit this broad pattern, and people ripping them off is a significant problem and it is a significant disincentive to carry on. That's too bad, because it's often these kinds of people who make a lot of the most interesting or useful content in their particular niche.
Some years ago, a site I was involved with was moving. Someone contacted DMOZ with a simple request not to keep listing the old address, because their influence on search engines was distorting the rankings and putting the old, soon-to-disappear, out-of-date site higher than the new, up-to-date one. That was creating significant problems for people getting the wrong information, and that in turn was causing a lot of hassle and wasted time for our volunteer organisers who had to clean up the mess. The DMOZ rep basically told us they wouldn't change anything because they were there for users not site operators. They couldn't seem to understand that what we were asking was in the interests of those users, nor why we blocked all traffic giving their site as a referrer from both sites afterwards. From our perspective, it might have been a well-intentioned idea, but it was run by people with a terrible attitude and ultimately did more harm than good.
Almost everything is cracked immediately these days.
You keep saying things like that, but it's just not true. If anyone does have a crack for several of the major online DRM schemes, other than crude things based on the analog hole or the like, they're keeping it extremely close to their chest.
As I said elsewhere, the pirate content is typically coming from other sources now, such as the Blu-ray rips you mentioned.
Given that copyright-supported creative industries employ millions of people, I think it's safe to assume that at least some of the benefit is because everyone isn't just free to let those people do all the work and then leech off the results.
And copyright is more analogous to respecting private property rather than communal ownership than to having a monopoly in the usual economic sense of the term. If only one organisation could produce any works subject copyright, then it would be more like a normal monopoly.
DRM did what the EFF and FSF tell you: It stopped people from using their music.
And yet it is also the foundation for arguably the most successful innovation in the music industry in decades: Spotify.
The (even 4k) rips of netflix movies started, because people wanted to see netflix on settop boxes / sticks, which do not support netflix.
Who do you think is ripping 4K movies from Netflix?
People do not have a problem to pay $10 per month.
As someone who has actually run businesses in this market, I can promise you that many people do have a problem with paying $10/month. The number of people today who think everything should just be available for free, or that any new content should be a $1.99 download from some App Store regardless of economics, would blow your mind.
So you may only delay it by a few weeks, if you're lucky. Is that a reason to make watching movies a PITA for all honest custumers?
Ideally, no. But of course good modern DRM schemes do actually work transparently almost all of the time, inconveniencing very few honest customers, and delaying widespread infringement by even a few weeks can make a huge difference to the commercial success of say a new film or game.
Just to be clear, I have no time for those, particularly in the gaming world, who attempt to use heavyweight DRM schemes that do screw up and hurt legitimate customers, and I am in no way defending them. However, they are also the exception, not the rule.
But the anthropomorphic metaphor is a succinct way of describing a phenomena
It might be a succinct way of describing something, but obviously I don't think it's a particularly accurate metaphor in this case.
Any DRM of static media will be broken, given sufficient time and attention, and once broken, the static media can be distributed throughout the internet unimpeded.
Maybe, though rather like car theft, it's become difficult enough to break the security systems directly that most people are working around them, in this case by finding a different source for the material.
In any case, during the time-and-attention stage, the DRM is inhibiting illegal distribution, and even after it's been cracked it's still inhibiting illegal distribution for some people, who don't know where to find illegal sources, are concerned about the dangers of downloading them, or simply didn't realise that downloading to keep wasn't allowed if it was easy to do.
The pro-dissemination side has an inherent long-term advantage even when the anti-dissemination side has vastly greater resources, whether it's Chinese dissidents, terrorists, child pornographers, bored hackers, or pirates.
Interesting choice of examples, given that there are relatively few people who do get away with most of those things, and the penalties for those who do not can be severe.
If anything, piracy is the major exception, but given the degree of surveillance that routinely happens online these days, that is more because the authorities and the major copyright holders turn a blind eye up to a point, presumably fearing a popular backlash if they suddenly started actually enforcing what the law says and modern technology allows on a large scale. If whatever DRM they're applying to the new movie/show/game/whatever delays widespread piracy by a few weeks, they've probably already collected most of the extra revenue that was available from potential customers who would have been lost to piracy anyway.
Far fewer works were created, and they were far less widely distributed, in that time. Perhaps more significantly, many of those that were were funded through the patronage of wealthy individuals.
The whole point of introducing intellectual property is to apply Smith-style free market economics, and in particular the incentives to provide supply to meet demand, to creative industries, thus promoting the creation and distribution of new works without relying on a small group of very wealthy benefactors to fund everything.
WE DO NOT NEED THE CONTENT.
The content is something we will find with or without them.
Then why do pirates keep ripping the latest Hollywood blockbuster, Game of Thrones season or Adele single, instead of all the other stuff that was around before?
You might not need the content, but apparently plenty of pirates want it, and certainly plenty of people will pay to get it in other ways that maybe aren't so amenable to ripping it off.
We've had broadband fast enough to stream HD movies or TV shows in real time for several years in many countries, but the same has yet to happen. I don't think your bandwidth argument holds up under scrutiny.
Similar to how nature abhors a vacuum, the net (and largely, information in general) interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
Seriously, is this the cliche of the month club and I missed the memo?
No, the Internet does not interpret censorship as anything. The Internet is not alive, and the actions taken to distribute works illegally are ultimately taken by people.
Also, comparing measures to prevent infringement of copyright, which is merely against laws that are widely applicable throughout the world, with the sometimes very real problems of actual censorship is just a propaganda move designed to attract an emotional response that is not otherwise justified.
You're just repeating industry shill "the sky is falling" garbage.
Someone who has a different point of view to you is not necessarily a shill. And if there really isn't a problem if we stop creating and distributing new works, why is the vast majority of piracy ripping those new works, instead of just sharing the "orders of magnitude more media than any human could possibly watch" that we already have? Apparently most pirates disagree with you about which work is more valuable.
There is no money to be made in trying to scare pirates straight. There IS money in providing a convenient service, and DRM never adds convenience.
It would be lovely if that were true, but I have been following this issue for a long time, and the evidence so far seems to say otherwise. How would you run a service like Netflix, which obviously a great many people find more convenient than other models for watching movies and TV shows, without DRM or some other system with a similar effect? You're trying to separate DRM from what makes a useful service and treat the two separately, but they aren't independent issues.
We've done this song and dance with music, and DRM-free mp3s won despite all of the exact same arguments being made.
But as I pointed out in another post, music is basically the only creative sector where that has happened widely, and there are reasonable economic arguments for why that is.
Information wants to be free, remember?
No, it doesn't. This is one of those nonsense sayings that gets trotted out every time, but it makes no sense economically. A lot of creative content wants to be paid for, because otherwise there's no commercial incentive to create and distribute it. How that payment works is open to debate, but millions of creative professionals still need to pay the rent, and if creating won't do that, they're going to have to do something else instead.
If piracy/DRM-free is the most universal platform, we win.
Only if there's still stuff to pirate, and only if you don't suffer real world consequences for breaking laws when you rip infringing content. Neither of those is an inherent truth in the world.
By making DRM harder and more inconvenient, you make it less profitable,
Slightly, but the cost of a reasonably effective DRM scheme relative to the scale of deals that the likes of Netflix and major movie studios are making is probably pretty small.
which puts non-DRM media at an advantage.
That only follows if you assume the DRM doesn't have a beneficial effect that justifies its cost. If that were true, the executives running Big Media businesses would have switched tactics long ago.
It might not be a popular sentiment around here, but the reality is that a lot of copyright infringement is done casually and often by people who don't even realise they're doing anything against the rules. Copy protection technology doesn't have to be perfect to be effective. Even a relatively simple barrier can make quite a big difference here.
In contrast, if you look at the issues raised in the bug trackers after Chrome 55 added that download icon to the controls on HTML5 video elements, you'll find one comment after another from web developers whose clients were extremely unhappy about it. It wasn't just because it made it more obvious that people could download and save unprotected videos; obviously web developers knew this was possible before. It was also because the mere existence of the icon was causing visitors to those clients' sites to think that downloading and keeping the videos was permitted, even if it was totally against their terms. If you've never run a web business, you might not appreciate how much of a business finance and customer service problem even such a little change can cause, and equally how much hassle and abuse can be avoided just by making casual infringement a bit less easy/obvious.