

Why DRM is such a fucking stupid idea - AndrewDucker
http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/2885549.html

======
rlpb
I really wish that the word "buy" (and "sell") were illegal to use for DRM or
otherwise encumbered digital goods. If a company wants to license something to
you under DRM, then it should either explicitly use the words "buy a license"
or not use the word "buy" at all.

And conversely, if a supplier uses the words "buy" or "sell" implying that
you're acquiring digital goods (rather than licensing it), then that should be
sufficient to nullify any license and make it a straightforward sale in the
eyes of the law, and laws regarding "circumvention" should no longer apply.

~~~
dkuntz2
Do you not still buy and sell licenses? Sure, it's not the product itself, but
a license to use the product, but you're still buying it (it in this case is
the license).

Sure, maybe using "license this product" instead of "buy this product" is
technically more accurate, but at least 90% of customers don't really care.
And seeing license is just going to confuse them.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>Do you not still buy and sell licenses?

You do not buy and sell licenses. License is the verb. You license the work.
License as a noun refers to the agreement document, not the product.

> seeing license is just going to confuse them.

If by "confuse" you mean "cause to be suspicious" then that's kind of the
point, right?

------
zee007
This is what DRM says :-

"You could have easily downloaded our product/music/movie for free. But you
went out of your way to pay us for it. Thank you. In return, we'll punish you
by putting restrictions on you that you wouldn't have had if you didn't bother
to pay for our content."

A logic that sadly only makes sense to out-of-touch executives: "Hey, since we
can't get people stealing our stuff, lets punish people paying for it
instead".

~~~
npsimons
The reality is a little more nuanced. Basically, there are software people
(people like you and me) who convince the execs that they can increase sales
by reducing copyright infringement; all it takes is a little DRM they claim.
Whether this is due to malice or incompetence is unknown, but one thing is for
sure: we should start shunning these people. I don't care how good the money
was, DRM creators deserve to be publicly named and shamed, or in the case of
incompetence (believing that DRM will work), educated.

Of course, this is a supply side solution to a demand driven issue; but so is
DRM :) I'm not sure how to reduce the demand for DRM, because the sad truth is
that with enough demand, there will always be some idiot/huckster willing to
implement it.

~~~
altcognito
The reality is even more nuanced. Execs see people pirating their stuff and
believe that those are truly lost sales. (and maybe some % of them are) They
believe that if they can make it unpalatable/difficult enough to pirate
music/movies etc... they will return to the halcyon when everything was good
and they were making money hand over fist.

In truth, more people are turning away from traditional media than ever before
as choices have expanded more and more. They deplore this as well, but in some
cases the genie is out of the bottle (we are never going back to the days of
3-4 networks where power and profit margins were greatest), so the best they
can hope to accomplish is to own all the networks and control the stores. They
are winning.

------
tonyblundell
This is why I never 'buy' things online that I want to keep.

Music is a paid subscription through Spotify. If they went down I'd subscribe
somewhere-else.

Videos are either through a paid Netflix subscription or rented for £3-ish
through XBOX live. I never really watch the same movie twice.

Books I do buy from Kobo, but I wouldn't read the same book twice (unless it's
a reference book which I prefer to use paper for), so I don't really care if
it's not available after I've read it once.

I've never really got why people spend £15 to 'own' a movie on something like
iTunes when the way we consume that stuff is changing so quickly at the
moment.

------
dendory
I've written at length about this before. All DRM providers will go away at
some point, or decide keeping the server running isn't profitable anymore.
This is why I convert any digital good I buy, and if I can't, then I don't
buy.

~~~
zanny
If any service providing a game goes down that uses this kind of DRM, I _will_
pirate it if I bought it afterwards. How would it even stand up in court that
you are "stealing profits" from a business that no longer sells the thing,
especially after you already bought a license with no hard-coded expiration to
it?

------
ChrisNorstrom
I had bought some songs on Sony's old "Connect" (iTunes clone) music store
which uses DRM. It shut down and basically said the only way to keep enjoying
all the music I bought was to burn all the tracks onto CD and then rip the CD
back into MP3 format. (This degrades quality btw)

Rhapsody, another DRM music service had a weird glitch where the few songs I
purchased became "disconnected" from my account and no longer played. They
were just music files sitting there doing nothing.

MSN Music did the same. Google Video went down as well.

I bought "2012" on Amazon's video on demand store via Unboxed (which is
terrible btw). My family night was ruined. The DRM was so invasive to prevent
stream stealing that the movie got glitched midway, would pause and never
unpause, would not skip forward, and disappeared from my account after
upgrading the amazon player. After 2 repurchases and 2 refunds, I just pirated
it. The pirated version played great, but the family already got bored and
went off to do their own things.

Pirates pirate to avoid money -> customers pay because it's easier ->
companies use DRM to punish pirates -> customers end up getting hurt in the
cross-fire -> DRM makes pirating the better option for both pirates and
customers(former).

DRM isn't a stupid idea, it's a stupid execution of a reasonable idea. Steam's
DRM is reasonable. The damage to the name however, is already done. Now I
avoid DRM like the plague.

~~~
wuest
> Steam's DRM is reasonable.

This has yet to be seen. For a while, Steam was seen as a way to keep other
DRM at bay. Bioshock changed that (I'm not aware of 3rd party DRM on steam
titles prior; open to correction here). Now Steam is a distribution platform
which also incorporates DRM which may, or may not, result in customers getting
screwed, while games distributed through Steam may choose to incorporate
additional DRM. The sad truth is that we simply don't know if Steam's DRM will
ultimately screw over their customers. That will be seen at some point in the
future, when maintaining servers is no longer financially viable.

~~~
talmand
Compared with what's out there, Steam's DRM is quite reasonable. The main
reason is that you can install your games as many times as you want on as many
computers as you want, it just attempts to limit how many computers can access
the game at the same time. It would be even more reasonable if it allowed two
computers to be signed into the same account at the same time and allow two
different games to be played at the same time. For now you have to set one
computer to offline mode to make this work, but even then that's a decent
compromise.

But the main difference with Steam is that it offers features that are
beneficial to the gamer that excuses the DRM in the first place. Plus there's
the fact that for the most part the DRM is hidden from the gamer, it just
works.

Although, it does allow for another third-party DRM to be involved which just
sucks. Especially when the extra DRM actually cancels out features of Steam
such as limited number of installs. The worst is when a game is on Steam and
has Windows for Live involved. GTAIV was just awful; sign into Steam, sign
into Windows for Live, sign into Rockstar's Social Club to get full
functionality. Now that's just stupid.

Where Steam can possibly screw their customers is if you piss off Valve for
some reason then they can ban your account, which means you lose access to all
of your games. But this policy exists on other similar platforms such as
Origin. Personally I think this would eventually not hold up in court as I can
see them removing your access to a particular game for some reason, but not
the whole collection you paid for. Especially since Steam is a delivery
platform; it would be as if you did a credit card chargeback on the game store
that cheated you in some way and then they somehow took back every game you
ever bought from them. But so far, this type of case hasn't entered into the
court system as far as I know.

~~~
manicdee
Yeah, that little bit about "piss off Valve, lose access to everything you
bought through Steam" also translates to, "Valve goes out of business, lose
access to everything you bought through Steam".

Sure, they promise that if they do shutter the business they'll unlock all
purchases. But that assumes the business is closed down in an orderly fashion.

~~~
talmand
You are quite right. It's also a good strategy to stay in business, "Buy your
games from us to insure we stay in business so you can continue playing the
games you bought from us."

------
stevenameyer
There is no way to stop people's ability to pirate things if people want to
bad enough. I think the only real way to eliminate pirating is to find a way
to make people not want to. Maybe it is naive of me to think this, but i
honestly think that if you made a good product that very convenient to get and
allowed people to use it in the way they want then a lot of pirating would go
away. People are willing to pay for convenience, and when you introduce DRM
which makes getting/using it less convenient then you are actually pushing a
segment of people towards pirating.

PS: I know it's an old article but if anyone has not read "What color are your
bits?"[0] it is a great article on protecting copyrighted digital material and
why it is so hard/impossible.

[0]<http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23>

~~~
abecedarius
Yes, to keep people from copying a movie or a book requires more-than-
totalitarian control over people. But that's from a special property of
noninteractive works, that one viewing is all there is to them. To copy-
protect a program, in principle you could deliver it only to tamper-proof
machines that self-destruct before giving up the code. You can't infer the
program from its behavior, in general, unless P=NP (though of course you can
do well enough for many programs; but black-box reverse engineering is more
like creative work than scanning/recording). And releasing an app only for a
particular platform is not a human-rights violation, at least not on the scale
needed to suppress cameras and Turing machines.

That would take engineering beyond the current state of the art, but I know of
no proof it can't be done, and at least one person I respect seems to think it
can:
[http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_11.html#section...](http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_11.html#section04of05)

So "DRM is impossible" strikes me as short-sighted. DRM is bad for humans,
impossible for the media that Big Media currently cares the most about, and
currently unable to keep anything from escaping into the free world.

~~~
stevenameyer
You do bring up some interesting points. Restricting a program to physically
secured hardware along with software protection would definitely make it
extremely difficult to get the program or information outside of the way that
the maker wants you to. Although I am not entirely convinced that it would be
_impossible._ The issue is that it still must be a deterministic system. And
this means that with enough money, expertise, time, precision someone could
produce a situation in which they would be able extract the code and edit it.
Now in most cases the amount of resources and effort that would be required to
do so would probably not be worth it which would mean that it wouldn't be
worth it to pirate, but i would be hesitant to say that it would be
_impossible_ to. Any deterministic system can be compromised the key is to
make compromising it so difficult/expensive/time consuming that compromising
it is not worth it.

Now from a practical stand point I don't know how well this would work in a
consumer market, but can certainly see it being used in areas where protection
of information is extremely important. It just seems a little to costly to
implement on a wide scale to me, and I think consumers would see it as too
invasive and resist it, so if there were alternatives in the marketplace I
think a lot of people would opt for the alternative.

~~~
abecedarius
I broadly agree, but claims of impossibility face a burden of proof; and you
can see iPads as cheap crude approximations to sealed systems, and they're
effective enough that AFAIK most developers needn't worry about pirating. And
I'm not sure but I get the impression that successive models of iDevices tend
to take longer to find a jailbreak for.

~~~
stevenameyer
See my post to another one of your comments as to why as far as I can see it
is impossible to make a system that is completely unbreakable. But I
definitely think you could create a system that is so difficult to break that
in practical applications it would cost more to break then what is to be
gained. The solution you suggested is likely a very good example of this. I'm
not saying your proposed solution isn't a good solution to the problem or that
it wouldn't work in the real world(if security is the only concern). I'm
simply saying I don't there is such a thing as an unbreakable system, as long
as it is deterministic.

------
setrofim_
Obligatory xkcd:

<http://xkcd.com/488/>

------
qompiler
Correction - Why the cloud is such a fucking stupid idea

~~~
dutchbrit
Correction. There is nothing wrong with the 'cloud'.

SaaS etc... however is, which I assume you mean? (sorry for trying to be a
smartypants!!!)

~~~
qompiler
SaaS or any other cloud based service model. Storing your data somewhere else
where it gets held hostage in a proprietary format is a lot of pain waiting to
happen.

Dropbox and Gmail are examples of how it should be done, I have a copy, I can
make more copies, they make sure its accessible from everywhere I want. If
Dropbox or Gmail suddenly stops I will still have my files.

~~~
limmeau
So Dropbox is not part of the "cloud"?

~~~
yebyen
It obviously is, but you're only trusting the 'cloud' to keep an extra copy
and help you maintain synchronization between your copies. If they go down or
out, you've only (potentially) lost the latest changes if you actually threw
away the machine you were sitting in front of when you made them. In other
words, good use of the cloud.

*edit: So they provide sharing and cloud sync, too. I'm not sure if that should detract. I haven't used Dropbox shared folders since they were Public Folders.

------
matterhorn
Why Profanity in a Headline Demonstrates Immaturity and Lack of Substantive
Content

~~~
fixedd
"Fucking" is a vulgarity, not a profanity.

------
bengillies
> If you're walking into a situation with your eyes open, then go for it. I
> pay money to Spotify on a monthly basis because I view it the same way I
> view cable TV - I'm paying for access, I'm not purchasing something. But if
> you want to keep something long term, and have it work the way you want it
> to __, then don't buy it unless it's DRM free.

This seems like reasonable advice but I'm not sure it really follows from the
heading. DRM in Spotify is reasonable because if they shut down you lose
nothing and can move easily to another service (rdio or whatever).

Paying for something that you have no control over is reasonable only if you
don't care whether you get to keep it long term (I'd personally put books on
Kindle in this category as I'm only ever going to read them once). If you care
about access to something long term, then either subscribe to a service that
provides it (i.e. you explicitly own nothing (like Netflix and Spotify)), or
get it DRM free.

In a roundabout way such concepts also apply to things like Google Reader,
which is fairly trivial to migrate to another service vs Email, which (unless
you own the domain) isn't.

------
GotNothing
Agreed. Look at just early this week when ComiXology went down and users lost
access to their comics for an extended period of time.

[http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2013/03/the-lesson-
of-t...](http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2013/03/the-lesson-of-the-
comixology-blackout/)

------
tybris
One bad idea leads to another. Selling information by the bit is a bad idea.

------
contingencies
The sad fact is that global, multi-million dollar production value media
(film, computer games, etc.) is a seller's market. As long as they consider it
more profitable to implement DRM, it's not going away. It works enough to be
of some limited use to the content producers, and that's all they care about.

~~~
npsimons
_The sad fact is that global, multi-million dollar production value media
(film, computer games, etc.) is a seller's market._

Only an artificially created one. Take away the hype from big Hollywood
movies; could you then tell the difference between them and indie productions,
or even between most of the big studio ones? And I'm not just talking about
remakes here (which is another issue, because of copyright terms being
inflated ludicrously).

I still like Nina Paley's take on the concept: "Attention is scarce.
Information is not. Do the math."

