At some point this silly game of cat-and-mouse is going to escalate, and streaming players won't work unless your entire computer is locked down and "verified" by Microsoft or Apple.
At some point it escalates to where the media providers make watching their media so expensive, time consuming, and difficult that piracy ramps back up.
It sounds dumb, like "why would companies shoot themselves in the foot like this" but trust that they will. They always do. Corpobrain is a form of autopilot, there's no one with intelligence in charge not because the people who work at media companies are dumb (though, they are), but because there's just literally no one in charge. Its autopilot. Each iterative decision in isolation makes sense, but when zoomed out and interpreted holistically they're killing their own business.
That sounds an awful lot like an Xbox, and I personally don't think we're too far off from those becoming general purpose cloud connected DRM computers coupled with recurring monthly subscriptions for all your app/game/content needs.
It's like when that first Motorola came out with a locked bootloader, or maybe the second one, I think the first was trivially crackable. I remember that year, all of the people claiming it was just a matter of time. And nowadays, among other reasons, custom roms are largely dead because people want access to PayPal, Netflix and their banking app.
It's grim. I hope to win the lottery and leave the industry before the term "computer" has lost all meaning.
The only way to reduce piracy is to make access easier and cheaper - something the music industry figured out. Sure music still gets pirated but its a lot less.
Well, no, that isn't the only way to reduce piracy. Another way would be widespread collaboration between the largest tech corporations to lock down the pipeline from manufacturing to sale and onward
If users continue to accept this path, which... they seem to, that is where we'll inevitably end up.
That wont work. You can't tech your way out of this short of brain implants instead of screens. If there's a screen/speakers it's going to be pirated full stop. Games, okay that's a different story sure but they're already going down that path with online only games anyways.
No, that's where we are now. Not in the future, right now. It isn't working.
You fundamentally can't prevent someone copying your file. It isn't possible, full stop. You can only make it maximally inconvenient. You can't encrypt a user's eyeballs, so the media has to be transmitted in the clear at some level. Be it intercepting the LVDS signal to your TV panel or just pointing a camcorder at the screen.
The current tact is to just make it maximally inconvenient for anyone to access the file in any way. This does not consider the asymmetry in effort required. All legitimate users must deal with shitty DRM systems and broken apps, where it takes exactly one pirate to go through the effort of making a copy. Then everyone else who obtains a copy has to expend zero effort to consume the media.
Piracy is simply easier, which is why there's a resurgence now. The only sustainable option is to make legitimate consumption easier than piracy. For a lot of media, piracy is the only option to obtain a copy that will not vanish at some indeterminate point in the future. even if you paid for it.
Companies think that they can just make piracy harder, but that simply doesn't work. Once the first copy is made, the game is over. As established, there's simply no way to truly and permanently prevent a copy being created. That's simply the nature of digital media. At best, you can slow pirates down, you can never stop them. Piracy will never go away, and people need to accept that. People have been selling bootleg copies of goods since the dawn of time, there's no way to prevent it. There will always be someone nabbing copies of movies and sharing the files.
You can either waste everyone's time by trying to fight it, or you can realize that companies need to compete to survive, not just be large. If you compete with the pirates and produce a better product that people want more, well that's what capitalism is all about, isn't it?
Oh, don't get me wrong, I have zero faith in capitalism. After all, that's the entire reason we're in this situation.
However, market forces are actually very real. They just don't work the way capitalists think they do. Or rather, capitalists are convinced they can control the market through technology. Unfortunately for them, this is a technology that can't be solved or controlled.
It's not as though there's no effort to close this loophole (see HDCP and probably others) - I don't expect them to give up any time soon
Granted, pointing a camera at a screen and recording will always be possible - but I say if we ever reach the point where that is the only option, we've lost.
It is not a given that this will always be possible. I could imagine some kind of steganographic watermark in videos - diffused over the entire signal so that it cannot be easily cropped out - combined with a check for the same in all recording equipment that blocks the recording or blacks out the area if detected. Could be done "voluntarily" by all large manufacturers for starters, then eventually mandated by law for all equipment sold or imported into the country.
And there's already precedent for this kind of thing: the way copiers block money bills as source.
i suspect one factor is that music is a lot cheaper to produce than movies, so selling music at an "accessible" price is a lot more viable as a solution. plus, there's a larger market for music since music is largely consumed in isolation. people tend to listen to music themselves so they would either buy a copy for themselves, or stream for themselves, so there's the benefit of volume as well. on the other hand, movies are more likely to be consumed in groups - a group of people watching one movie will only pay once.
for the tv/movie industry, the best solution we have right now is basically streaming services like netflix. the issue is that its probably still not economically feasible for companies like netflix to pay for the streaming rights of new movies for their subscribers, especially those big budget movies. so for those, either you'd have to wait until the price is more palatable for netflix, or you'd have to just pirate it.
