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Are you looking for a 100% solution? If so, you'll never find it.

Instead, you need to think about how you make offerings cheap enough and compelling enough that a sufficient number of users will choose them over pirating.

There will always be pirated content. However, thankfully, most people are also more or less honest and well-inentioned. The two balance out to a great degree. So what tips the balance is how you treat your customers – does it become painful to deal with your product because of all of the DRM? Do you treat consumers like criminals? Is it significantly less hassle to pirate than it is to buy/rent/view legally (and likely pay for)? If any of those are true, you will tip the balance away from a completely successful business model.

Every business model has inefficiencies in the supply chain. Much of it falls under what's called "shrinkage". Sometimes it's from theft, other times it's from spoilage, weather, etc. The truth is, just like in heating, cooling, power production, engine design or anything else, you can never achieve 100% efficiency and in the case of consumer-facing products and services, I suggest you re-evaluate such pursuits before they ruin what otherwise would have been a profitable business model because you've alienated your customers.




There's nothing about DRM that intrinsically must be obnoxious to the user - setting aside the issue of control over your devices, because so far that's not something that much of the population cares about.

Yes, lots of companies have implemented DRM in really terrible ways. But there are also examples of DRM that users are perfectly happy with. BBC iPlayer uses some very trivial DRM so that their programmes are available for a limited time, usually a week. It's easy enough to bypass, but people mostly don't bother: it doesn't get in the way, and I think people understand why it's time limited.


Netflix has reached the convenience level for me. I didn't even know it had DRM nor do I have any reason to care. Netflix, Spotify, etc, are the future of content online: unobtrusive DRM with subscription oriented payment.


I'd even argue that just in time streaming with minimal buffering is its own form of copy protection - it just gets to be too slow to make it worth the while to copy en masse.


Exactly – as I said, if you're looking for anything approaching a 100% "protection", then it's my contention that it will long since crossed that line into obnoxiousness.

Your point about trivial DRM working well exemplifies just makes my point –- "does it become painful to deal with your product because of all of the DRM? Do you treat consumers like criminals? Is it significantly less hassle to pirate than it is to buy/rent/view legally (and likely pay for)? If any of those are true, you will tip the balance away from a completely successful business model."

If the DRM is minimal and unobtrusive, then it doesn't meet my stipulations, above, and it's probably found some sort of happy-medium. (FWIW, I think most of Apple's DRM approaches in the iTunes store have gotten close, except for the device lock-in)


I think that you are missing something very critical: technology given us new tools the past twenty years which make previous ones more obsolete. Its the idea of creative destruction. When the car was invented, the horse-buggy industry died. In our case, the horse-buggy is the music cd industry. Instead of the industry trying to find a new business model with the emerging technology, they are trying to force us to stay with the old model. Fortunately, other companies have innovated in place of the RIAA (and MPAA) and we have services like Spotify, Pandora, and Netflix.

Do not confuse these companies with the industry itself. Especially with the music companies (Spotify and Pandora) the companies are paying ridiculous royalties on the music they play (especially when compared with an actual radio station). I can tell you that Pandora does not use DRM for the music that they play for you (about a year or two ago I sniffed the traffic and found raw mp3s being transferred, they might have changed that but I hope not). Still, I did not see people simply downloading all of Pandoras music. If people wanted to do that, there are much better ways (a la bittorrent).

Therefore, the real issue here is control. The industry wants to control what you can and cannot do; even more so than they used to be able to. For example, adding music to a home video which you post on youtube is something they dont want you to be able to do. You have the legal right to do so, but they still dont want you to. (You have the legal right to do so, so long as it is a creative use not meant for monitization, etc.) As long as the DRM provider allows you to do what you want to do, it can be seamless. But as soon as you want to step outside those bounds (whether within your legal right or not) theres going to be friction. I bet that people who like making videos with popular songs playing in the background have more of a problem with spotify than people who simply like listening to radio.


> Are you looking for a 100% solution? If so, you'll never find it.

I dunno, getting paid to make information-based content (which includes anything you can stick on a hard drive) by the people that want the content, rather than by people who want to try to profit off its artificial scarcity, could probably be a 100% solution.

Because then the information you have you can treat like anything else you own - you can share it, spread it, etc, without fear, and the content creator got paid by people that wanted it made.

I mean, it would be a culture shift, but it is a 100% solution. Piracy doesn't matter if the point of profit isn't in per-goods sales but in goods creation, where the actual costs lie.


I'm having trouble understanding what you mean by people paying for the creation of goods by the people that want the content. The division between paying for DRM-free content and the creation of that content seems contrived unless you're saying that consumers would pay the content creators directly so that more content can be produced, but that would make it problematic for up and coming artists to break into the market.

Don't take this as an argument, I'm just asking for clarification.


I dunno, getting paid to make information-based content (which includes anything you can stick on a hard drive) by the people that want the content, rather than by people who want to try to profit off its artificial scarcity, could probably be a 100% solution.

Unfortunately, by simple economics, that works only if you can find a sufficient number of people to entirely fund the sunk costs and an acceptable level of profitability up-front, allowing the low marginal costs to be written off. This is the classical patronage model, or in more modern terms, something like Kickstarter.

On Kickstarter, a project that has experienced, well-known, credible people behind it might reach seven figures of funding, though that is a significant success and relatively rare. I'm all for cutting out the middle man and for curtailing the exorbitant fees commanded by a handful of A-lister actors/singers/producers/whatever, but raising a few million a handful of times each year still isn't going to fund the big media industries, not by a long shot.

That culture shift you're talking about would be necessary and dramatic for this idea to work, and that's not going to happen any time in the immediate future, so what's your proposed solution to keep people getting paid to make good content tomorrow?


Netflix streaming is only $8/month, how much cheaper does it need to get before it's better than pirating?

There will always be pirated content. However, thankfully, most people are also more or less honest and well-inentioned.

I think this is likely true, but it's not something you can just take to the bank. Making a movie is a very expensive business venture because people have pretty high expectations for what constitutes a minimum viable product.


I think Netflix does a great job of proving my point. Streaming big content at a rate equal to viewing speed makes a weak target for pirating and helps keep people honest, IMHO.

Tell me again why we need DRM in HTML5? How many people are actively going out of their way to pirate the movies and shows from Netflix?

At the end of the day, pirating from Netflix: A) takes a lot of time (a bit of analog DRM, if you will as the rate is a huge limiting factor) and B)Takes a decent amount of disk space. Sure, storage is cheap, but what advantage does it give me over just keeping a netflix subscription? Not much, IMHO.

So, the upshot is that, pragmatically, I just don't see why Netflix needs DRM in the HTML Spec.




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