It's interesting that, every time an article comes up like this, I wonder why I never seem to experience the same kind of digital addiction or negative feelings that other people do - and then it turns out I'm already doing almost everything the article suggests for "unplugging". I've taken an hour long walk every single day for the past 15 years, and shower, and make sure I'm not getting overwhelmed with notifications. Yet, I feel no desire to interact with the physical world. I prefer being online, perhaps because I know how to handle it properly. I wonder how much of our misery is caused by poor user-experience defaults that people don't think to change (like always-on notifications). We get used to a corporate-designed hellscape and think that's the only way to experience a digital existence.
Technology is just a delivery mechanism which can be used for good or bad interactions. The problem is some technology is optimised for delivering the bad interactions because it benefits the technology vendor. Use technology that you control and decide when to interact with.
What I see is a lot of people saying on the one hand “I want my privacy and to be left alone” then hiring a vendor that is motivated to take your data and bug the shit out of you because it’s cheaper and subsidised by this poor behaviour. On top of that they then install apps which damage multiply that.
Incidentally on notifications all my kit is set on do not disturb all the time apart from alarms when I need to get up.
> perhaps because I know how to handle it properly
A subset of people seem to share this sentiment. From their perspective, the rest of us are somehow just doing it wrong when it comes to being online. What they never seem to have, however, is a clear understanding of what it's like to be on the other side.
A little vignette: I've been entirely off of social media for about 10 years, as in no accounts. Very recently, however, a friend of mine went on a trip and said the best way to follow along was on Instagram. So, I created an account and followed just that person and one other close friend, who is a fan of posting pics. Straight away, I was bombarded with an endless repeat of advertisements in the feed for some kind of colon cleansing technique. I'm unaware of any problems with my colon, so just ignore it, right? It's not that easy. Now, I have ideas about colon difficulties implanted in my brain. And it's now crossed your mind, too.
Some major forms of digital media insert themselves between me and my friends, rather than simply facilitating communication. In doing so, they hijack the power of human relationships.
It bends people. I'm not sure how else to say it. From where I sit, progress likely means giving up on maximalist capitalism and developing online stuff that strikes a balance between everyone needing to make a living and everyone needing to be cared for as humans.
I'm happy to see that you are able to strike a good balance between those two worlds and, in an ideal world, that should be the ideal outcome, rather than going back into the stone age.
Noticed the same in myself and my numerate, STEM minded colleagues. There’s some research that suggests understanding how to spot and reason through why something is logical fallacy acts as an inoculant against fake news[1].
It’s a recent category of analysis but subsequent studies suggest it’s real.[2]
Knowing how the sausage is made lends to awareness this stuff isn’t divine mandate. Disabuses people of pseudo religious belief in politically contrived economics, etc. If you consider religion is not the content of a holy book but a state of belief in socialized babbles essentialness to existence, American Civic Life looks a whole lot like a religion.
I'm not saying bad code doesn't exist there. My thought is that the percent of bad code increases with volume (or at least higher number of producers). Tens of millions of people committing to Github should mean its more cluttered with garbage than in MS. I at least assume MS has some automated code standard or security scans. That's at least more than nothing.
Please note: The entire "windows" portion of that article has largely been resolved at this point, because I fixed it myself. Some of the more egregious documentation problems have been fixed, but others remain unresolved.
Thanks for pointing that issue out! I had a fun time figuring out the codegen algorithm by putting printf statements in every function I thought was relevant.
I presume that's after the works of h. p. lovecraft, who created an association between non euclidean geometry and horrific nightmare realms and beings.
Given the number of corporate apologists floating around this site, I fully expect that the top voted comment here will be some form of "rent-seeking behavior isn't always bad". Someone will point at the GDP going up and say this justifies literally everything that corporations do. Someone will draw comparisons between two lines on a graph and say this is why Facebook never did anything wrong.
Is this really what we've sunk to? Is this really what everyone thinks? Are we so jaded by the failures of our economic system we can't even tell when it's falling apart?
Surely, even the most staunch supporter of the free market can admit that at a bare minimum, capitalism in this country is in desperate need of better anti-trust regulation to stop monopolies from crushing all competition. Surely we can admit that simply making a bunch of tech startups with weird website URLs is not going to fix the economy by themselves, and might even be making the problem worse.
Of course, given that we can't even agree that global warming is a problem as the arctic permafrost melts, I'm not particularly hopeful.
I marvel at those charts that show everything companies like Proctor and Gamble own - I cant believe it’s allowed. But yes you’re right too comment is already about how it’s unfair to criticize. So many apologists. Our economy is broken. It’s so dismaying.
> Someone will point at the GDP going up and say this justifies literally everything that corporations do. Someone will draw comparisons between two lines on a graph and say this is why Facebook never did anything wrong.
Except literally nobody will do that, except the caricatures in the fantasy of your own mind.
> Surely, even the most staunch supporter of the free market can admit that at a bare minimum, capitalism in this country is in desperate need of better anti-trust regulation to stop monopolies
Not taking the position, but free market supporters typically point to regulations as the main reason why monopolies exist.
And they're somewhere between wrong and disingenuous to do so, though it's an awfully common trope.
Contrast the treatment of monopoly in Marshall's Principles (the leading text from the 1880s through the 1940s) -- a full chapter, plus numerous other mentions -- with, say, Hazlitt's One Lesson, where it escapes mention entirely, save a note at the end. Hazlitt's book is corporate propaganda.
I think Martin Gardner when writing about bad science roughly said unless there are strong countervailing forces orthodoxy eventually becomes a reflection of cultural biases. I feel modern economics is if anything about generating obsequious corporate propaganda.
On the flip side regulations are in place to protect the ill-informed consumers (either due to mental capacity or lack of information). I figure consumers enjoy being in their position anyways, they just want something to work without having to worry about any of the details. i.e. Using Salesforce instead of rolling your own solution.
> Surely, even the most staunch supporter of the free market can admit that at a bare minimum, capitalism in this country is in desperate need of better anti-trust regulation to stop monopolies from crushing all competition.
Yes, I do agree. For example, we should stop threatening media platforms like Facebook and Google with regulations that would put any competitor out of business, either because the regulations are so onerous or because the regulations are so unimaginative that they accidentally rule out perfectly viable, and better, business models.
Perhaps we could enact a law that prevented regulation of most markets.
The inNative WebAssembly Runtime ran into this problem as well, and includes wasm_malloc.c, which can be linked against your application to provide a simple malloc() implementation without having to write one yourself or depend on WASI.
I think it's amazing how a lot of comments on EFF's resignation from W3C (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15278883) seemed to focus on how they were being unreasonable about EME, and that allowing companies to have DRM is necessary. Yet, both then and now, the EFF keeps making the point that none of the DRM even works! It was never ABOUT the DRM. The companies don't give a shit about "copyright laws" or people "stealing movies". As this article very clearly demonstrates, the companies are using this to crush competition. That's it. There's no other use for this.
The DRM is a legal excuse to sue competitors out of existence. The existing EME-compliant DRM implementations don't even work. This whole thing is a farce.
I think the more accurate view is that the W3C is dead and has been for a long time.
At this point it is just a mechanism for oligopolists to collude with each other to maintain their dominant market positions.
It is funny to watch how something like Web Crypto takes years to implement, even though the technology is ancient, but if Google wants a new feature to spy on users it will be released next week.
With all due respect to the great vision of Tim Berners-Lee, as well as his historical achievements:
The W3C has turned into an anti-pattern of what to expect from a standardization organisation. In some sense, the W3C standards are the opposite of the RFCs by the IETF.
(and ISO is somewhere in between - they do produce over-engineered crap, but their signal-to-noise ratio is still tolerable, even though it hurts)
Well, I did not intend to say IETF does everything right, but their signal-to-noise ratio is better by orders of magnitude.
Also, I'm under the impression that IETF learned from that utter failure and took measures to prevent similar mistakes in the future (please correct me if I'm wrong).
I did not observe that W3C actually learned anything from their mistakes, but produced less and less useful things over time (again, please correct me if I'm wrong).
It recently came to my attention that the mere concept of copyright law could be abolished with little economic consequence. In the end, the existence of those laws derives capital from other things, and it works as a sort of economic rent.
It's a good question to ask as a thought exercise, especially since so many vested interests don't want you to think about it, and try to condition you not to question it.
I think the concept of copyright law is good in lots of ways, but the current copyright laws in the USA are pretty awful. It was originally 20 years, now it's 90+. Lots of old works are being lost or having access denied because they're still under copyright, but nobody is publishing them.
From memory (an Economist artible that I cba to find right now) an economic study found that the ideal copyright limitation to actually stimulate authors to produce protected work was somewhere around - 25 years. We are now at 75 after death of the author or so.
Work for hire (producing something to begin with) would still be a thing.
For a broader discussion I'd prefer to reference the actual text for the basis of US Copyright.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
With the meaning of those words at the time of their writing:
* limited to scientific works
* and methods of doing things that have direct industrial benefit.
* ONLY by the author/inventor (not corporations)
* LIMITED time, I think 5 years is probably plenty and 10 is a maximum.
* I like the idea of a short default term, and paying (active effort) for longer renewal.
* Consumer protections (trademarks) are a different matter entirely.
I still think you have to give authors and artists a way to make money from their works, and in principle at least copyright is helpful. But copyright seems to be becoming effectively perpetual and that's not helpful. And the whole scientific publishing bullshit is even worse.
My impression has been that the way bands make money is not from selling their music, because the record company takes most of that money, but rather from going on tours and selling people expensive tickets to experience something which is fundamentally impossible to experience through piracy.
Unfortunately, tour tickets are a scarce resource and there is a whole secondary market that makes tickets even more expensive [0]. This is not an argument pro or contra copyright, just another limitation of this approach.
Writers are not really protected copyright wise...they can always talk and explain and expand on what they write. Photographers can do requests, filmographers can naturally have rights to first showcasing.
> I still think you have to give authors and artists a way to make money from their works
I understand the sentiment but..why. Why is it necessary. Art and science advanced on its own long before copyright enforcement of any kind.
True there are things that are particularly benefited from copyright. But they do so at the expense of something else. It diverts labor to things that later require law enforcement to protect.
It is not necessary, but if society was good at assigning a price to the relative merits of informational resources vs physical goods it would result in a more efficient economy.
Yes, science and art will progress, but if there is no economy attached, then they will be dominated by people who don't have to make a living. Unless we fund the whole thing publicly. That would work, but in other contexts we believe the market is more efficient.
Art advanced along fine because there was no way to copy paintings and sculptures. There was no way to record a play or orator.
But that, of course, is no longer true. The advent of technologies to capture and distribute art has led to new forms of art, and with that an amazing situation where people have unparalleled access to the works of genius. However, those new forms also have a drawback: they can be easily copied and distributed without compensating the originator. So in order to keep being able to support filmmakers and novelists and musicians we need to shield them from this. Otherwise, they will stop making their works.
Who is going to spend 5 years writing a novel if they can only sell one copy?
Economists call this the "Free Rider" problem: people are able to derive value from a common good without paying for it, so there is less incentive to produce the type of good than would be optimal.
Roads. Infrastructure for sewers. Defense. Fire suppression.
These are all cases where a purely free market fails to provide optimal levels of the good or service.
People are evidently willing to pay for novels, so we know they have value. The question is whether the current copyright system gives copyright owners too much power to extract rents at the cost of the public domain.
No, assuming the author pays taxes, the author is not a free rider on the law enforcement infrastructure.
The act of publishing the book has positive externalities (people derive benefit from reading it). Copyright is an attempt to allow creators to capture some of those positive externalities to promote more production of books.
Your position that the creator should not have a mechanism to capture any of those benefits is rather extreme, as is the position of the copyright maximalists that assert they should capture all of the benefits.
Why? If the argument is that a novel would not exist because the author cant collect value from it without copyright protection, then the value he is collecting is based on the copyright protection costs.
I'd say DRM works really well for some definition of "works". It certainly doesn't make it impossible to pirate anything, but the technology and the laws make it difficult enough that I rarely bother anymore and just pay for Hulu, Netflix, etc.
I don't think they're attempting to stifle competition, and if so they sure are not succeeding at that because there are new streaming services all the time. It's so they can prevent a commercially viable piracy business.
Does it though? Ten years ago it was trivial to surf to your local bay of pirates and get a copy of just about any popular film or series. This is still possible (hypothetically of course), but it takes a lot more effort (finding and joining trustworthy private trackers or setting up newsgroups), precaution (VPN, OPSEC), and diligence.
But that's not because DRM works.
Getting a digital copy of some bit of media is still trivial. Netflix forcing its DRM on its customers doesn't mean that you can't illegally download Stranger Things in excellent quality, and their DRM doesn't slow anyone dedicated to doing so down at all.
In fact, Netflix could stream all their stuff without DRM, and nothing would change (with one exception I'll come to in a bit). What's made piracy harder is a combination of factors:
* The legal way is often easier (just pay Netflix a small monthly sum and watch stuff)
* The legal way suffices for a lot of people
* Getting caught infringing copyright has serious consequences in many countries
* Downloading files from shady sources puts your computer at risk (Windows in particular; e.g., ransomware)
If Netflix turned off all their DRM tomorrow, then perhaps some pirates would have a slightly easier way to source their material, but otherwise nothing would change.
Except that the end-user gets a better experience.
At this moment Netflix is refusing to serve 1080p video content to anyone who uses a free operating system and free browser, because 'the DRM isn't good enough'. For 4k the rules are even more stringent; you need Microsoft Windows, Edge, and pre-approved trusted-platform capable hardware (which includes the monitor/TV).
For the rest of us, Netflix and the major content studios begrudgingly allow us to watch 720p video on our way too open computers.
This isn't about protecting the media streams from piracy, this is about making sure that the future of media consumption means consumers will run the media producers' software, using their rules, on hardware they control. We are not supposed to run our own HTPC, or do clever things with media we pay for (e.g., letting an algorithm watch ahead to warn the user of scenes with strobe light effects for epileptic patients, as the EFF mentions, or simply controlling a string of LED lights behind your screen for added effect, or downloading the streams to watch on holiday, or cut fragments out of a stream to use as samples in a lawful manner (e.g., a blog about films, or some cultural analysis), or …).
> At this moment Netflix is refusing to server 1080p video content to anyone who uses a free operating system and free browser, because 'the DRM isn't good enough'. For 4k the rules are even more stringent; you need Microsoft Windows, Edge, and pre-approved trusted-platform capable hardware (which includes the monitor/TV).
Hahahah, amazes me how people still use that crap. Why not pirate it instead and give them a big fuck you with those restrictions?
Because it is a fiendish dilemma. Most people are fine to obligingly use proprietary apps on approved operating systems to gain access to the content, so if you care about remunerating content producers, and watching the media by means of open technologies that work on any modern operating system, then supporting Netflix is currently one way to do so.
But you are right, the downside is that my account is effectively limited to 720p because of complete non-sense.
The sad thing is that any competition (e.g., Amazon Prime) appears to follow the same rules as far as I can tell: sure, you can use your browser, for now, but nothing over 720p for you until you run our software outside of that sandbox of a browser on a verified trusted operating system.
I'm not sure where my point of rejection of this deal lies.
That's what I do, with zero remorse. They are killing the web to make bigger sacks of money. Fuck me if I'm going to feel bad about pirating the everliving shit out of their content.
I've never deprived someone of something they own or committed any kind of mayhem on the high sea.
Generally, I pay for whatever content I download. I'd have to do some research to figure out how to rip a Netflix stream or export recorded video from my DVR. Ripping DVDs (and especially Blu-Rays) takes a bunch of time, and encoding the result can be hard to get right (embedding subtitles, choosing a codec and profile that works on most of my devices, etc). It's easier and faster to torrent it than do all the ripping and conversion myself. Not that I do it much anymore; I suspect that format-shifting wouldn't be a good legal defense. And I also suspect that my ISP (the only high-speed one in the area) would dump me as a customer at some point.
shame on you, good thing you aren't doing it either way ;)
> I suspect that format-shifting wouldn't be a good legal defense
you seem to imply by analogy to homerecording, torrenting stuff you once payed for (or didn't directly as with yt) might be ok, but sure enough, taperecordings were campaigned against, too.
Btw: I worry about codec and network exploits, so easy is not the exact term I would choose wrt torrents and p2p-"sharing".
> shame on you, good thing you aren't doing it either way ;)
srt's in the container, not hard-overlaid into the video ;-) We've got asshole neighbors. They'll purposefully rev their Ferrari to wake my kid up if they hear the TV (e.g. sound is up enough to easily understand a whispered conversation, then there's a bass-heavy explosion). Then there's the less-common use-case of watching a movie on a plane without blasting the audio.
> you seem to imply by analogy to homerecording, torrenting stuff you once payed for (or didn't directly as with yt) might be ok, but sure enough, taperecordings were campaigned against, too.
Tape recordings don't involve automatic sharing of the data with other people in the swarm as an implementation detail. I did a fair amount of downloading 8-15 years ago, but mostly dropped it when I started working.
Huh? It's still trivial to pirate media. Grab a copy of the Tor browser, go to the same pirate bay you used ten years ago, download the same content you did then. Zero investment, it's just as straightforward.
The legal options have improved, but the illegal ones are still there and just as good.
That's trivial to us (hypothetically), not to the average consumer who is, quite frankly, well-advised not to risk getting 'fined' in an out-of-court settlement for infringing copyright. And how do they even know if they're on the real Piratebay? The original domains are blocked in many countries. TOR? VPN? These require knowledge or guidance; doable, but not zero investment.
> That's trivial to us (hypothetically), not to the average consumer who is, quite frankly, well-advised not to risk getting 'fined' in an out-of-court settlement for infringing copyright.
Pirating content has gotten SO easy that my elderly parents do it regularly by simply searching for streams of movies they want to see on google. DRM has stopped none of this - and the risks of getting drive-by malware are an afterthought to most people.
It's actually far easier to pirate media now. No need to setup a torrent client at all. Simply browse to one of the hundreds of free streaming sites and download over http directly in your browser.
The average person now get's dozens/hundreds of movies and shows on a cheap USB stick from their friends, then the plug it into their TV to play. Piracy is easier for the average consumer now than it ever was in the past.
Why is what? You can find things with google because it's a search engine, that's what it's for.
You can't trust TPB because the content is user generated, TPB does not do much to stop people from uploading malicious content and boosting it to top10 by seeding with bots.
Nothing that involves "Tor" fits the "trivial" definition.
If Netflix captures the market of people who aren't comfortable subverting encryption, they win. 100% capture is unnecessary if they get the people who can't and intimidate the people who won't with the occasional prosecution of the people who do.
The illegal ones are not "just as good" - they faced the competition and got better in the past few years, learning from others successes.
Remember the Popcorn Time. It dropped a bomb because it was an evolution from "go to some tracker, find what you want, download it, wait, watch when it's done" to the modern standards of "think of a title, grab the popcorn and start watching".
(Just in case - I'm not approving or condemning of anything. Just stating the facts what had happened.)
>For the rest of us, Netflix and the major content studios begrudgingly allow us to watch 720p video on our way too open computers.
I wish they even gave this, but at least in here, many mainstream flicks are of even worse quality (although this restriction on some content seems to apply even on Windows and Edge browser, at least on my computers). Not that it really matters what's the nominal resolution of a 1000 kbps stream anyway (and lately Netflix has removed the option to see the actual resolution of the video I think), however...
... selling out the free web got us so much indeed.
You're on target, but I think you missed the bullseye by an inch.
Netflix, Steam and Spotify made it incredibly convenient to obtain content legally and at a reasonable price. They removed most of the incentives for piracy. There was a surprisingly long period when piracy was hands down more convenient than buying stuff legally, and services like these were responsible for reversing that trend.
More specifically, Spotify deserves a special mention, as it has been single-handedly responsible for massively changing my listening habits, because of the way the Daily Mix/Discover Weekly features keep pushing my boundaries. It gives me something valuable that I couldn't get otherwise.
> I'd say DRM works really well for some definition of "works".
Well, it works only for crooked purposes, and that's exactly the point EFF is making. DRM is therefore unacceptable, including in the context of the Internet.
And you are still missing the point. DRM doesn't make any pirating difficult. All it does is giving power to undemocratically extend copyright law in arbitrary directions by slapping DRM on something, and saying that breaking that DRM is illegal. It's a power grab tool. Just take a look how this garbage was used to prevent users from switching mobile carriers, claiming that unlocking the mobile phone (i.e. breaking its DRM) is illegal.
DRM _technology_ isn't the problem at hand, and yes it does "work" to effectively keep honest people's behavior constrained to corporately approved actions.
The real problem is DRM _law_, which is a gross overcriminalization of justifiably legal activity, like repairs, format shifting (both to and from DRM devices), security research, tinkering with your own possessions, etc. And on top of that, then demanding that all countries in the world follow suit.
I first check Hulu and Amazon video, if it's not on there I pirate it. I can't remember the last time I heard of anyone being burned legally for pirating, and torrents are not difficult to use.
If you can't find a movie on hulu/Netflix/etc, do you then buy it on DVD?
Rarely do I want to see a particular movie that's not included in a flat-fee or free service. Having saved enough from those cost-cutting measures, most of those few are available for $2-6 from Redbox, iTunes, or Amazon Video; as I'll pay that much for a cup of coffee, and far more often, the convenience of shelling out a few bucks far exceeds the benefits of relenting to the annoyance of pirating. For the very few movies I otherwise can't get free/cheap, I likely want them enough that actually buying at retail is satisfying.
Torrents aren't difficult, but typically I'll burn more time trying to get what I want, uncorrupted, than my available time warrants. Legal burn is unlikely, but burned by bugs or malice is likely enough to waste time I could have spent just watching it via inexpensive legal sourcing.
And then there's that little issue about ensuring content creators actually getting paid, so there is actually content worth consuming.
> And then there's that little issue about ensuring content creators actually getting paid, so there is actually content worth consuming.
This is something creators need to get better at. Creators need a "Pirated my media but want to make sure we still get paid? Click here!" button. I want to pay a lot of artists, but I also don't want them to think I want to pay for the DRM'd form.
That doesn't make sense though. I'm completely allowed to send an artist money "just because". I'd be extremely surprised if there was any contract that said that wasn't allowed.
There's a difference between someone voluntarily sending an artist money, vs the artist openly soliciting donations in a manner easily construed as advocating piracy.
Yeah, but it's hard to tell the difference if worded correctly. It could just be a button saying "send us random money". It doesn't have to be explicitly for piracy.
Thing is companies like Netflix want to believe people are paying for seeing content, while truth is most people are paying for convenience. This needs to be drilled down to them.
" -- all trace their success to business strategies that shocked and outraged established industry when they first emerged. Cable started as unlicensed businesses that retransmitted broadcasts and charged for it. Apple's dominance started with ripping CDs and ignoring the howls of the music industry (just as Firefox got where it is by blocking obnoxious ads and ignoring the web-publishers who lost millions as a result). Of course, Netflix's revolutionary red envelopes were treated as a form of theft."
Yeah, this right here. DRM might be technically impossible to get 100% right but you don't have to get it 100% right if you have regulation to back it up.
The alternative is that there is no way to protect IP on the web, which means that there is no incentive to transmit IP over the web which takes a shitload of value off the table.
"But if someone goes around your DRM and doesn't violate any other laws, the non-aggression pact means that you couldn't use the W3C standardised DRM as a route to legally shut them down. That would protect security researchers, it would protect people analyzing video to add subtitles and other assistive features, it would protect archivists who had the legal right to make copies, and it would protect people making new browsers."
This is a major part of the argument being made here and helps to close the gap between blind ideology and serious issue.
That's a perfectly reasonable point (which I agree with). It's naive to dismiss the concerns of content creators out of hand, but surely there's a middle ground we could get to legally over what constitutes fair use (or fair cracking?) when it comes to DRM.
> DRM might be technically impossible to get 100% right but you don't have to get it 100% right if you have regulation to back it up.
You do if you don't want the material to show up on pirate sites, which is why they claim they want it.
> The alternative is that there is no way to protect IP on the web
Protect it from what? It can't be posting the material to pirate sites because it's already there. It can't be preventing users from making a fair use copy because that isn't a thing to legitimately want protection from.
IT is ideology, you should check the gog.com entry in wikipedia, DRM does not work, the movies and games still get cracked so what DRM gives the users? DRMed games are slower, cause issues for legitimate customers, add the risk that in future the game will stop working and it will be illegal to patch or mod it. For video it adds hardware requirements like I must buy a new CPU from Intel.
There is no benefit for the users, content is still easy to pirate. the only advantage is that they can now use the law to cause problems for people that want to use their legitimate copy as they want and for software maybe they want to also modify it(If I bought this game it should not be illegal for me to mess about install a mod or fix a crash)
I discovered GOG.com when I had no internet on a bus and couldn't play any Steam games, and when I couldn't figure out how to copy a Steam-managed game executable over to my friend so he could try it.
Pretty hilarious to have put up with that at all.
Now my gaming library is a trivial folder of executables like it should be.
Nobody said they don't get cracked but it's far easier to pay $10/month for a Netflix subscription than it is to hunt down rips of everything on there.
If there was no DRM you could just save the movie to your HD with little effort.
Enough people pay for streaming services to make them a viable business model. That's all the empirical data you need to show that DRM does work for its indented purpose.
> If there was no DRM you could just save the movie to your HD with little effort.
...after subscribing to the streaming service. At which point they have your money.
And it's not like you can cancel your subscription after that because then you wouldn't get new content, which is the entire point of having a streaming service instead of watching the same pile of old DVDs you've had since 1998.
I'm pretty sure people would pay for streaming services even if a DRM-free copy were easily available. Why? Because streaming a movie is no fun when the server can't deliver the necessary bandwidth. Maintaining an infrastructure that can handle streaming at the scale of Netflix costs money no pirate bay will ever be able to afford. So streaming services could still compete with the free offering based on quality of service.
Distribution is virtually free. It's essentially a solved problem. The hard and expensive part is being a gatekeeper. If companies gave up the idea that they need to play gatekeeper with their media, they could distribute it at virtually no cost.
And this to me, is the critical problem with all of these services. We don't need gatekeepers anymore, because that's a leftover from physical media. Those days are gone, and the gatekeepers need to die.
Even bootleg markets took some effort because you are still dealing with physical media. With virtual goods, there's nothing to deal with other than uploading.
There simply is no way to protect IP on the web, and refusing to understand that is burying-your-head-in-sand levels of myopia. If that takes "value" off the table, then it can come off the table, capitalism be damned.
You can try and legislate DRM all you want, but like a law to make pi=3 or enacting laws to declare that water not be wet, it is the wrong thing to legislate.
The companies that make movies certainly care about people "stealing movies". Netflix, in turn, cares because they have to negotiate with those companies.
Should the W3C, in turn, care about keeping Netflix happy? That seems like the relevant question to me.
They definitely shouldn’t because netflix doesn’t need their help to succeed. They should make upstart netflix competitors happy however, to grow an ecosystem.
The frustrating part is that my choice to be a law-abiding media consumer subscribing to a bunch of services makes me get a worse service in many ways than a pirate. I can’t use a player of my choice, i can’t have a single UI on top of all media, I can’t rely on content remaining available. Pirates don’t have these problems. The DRM legislation and media conglomerates power ensures that the market can’t fix itself. You can’t make a netflix competitor without DRM because you’ll never get access to licenses for popular culture products. Even had the W3C refused to deal, the situation wouldn’t be meaningfully better.
How does W3C enabling a DRM option stop Netflix competitors, though?
It's not like the next Netflix could legally start by just downloading the current Netflix. They'd have to go back to the media owners and negotiate their own contracts for it. At that point, anyone trying to compete with Netflix presumably winds up with the same contractual requirements from the media providers to use some sort of DRM.
From that perspective, the W3C adding web platform support for DRM surely enables more competitors than it stops, right? Now the startup engineering cost is to build or hire one EME-compatible DRM provider, you don't have to build proprietary apps for every platform, you can trust people's browsers to run your DRM as easily as Netflix's and quickly launch to every platform that has a supporting browser.
There's also still room left to compete with a DRM free product, assuming you find a way to negotiate media contracts without it, and figure out how to market that fact both to media companies and to users why that would be an advantage. From a web platform standpoint the work that goes into providing pleasant DRM experiences still floats some of the needs of DRM-free video playback, because browsers are going to engineer one on top of the other to save effort.
The article explained in depth how the W3C didn't just enable a DRM option, they were in a position to create a standard that furthered the whole concept of DRM in a way that wouldn't have otherwise happened at all. And they make it painfully clear that DRM is used abusively to undermine otherwise legal rights.
None of which invalidates my points, which was with regards to corporate competition.
It furthers the whole concept of DRM, but as a standard open to any party, thus not really damaging competition on the scale of companies like Netflix, that if anything helps the next company to come along and wish to replicate the Netflix streaming experience, because Netflix "has" to share that baseline DRM standard with them (otherwise W3C wouldn't have endorsed it and browsers wouldn't support it).
Yes, DRM is used to abusively undermine the legal rights of users, but that doesn't stop competition for those users, and supposedly in a fair market the least abusive company you'd hope might be able to market a better value proposition. A DRM standard doesn't stop companies from being less abusive and using that as competitive leverage, even if it arguably furthers, or at least favors, the baseline amount of abusive behavior amongst that corporate ecosystem.
> It furthers the whole concept of DRM, but as a standard open to any party, thus not really damaging competition…
It damages (as the article states) the specific type of competition that is disruptive to the framing of Netflix-type business. I.e. there can be competition from a Netflix-clone but not from an innovative competitor who does something different building directly on Netflix in the way that Netflix themselves built directly on top of existing DVD markets to get started themselves.
Real innovation often involves this sort of non-clone, innovative, disruptive competition that doesn't just do something new but actually adapts the existing market in new ways. DRM certainly blocks a lot of that, and that is exactly what the DRM-advocates want to block and what EFF is talking about in stifling competition.
I suppose I'm arguing from a stricter reading of competition as a direct competition. Even expanding to "non-clone, innovative, disruptive competition", I still get back to in the case of a Netflix DRM is backed by contract law. Most of those same "non-clone, innovative, disruptions" would be "protected" against by contracts and license/subscriber agreements with or without DRM enforcing them. A lot of the arguments here about DRM stifling competition aren't dissimilar to complaining about how exclusivity contracts stifle competition. (Disney removing their entire catalog from Netflix in a couple years to give exclusivity to their own streaming service has much more to do with contract law than DRM.)
So too, the fact that you couldn't build a sharing service on top of Netflix has much more to do with the contract law and licensure of digital artifacts versus physical goods than anything at all to do with DRM. DRM is entirely orthogonal to the discussion. DVDs have DRM and that didn't prevent Netflix from building on top of them. What almost prevented Netflix from using DVDs was existing contract precedences with Blockbuster, but again that had much more to do with contract law than DRM.
DRM is a tool that is only as useful as law allows it to be, both for good and bad (how it gets regulated versus how it enforces legal structures). It does seem to me that many of the complaints about DRM are misdirected that there is no digital bill of rights and digital assets don't have regulations/protections that we take for granted for physical goods. Those problems remain even if W3C had blocked EME from becoming a standard.
Given that the article makes a case that Netflix and cable companies started by exploiting grey areas in legal contracts, it's clear that they're talking about competition that broadly. The fact is, weird grey areas or loopholes in contracts (basically everything that undermines "protection" against competition) is an opening for competition.
The logical conclusion is that much of contract law is in the way of competition. But the point is that whether we think competition is good or bad or contract law should exist or not or be strict or whatever, the companies in this case are not following the Golden Rule.
Contracts were intended to block things like Cable TV or Netflix, but they came into existence by finding loopholes in those contracts. The argument is that their exploitation of the loopholes added real value, invented new services etc.
The arguments about competition here are anti-protectionist. They basically say that since we recognize that Netflix added value, we not only should be glad that they found the contract loopholes, we should probably eliminate all such protectionist contracts.
The argument about regulation in this case is that we don't necessarily need regulations to protect digital rights because it's trivial enough to technically enable them as long as we don't prohibit the rights legally. Take away the legal enforcement of DRM, and DRM becomes irrelevant for technical reasons. Thus, no digital bill of rights is needed.
It's not my argument (I'm not sure), but it's logically consistent.
In short: legal protection of DRM enables companies to have profit and power and avoid the threat from new types of companies, services, and innovation that would otherwise happen and would be in the public interest. The public isn't only interested in Netflix alternatives but in all the world of innovative developments that would be possible if we removed the protections of Netflix's business model (even if it doesn't protect Netflix as a player in that model).
Really short: it's about competition between types of businesses or between business models, not competition within a business model.
It's about cable competing with airwaves; about radio competing with live concerts; about books competing with priests, etc. not about competition between different books etc.
Does Netflix actually hates DRM but is forced to use it? are the Netflix original movies DRM free? If not then we need to stop excusing Netflix for using DRM because bad guys in Hollywood are forcing them to do it.
Netflix's argument for the longest time was they didn't want DRM, but they had no choice.
But, now their originals are becoming a larger and larger part of what they provide, they've steadfastly stuck to having DRM on all their content (first and third party). So that prior argument kinda falls flat on its face.
Shipping new player variants is a pain. The kind of pain you read about on thedailywtf.
Once you have streaming working with DRM on all devices you need a %@#$$@#$@ good reason to introduce DRM-free streaming. Netflix wouldn't want to discover that its own content plays with very low quality on, say, Panasonic TVs made between April and August 2016.
Because all devices can play only DRM videos?
Most devices if not all can play not DRM video and probably not including DRM uses less resources so this is not an excuse not to offer the option, (that can be off by default and only power users could enable it).
Is there extra work, yes it is, but you can't be anti DRM but use it because we need to put some work to offer no DRM version of a stream.
I've worked with this. I've dealt with blackbox player blobs with >100 undocumented tuning variables, and with TVs whose manufacturer didn't really know what worked and what broke.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if some TV manufacturer broke some streaming variant (such as high-bitrate unencrypted smoothstreaming), discovered after a few months, and silently fixed it in new models without issuing an update for the old models.
EDIT: I wouldn't assume that TVs are better at playing DRM. Just from my experience, non-DRM works better (less code that might be buggy). What I'm saying is that once Netflix had a few hundred working devices that worked with DRM, avoiding player bugs became a really good reason to stay with DRM.
Adding an option would not affect TVs that use the old players, only TVs that would update the Netflix app would get this DRM free option and users would have to enable it, if it is not working they can disable it and complain.
I understand your point but this is not a good excuse why people on PCs that don't have the right CPU,cables and monitor can't watch 4k videos that they paid for (..because Netflix wants to give you DRM free video but because some old TVs may not work then you can't get it so please watch low quality stream)
Everything on Netflix is DRMed, as far as the user is concerned. You cannot get a copy of the video file for offline playback. You cannot play the movie on a video player without the Netflix app. They remove stuff all the time and then you lose access. Hell, they even control the quality based on which browser you are using (only Edge can play 4k).
Netflix is in on it, plain and simple. They want to control your movie-watching. That's what earns them their monies. The only upside about Netflix original content is they don't put any kind of geographic lock on it.
The W3C is supposed to care about keeping Netflix and EFF happy. They're supposed to reach a compromise. There seems to have been very little compromise here. They've certainly managed to make EFF very unhappy.
EFF argument was highly politicised and conflating US law, with global technology standardisation.
Quite simply EFF had a weaker argument, even though there is a lot of sympathy for their cause from representatives in W3C, who also think US law is an arse, its simply not the correct forum for the battle.
To stay relevant as a content platform and limit the scope of proprietary code to a small encryption module instead of a bloated behemoth like Flash.
That's not say that's a great argument, but the problem with making EME a battleground is that there is zero leverage over the content companies that insist on DRM, zero. Studios have the content people want to watch, if they can't watch it on the web they'll use proprietary apps. Technologists like to believe we shape the future, but browsers do not shape the content industry, rightsholders do. From their perspective, refusal to implement EME is damage they will route around, and they have the leverage to do it. Also note the inefficacy of DRM in general.
The place to win this battle is in congress. We need to move towards strengthening fair use and outlawing DRM, that's the only way to take the teeth out. The idea that the browser is an important battlefront is nonsense, EME is a sensible compromise that keeps the browser relevant. I respect the Stallman-esque view that the web should in no way be compromised but it's not a winning move in the long-term.
In implying that the point of DRM is to make copying the data impossible, the EFF is creating a straw man.
I don't lock my doors and windows because I think it makes it impossible to break into my house. I know full well how easy it is to get in anyway, just by breaking a window. I lock my doors and windows because I expect it to create just enough of an inconvenience to mostly deter others from breaking into my house.
Let me re-iterate the emphasis on the word 'mostly'. I'm not trying to make the perfect the enemy of the good here. It's the same for media companies. They're not looking for something that will prevent everyone from pirating movies. They're looking for something that will make pirating movies just inconvenient enough that most people choose to pay for content instead.
The EFF really needs to come up with a less specious argument if it wants to see much success in convincing anyone who doesn't already agree with them in the first place.
A better analogy is this, You buy a paper book but it comes inside a big glass box so you can't xerox or scan it.
To read it you have to use a key that you received that will unlock a stick inside the box that you can control to turn the page.
A pirate buys the book, brakes the glass, makes many copies, all the pirates then can read comfortably, can take notes on the book, can go fast trough the pages, yopu the person that uses the legitimate DRMed book you use it in a uncofortable way, you can't make notes, skipping trough pagers is super hard, lending it to a friend is impossible.
So DRM made it harder for legitimate users, for pirates is still easy.
That's a pretty poor analogy. The average user doesn't notice DRM or even know what DRM is. The difference between Netflix with DRM and Netflix without DRM is approximately 0 for the average user.
DRM isn't there to keep content off the pirate bay, it is there to keep mildly computer literate people from doing Right Click->Save As in Netflix and then sending House of Cards to all their friends.
I hate to underestimate the "average user," but there are legitimate things the average user could do with a Save As button in Netflix, like playing video on unapproved devices that they own. There are a lot of people who still don't have a smart TV capable of streaming Netflix but do have one capable of playing .mp4 files from a USB drive.
The last time I ripped a DVD was so my mother could watch it on her iPad over a long plane flight. If DRM didn't exist, I imagine importing a DVD or Blu-ray into iTunes would be as easy as importing a CD. Empowering users to watch media they own on devices they own would have a real impact. It might not be something the average user devotes a lot of thought to, but it would certainly be something they would do if they were allowed.
Are you sure? I do not use Netflix but DRM books(at least some of them) you can't copy paste text, I think many people will miss this.
Someone explained that Netflix app buffers very bad, this seems to be a problem caused by DRM but I can't prove it.
I doubt that many people are reading ebooks in a context where they need to copy and paste regularly, I could be wrong though. I read exclusively ebooks and it hasn't ever come up that I remember. I'm not saying it isn't a valid use case, but I question whether it is a common use case for the average user.
I'd be curious to know how someone has narrowed down the black box that is Netflix to determine that buffering is caused by the DRM.
Sorry if I was not clear, I suspect that DRM caused the buffering issue, or at least an open source player could be implemented that could keep more back buffer so you can go back 30 seconds. Wouldn't be illegal to reverse engineer the players that include DRM? or you would have to be careful not to look at the bytes that implement the DRM.
The Kindle and Nook iOS apps both let you copy/paste. I did it all the time when I got stuck having to use DRM ebooks in school, and never had a problem with it. There may be limitations on how big a region you're allowed to do it with, but, if so, the limit's large enough that I didn't encounter it in the course of normal academic use.
I did sometimes run across ebooks that basically used images of the text instead of actual text, and copy/pasting from those naturally doesn't work. But the ebooks in question were all non-DRM.
I am disabled, I need to copy paste the full chapter so I can have my Text To Speech application read it to me. Maybe today the Kindle app has TTS, I can't find it on Google though.
I can see your point for calling straw man, but you seem to be implying this was their only argument. My takeaway was that the primary arguments centered more around controlling competition to secure monopolistic positions, threatening legitimate security researchers from disclosing truths, and preventing fair use.
And just to play devil's advocate for a moment, while I tend to agree about your straw man point, is it completely a straw man argument if some of the CEO's at the large corps pushing DRM actually do believe they can make copying data impossible? I mean, just because we know this is a pipe dream, and many very smart people may argue convincingly against it with hard evidence, does not mean everyone will actually believe it.
It's not their only argument. But it's one that they lean on a too hard. I think because, as the balance of votes on my previous comment seems to indicate, it's very popular with most DRM opponents. Assuming that is the case, it's a big disappointment, because, in the context of an important public debate like this, preaching to the choir is a serious tactical error.
To your second point, I can't speak for most CEOs of large media conglomerates, but I would say that I've never been in the habit of believing that CEOs truly believe everything they say. Their messages are crafted.
What I can speak to, though, is what I was told when I was asked to evaluate copy protection strategies in a product I was working on, and tried to push back with the "but you can't make piracy impossible, anyway" argument. And it was basically the response I described above. Eventually I was able to come up with a compromise, which was that we would use a much less intrusive technology than the one that was originally proposed, on the grounds that even the most optimistic benefit to us didn't justify the added inconvenience to legitimate customers.
I don't think that argument works here, though, because the DRM in things like Netflix is so convenient for the average consumer that very few people even realize it's there.
Maybe that leaves us with only the "controlling competition" argument. Unfortunately, that one also seems like a tough case to make these days. The story of browser streaming over the past few years has been one of increasing competition. Once upon a time, Netflix had a near-monopoly. Now there are all sorts of streaming services. I mostly use two of the smaller paid ones, my public library offers streaming, and my partner and I are seriously considering canceling our Netflix subscription. If the goal was to squeeze out the competition, they don't seem to be having much success at it.
For my part, I think the main argument I'm left with is one of interoperability: I don't want my content to be tied to specific hardware devices. The situation with the Amazon Kindle is awful, and has really kind of killed ebooks for me. And it's a great example of content creators shooting themselves in the foot with DRM: They could have retained the ability to sell and distribute their own content if they hadn't worried so much about it. Instead, they just handed basically the entire digital book distribution market to Amazon, and Amazon proceeded to act like about as benevolent a dictator as Amazon always does. This is a slightly different story from how things work with streaming in browsers, though, so I'm not sure you can just stand that analogy up and use it as a solid argument.
Except that the cost of circumventing DRM has nothing to do with the cost of pirating movies. People pirate movies by downloading them with the DRM already removed. The DRM only affects the source, and by all evidence it doesn't affect them enough to prevent the first copy from happening, which is the only useful thing it could possibly do since it isn't present on any of the subsequent copies.
It's like arguing that all citizens should wear shackles because it will keep prison inmates from escaping. It doesn't work that way and the people insisting it does have ulterior motives.
No, the cost of DRM do not repay itself by preventing enough users. There have been tests cases, studies, and the repeated conclusion I keep seeing is that DRM has no correlation to the revenue from individual music, games and films. It has however a correlation to platform and user retention, which is what this article continuously refers to.
To take a few examples, remember when the European Commission hired researches to do a study on the effect of piracy? What about the revenue from itunes after it went DRM free? Sale of music that is available on youtube after it went HTML5? Revenue from music, film, and games on the longer term after aggressive blocking of torrent sites? What about the long term effect from anti-piracy/DRM laws?
The whole EFF article ends on the conclusion that DRM will not exist if their only purpose is to prevents enough users from copying the product. That effect won't be worthwhile enough to pay the cost of DRM. Only a sticky platform that prevent competition will bring the revenue to validate investing into DRM.
The European commission study you're referring to a) said that piracy did make a difference on Hollywood films (it said it didn't make much difference in other sectors, but for major films it did) and b) had such enormous margins of error it was essentially worthless.
You're not helping your case by bringing up evidence you don't site except for one example where it showed the opposite to your claims
"In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements. That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect. An exception is the displacement of recent top films."
The difference is not for all Hollywood films, a finding that I recall other studies have found before the EU one when they looked at movies that got leaked before a cinema release. But comparing Cinema DRM to EME is like Apples to oranges, they are not the same thing. Cinema DRM is not intended for end users.
> Well, surely DRM prevents enough users from copying the product to make it worthwhile?
What I don't understand is that it's not how it works, all it takes is for one single user to make a copy and upload it on newsgroups/bittorrent/... and it's available for everybody.
That means that in order for DRM to work you need a 100% success rate at preventing unprotected copies. This seems absolutely implausible.
Since I'm unhappy with the selection and compatibility of the current streaming services offering I keep pirating all the TV shows and movies I watch and they're always available for download mere hours after their official/legal counterparts. It's not like videogames where intricate anti-piracy measures can take weeks or even sometimes months to break, here it's mostly about the time for the pirated copy to disseminate on the network.
I wonder by which metric video DRM can be said to work. It's a pain for legit users because they can't view their movies and shows on all of their devices easily and it's a complete non-issue for pirates.
It does need to be perfect to achieve that. If only one pirate can bypass the protection then everyone can just go to a streaming site and watch the movies without DRM.
Controlling illegitimate users is impossible. Therefore the purpose of DRM is control over legitimate users to the point where they can harm legitimate competitors.
This argument is deeply flawed. It is never about the few people who have the technical skills to circumvent copy protection schemes.
Copy protection needs only to be economic. It works as soon as accepting the copy protection is convenient enough that enough customers prefer it to hunting down an illegal copy with good enough quality and without protection.
That makes absolutely no sense. You need to pay to access Netflix. What then does DRM on Netflix achieve in making the "customer accept the copy protection"? The customer already fricking paid!
Everything that is on Netflix you can already get on TPB (since the DRM is ineffective to those with technical skills), so how could the existence of DRM possibly have influenced the customers decision to pay vs. pirate?
That argument is flawed. To prevent the plebs from right click-saving, it's enough to add some Javascript. If they have the skills to work around that, they have the skills to torrent.
Considering torrenting is the preferred method to view online content at least here in Bulgaria, and I assume in most of the rest of the non-western world, I would advise against underestimating the technical abilities of most internet users.
Next door in Romania, I agree with what he says. Using torrenting or other pirate source is standard practice for anyone under the age of 35-40. It is by no means limited to a niche demographic of tech anoraks. A decade ago in my city, before the big ISP mergers, when you signed up for broadband internet our local ISP would actually give you the username and password for an eMule server where you could quickly share films and music with other people in the city.
It is not hard to find a illegal copy of a movie, you just need to know how to google, eventually you will find a website that embeds the video, no need for torrent application, downloading and running software.
So tell me again why I should fire up Google, look for some shady website with dubiously dangerous ads to download or stream a movie when I can just fire up the Netflix app, tap the movie I want and start watching?
I think you did not understand my point, I have a steam and gog account, I pay for Intellij so I am not advocating for piracy,
my point is that DRM does not make piracy super hard that only developers and linux users can pirate movies, I gave an example that you can watch a movie just by knowing how to use google, I am also sure that children in schools will teach each other how to get latest cartoons via torrent or website. If you go on gog.com you will see a large number of games, DRM free, music is now mostly DRM free, again my point is that Netflix offering a DRM free stream will not cause the number of subscribers to drop, because piracy is not that hard as the previous comment said it is.
I agree with you 100%, I would pay the subscription to Netflix to avoid those websites, but it would be cool that I would not have to buy special hardware for it.
P.S. I do not use or considered using Netflix because of my Internet speed.
And you misunderstand my point. DRM plays into many other measures to provide a sufficient incentive to seek commercial offers over piracy. DRM makes the initial copying hard. This pushes illegal copies into the dark corners of the web because of their lowered availability. At this point DRM was already successful.
I did not notice any change since DRM was implemented for movies, piracy was illegal before and piracy is not much harder with DRMed videos, you can watch Game of Thrones immediately as it is released. Maybe you think is harder now but is easy to pirate and easy to find the pirated content with google, then click play and done.
If you have time I recommend reading gog.com page on wikipedia and also find the interviews with CD Project Red devs about DRM.
And then there are publishers that experiment with DRM. I distincrly remember one older case where the add-on to a game that contained copy protection sold more copies than the base game without protection. How do you explain that?
As long as there is a moment where you properly show content to a user, there is a moment he can copy what he sees perfectly too, therefor DRM will never work.
If it's just to prevent that, you could just have a "copy=false" attribute on the tag, which browsers would respect. No need for proprietary encryption nonsense.
Some versions of some browsers turned DNT on by default. Respecting DNT in this instance would have always made this flag a choice by the user.
There is still room to argue that the user's choice was to install a browser that made DNT the default option.
But it's a moot point, since the sort of web services that were in mind when DNT was proposed largely ignored it. They never set the evil bit in their responses, either.
> Well, surely DRM prevents enough users from copying the product to make it worthwhile?
It surely does not. DRM is broken (by any skilled pirate), and the rest of pirating users can get it without said DRM after that. So let's make it clear. Usage of DRM has nothing to do with piracy.
No, not really. You're thinking that every user has to copy a movie from the browser. But only a very tiny percentage of the people wanting to see the latest Game of Thrones episode need to steal it so that everyone else who intended to pirate it can watch it as well.
Whether or not DRM exists for those other 99.99% of the people is completely irrelevant. The show is already on torrents put there by those who could bypass the technical protection of DRM. So now those 99.99% of users can watch it for free, too, without having to know how to bypass DRM themselves.
You drastically underestimate the amount of piracy that occurs from just “cntrl c cntrl V”ing files.
The goal is just to make it just hard enough to pirate that the masses don’t spend the time to figure it out.
My mom and her friends pass around cds and rip them on iTunes. Because it is easy. She’s pirated hundreds of cds. She didn’t know what what.cd is. She doesn’t know what the new version of what.cd. I don’t either.
The more difficult it is to strip DRM, the fewer pirate captains there are. You don't need to take out every pirate to end piracy; you just need to take out every captain.
So if only Paisleybeard and VikingVik can crack the GoT DRM, you maybe only need to get cooperation from the Croatian and Swedish police for a few weeks, and then you get some amount of time when pirated shows are no longer available. But then Swashbuggerer and NotSoJollyRoger and Plaidbeard step up, and the pirate crews flock to their standards. But for a time, some people who might have otherwise pirated may have paid. But then you're back to talking to the American and Filipino and Scottish police. And if one of your captains is in a non-extradition country, you may have to talk to Pinkertons or ex-military contractors.
If it is trivial to crack the DRM, everyone can be a pirate captain if necessary, with a crew of only themselves. You will never, ever stop piracy for longer than a few minutes in any pirate-friendly household with that kind of DRM. That's like the difference between posting your property and putting up an actual fence or wall. It is just a virtual boundary that has legal consequences in the out-of-band enforcement system.
And don't forget that when pirate captains voluntarily retire, or are forcibly retired, they can still publish "how to be a pirate captain" guides for the media-seas they once sailed. They can distribute models for 3D-printing your very own pirate ship. So the DRM-makers have to put constant effort into changing tactics and updating technical countermeasures to fight that kind of fight. It gets to be expensive, because the defense has to be perfect, while the offense can breach it through any ant-sized hole. Furthermore, the analog hole will always be there, and every paying customer has the keys to your fortress gate.
You do need DRM to strategically put specific people in jail for pirating, in a way that would not be dismissed by your consumer base as either petty or draconian.
You need the DRM to go after one Kim Dotcom, instead of getting civil judgments from a thousand unremarkable people who were just doing the same thing that hundreds of thousands of other people do routinely and innocuously, without ever getting caught. You need it to narrow down the size of a class of people until it is safe to demonize and turn into examples, without alienating your potential customers.
Without DRM, when grandma gets sued for $10000 because she sent a copyrighted video to all 8 of her grandkids, the rights-owner looks like a bad guy. But when a nerd cracks the DRM and seeds a torrent resulting in thousands of downloads, prosecutors can pile on the computer crime charges, and it looks like the hacker is a dangerous criminal, who was probably stealing your identity and browsing through your cloud photos, too.
It's all about public perceptions. Shooting people in the head is somehow less acceptable if you didn't draw a line in the sand first. People get distracted from the main issue--which is people getting shot in the head--if the victims could have made some choice that would have yielded a different result. The public then gets fixated on where the line should be drawn, rather than taking away the shotgun from the homicidal maniac.
I agree with you that this law is harder then copyright law, but your comment is not clear what is your opinion if you think it is justified to have such a law.
I appreciate the point of view this post is providing. It is always important to think about the potential limitations of AI, and the fact that once again, we may hit the ceiling of our current attempts at AI much more quickly than we realize, and no singularity will ever occur. We need to think about how to solve our problems realistically, now, without waiting for a godly super AI to come solve them for us.
However, what's bizarre is that he is painting a world that is already wrong. In particular:
"We won’t have massive, perfectly coordinated networks with optimised flow and distribution — think traffic networks (those self-driving Teslas that act as taxis when you don’t need them)"
But... we will. We're already making it. It might not work very well at first, but automated cars are a real thing, and they are going to happen. We have preliminary automated cars right now. Perhaps he is instead claiming that our autonomous cars won't scale, but this too makes no sense. Of course we can make them scale. Once we've solved the hard problem, which is actually driving the cars around and not hitting things, solving distribution and flow is almost trivial. We have all sorts of systems for solving distribution problems and finding maximal flow along a network. There's even an entire class of algorithms to solve it with[1], which we currently use, right now, to solve things like scheduling airplane flights.
And then he brings up a point that seems completely perpendicular to the entire rest of the post:
"We won’t have total surveillance (à la Reynold’s Mechanism or Brin’s Transparent Society)"
This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with cryptography. Whether or not the singularity does or doesn't happen is completely irrelevant. Indeed, it currently looks like we're headed towards having total surveillance with or without the singularity, unless we do something about our privacy laws.
While we shouldn't assume AI will fix all our problems, the examples provided in this post are bizarre, to say the least.
The "singularity" is really just 17th-century metaphysics. It's Rene Descartes all over again imbued with religious undertones of salvation and transcendence. Most of the "aspirations" of its occurrence are nonsense. Kurzweil has fashioned himself like an AI prophet. For some reason, it has caught on among people, some very smart, and has lead to this general passive-ness to solving real problems today. The "singularity" becomes the answer for everything, "it's definitely coming!"
The author made the mistake of citing specific examples that weren't very good. It's odd to me that's there's this conflation of ai with the singularity. Strong ai is only one path to the singularity, others being human augmentation, and group minds. Also, the idea of this all being a 'failed dream' was addressed by Vinge in this talk[1]. He picks a metric, then tracks how it would develop in the case of a singularity never happening. Very enlightening to see his thoughts on this.
My pet theory is that if everything goes as well as it can go, people thousands of years from now will call the period we are currently living through the singularity.
I mean, if you look at the definition of singularity that is implied by the site behind your link -- "self-accelerating technologies will speed up to the point of so profound a transformation that the other side of it is unknowable" -- then to be quite frank, that has basically already happened.
BTW, I'm not trying to say that the singularity has ended already. It's a development that started 1-2 centuries ago and is currently ongoing, and pedants of the future will quibble that it's not truly a singularity (but then again, true "naked" singularities simply don't exist in nature, so that point is moot).
> "self-accelerating technologies will speed up to the point of so profound a transformation that the other side of it is unknowable"
It is not even the first time this happen. There was something fitting this description starting the Neolithic, that people are not sure what exactly it was. There was writing and the big civilizations that happened through it. And there's the scientific/industrial revolution that we can argue endlessly if it is or isn't just a part of what is happening now (but falls just outside of your timeframe).
Re: writing. Lots of the oldest clay tables are rants about how 'our laws are the best' and 'other cities' laws will make you work too hard'. Apparently writing really took off when it got used for PR!
> solving distribution and flow is almost trivial. We have all sorts of systems for solving distribution problems and finding maximal flow along a network. There's even an entire class of algorithms to solve it with[1],
I would not be so confident with that. Yes, in a perfect world with perfectly rigid, cubical cows, and passengers that are never late you can make flow algo's that reliably hit near 'global maximums'. Things do not change dramatically if you feed the problem to some ML algo.
The flow problem for airlines is in bigger part a problem how to make decisions given near random occurrence of things like sudden worsening of the weather, traffic redirection due to something happening on the runway/airport, fueling trucks being late, and of course the need to maximize revenue per seat. The best decision making algorithm here would not be the one that maximizes throughput, but one that can keep routes more or less consistent given all those changes.
Here, I see that even if you had a near-perfect routing algorithm, and a transportation system with no human driven cars, the whole routing map may have to be changed completely in response minuscule externalities like somebody jaywalking. This class of problems is altogether different than any kind of optimization.
Ironically, the logic class most adapted for solving such problems is the long forgotten fuzzy logic.
You know how solving 90% of some problem takes 90% of the time, and solving the remaining 10% takes another 90%? I have a feeling that with self-driving cars we are not close to 90% yet, not to mention the last 10%. There is a huge difference between "hey, this prototype kind of works" and polished product ready for consumption.
All kinds of cool inventions never (yet) got past one-offs. Jetpacks, flying cars, exoskeletons (done in the 60's). If the price, safety, usability, etc. aren't all perfect, it can completely fail. Even electric cars got almost nowhere so far.
He makes the same comments about elder care and robots. This will happen to some degree with or without strong AI. I don't think the author realizes that some tasks, like network optimization don't require anything close to strong AI
One potentially alarming sentence in this article is "Wix will open up DeviantArt’s repository of art and creative community to the Wix platform, giving Wix’s users access to that work to use in their own site building."
Exactly what do they mean by that? Will it be opt-in? Will it only cover art that's already under Creative Commons? Will be it all Creative Commons? Does a Wix site count as commercial use? I can't imagine people would be very happy about their art suddenly being available for use elsewhere without their consent.
Hopefully, this is much ado about nothing, and Wix won't do anything terrible, but we've seen technology companies do stupid things before. At the very least, it would be nice if they elaborated on their plans regarding this.
3. License To Use Artist Materials. As and when Artist Materials are
uploaded to the DeviantArt Site(s), Artist grants to DeviantArt a
worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to do the following
things during the Term:
a) to prepare and encode Artist Materials or any part of them for
digital or analog transmission, manipulation and exhibition in
any format and by any means now known or not yet known or
invented;
b) to display, copy, reproduce, exhibit, publicly perform,
broadcast, rebroadcast, transmit, retransmit, distribute through
any electronic means (including analog and digital) or other
means, and electronically or otherwise publish any or all of
the Artist Materials, including any part of them, and to include
them in compilations for publication, by any and all means and
media now known or not yet known or invented ;
c) to modify, adapt, change or otherwise alter the Artist Materials
(e.g., change the size) and use the Artist Materials as described
in Section 3(b); and ...
The only thing a DeviantArt user can do is to delete their content, shut their account, and leave the site.
The policies only apply for the "Term" in which a user exists and the art exists on the platform.
a) We can re-encode your images, to whatever format
we need to make the website work.
b) We are allowed to display the pictures online.
If something happens and the internet stops existing,
we'll still be allowed to show people pictures where
we go after the web. We are also allowed to display
pictures not only by themselves but also as part of
a gallery. E.g. in search results.
c) We're allowed to resize, convert to grayscale, etc
so that galleries, search results, etc, all work
the way a modern website is expected to.
You need all those rights to be able to operate DeviantArt. You really don't want the licence to become the limiting factor when you implement a new feature on the website, so you need to be quite broad.
Sure, but you those very same terms could also be used to operate something entirely different from deviantart. Was the parent post accusingly pointing fingers or was it just dusting facts?
That Wix scenario doesn't look all that terrible by the way: imagine deviantart pivoting into some kind of racket machine publishing connections between cringeworthy "early works" and the current employers of meanwhile professional graphics artists, now that would be an evil use of the repository.
I'm no lawyer, but it looks like that language grants the DeviantArt corporation rights to use submissions, which they need in order to provide basic search as well as marketing.
It would be a different thing to grant Wix users the right to take someone's work over to their own sites, I speculate that would require an extension or transfer of copy rights in addition to the quoted policy.
I'd wait and see, I'd expect that Wix won't just lay claim to all submissions without asking for permission or remunerating artists who's works are sold.
Notice it says nothing of re-licensing to others. These terms seem to facilitate DeviantArt's (and presumably its owner(s)) ability to show your work to the world on their site. But does not facilitate their sub-licensing your work to others. If I were an artist and loved my DeviantArt account, I'd make sure to hold them to task if my work showed up on a Wix customer's site.
If I understand wix.com's product correctly, those customer sites run on wix.com's servers. So, one could argue that it would be wix.com that shows the images. It would not be clear-cut that this infringes on that license.
I do hope that wix.com will do the right thing, though, and limit this to images that their creators permitted to be reused and/or add a feature where wix customers can negotiate with deviantart users over pricing.
This line is pretty common in ToC's as far as I know (I'm no lawyer). It allows them to show the images on the site and in advertising. Nothing too uncommon, and most of it's needed to make the site work.
"Royalty-free" doesn't mean they can just do what they want. It means they're not going to pay you for the things listed in the license (to which you agreed by hosting on their site.) It doesn't even say "...perpetual license." It's clearly limited to stuff you've put on their systems, while it's on their systems. You remove it, they can't use it.
DeviantArt has been one of the better online hosting services when it comes to their handling of copyright. Buying them won't magically grant additional rights to Wix.
Based on the Submission Policy on DeviantArt's site, the essence of the agreement seems to be that as long as the work continues to be on DeviantArt, any DeviantArt site can use it royalty-free under a non-exclusive licence. The artist (or other submitter) is free to remove the work from DeviantArt at any time, and with some provisions about orderly handling the work is then no longer available for use on DeviantArt sites under those terms. The copyright and related legal rights in each work remain with the artist throughout (or with whoever else had them before, but they're not automatically transferred to DeviantArt).
Whether the acquisition means sites run by Wix now count as successors and therefore enjoy the royalty-free rights regarding uploaded works is one for the lawyers, but even if it that is the case, it seems that anyone who objects can simply delete their work from DeviantArt and in doing so withdraw the consent required to use the work on any other sites as well. That being the case, it would seem unwise for Wix to try to pull a fast one here, and a more collaborative approach would seem to be in everyone's interests including Wix's.
It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. Deleting things on DA doesn't always do what you would expect, and it surely sounds like Wix thinks they are going to offer work for free.
For me it means enough, i just deactivated/deleted my deviant art account.
This unclearness, plus their in my humble opinion, horribly annoying youtube ad campaign, did not make me ponder about deleting my account for a second.
Since you can monetize your artwork already on DA I hope this will be as simple and straightforward as opting into it much like you would with prints. And maybe letting someone search any Creative Commons licensed art with that as opt-out.
You cannot unilaterally change the license on someone else's work. A lot of images on DeviantArt are under very restrictive licenses.
I'm assuming they will present an option for artists to allow their work to be used on Wix sites in exchange for royalties, with the middleman taking a percentage of said royalties.
Well that depends on the terms the uploader agreed to. The license displayed for works is, as I understand it, the license that applies to visitors/viewers not necessarily for deviantArt itself.
> DeviantArt does not claim ownership rights in your works or other materials posted by you to DeviantArt (Your Content).
Here's the rest of it:
> 4. Copyright
> DeviantArt is, unless otherwise stated, the owner of all copyright and data rights in the Service and its contents. Individuals who have posted works to DeviantArt are either the copyright owners of the component parts of that work or are posting the work under license from a copyright owner or his or her agent or otherwise as permitted by law. You may not reproduce, distribute, publicly display or perform, or prepare derivative works based on any of the Content including any such works without the express, written consent of DeviantArt or the appropriate owner of copyright in such works. DeviantArt does not claim ownership rights in your works or other materials posted by you to DeviantArt (Your Content). You agree not to distribute any part of the Service other than Your Content in any medium other than as permitted in these Terms of Service or by use of functions on the Service provided by us. You agree not to alter or modify any part of the Service unless expressly permitted to do so by us or by use of functions on the Service provided by us.
> This line is in the current TOS:
> > DeviantArt does not claim ownership rights [to your content]
But there might be a clause in there where they claim sufficiently unrestricted license to use that content in any way they chose. Not having copyright does not mean that they don't have license to use the content or let their users do the same.
I could totally see them taking all the CC licenses and open it up as a stock image repository. This could go two ways.
One, they open it up and its a total free for all, and as a Wix user, I can just go take someone's images and use them on my site royality free, which is downright scary.
Two, they take control of all the work that's under CC, involve the artists and offer them a percentage of the profit to use their art for their websites. Or cut out the artists entirely, which I could also see happening. You have huge opportunity to drive a ton of revenue from the stuff that's already on DA.
> One, they open it up and its a total free for all, and as a Wix user, I can just go take someone's images and use them on my site royality free, which is downright scary.
Why is that scary? It's the point of CC licence. All they'll have to do on the using site is add an attribution (for ex CC-BY-SA).
It's the intention of CC to allow gratis usage and sharing.
So, from the comments here, it seems that people are under the impression that mastering engineers work off of the individual instrument tracks (the stems). This is not true. The article itself explains that a mixing engineer takes the individual tracks and mixes them. The final mixdown is then sent to the mastering engineer. It's called "mastering" because this stage of processing happens on a single track - the master track. Buying music in a pre-mastered form would still be a single lossless file, which is no different from Bandcamp allowing you to download the final lossless mastered version. The pre-mastered tracks will just sound worse and have wildly different volume levels depending on how they're normalized.
If you want the actual stems of the song, that would actually be the music in it's pre-mixed form. It wouldn't even be mixed at that point, let alone mastered.
Yeah, there seem to be very definitive statements in these comments without a basic understanding of the recording process. I wonder if these are the same people who swear they can tell the difference between various playback formats or when they use gold XLR cables.
Apart from the misunderstanding, I think it would be actually interesting if you could buy the un-mastered version, plus "mastering" files to use depending on your setup (e.g.: crappy headphones, car stereo, home stereo), but that would require multiple mastering sessions and wouldn't probably be very cost effective...
Or you could crowd-source them but then it might go against the creators intentions...
In a different field (digital cinema) the above is being done for color, lookup the ACES colorspace and workflows...
(Very) Basically the camera's recording goes through a process to make it into a standardized ACES colorspace. It will then being processed by editing, VFX, grading, etc... and then there's output transforms from ACES for each output device, like a cinema projector, a home TV or a mobile phone.
And yes, AFAIR, that does need grading for each targeted output device, because of how we see and perceive color depending on the environment we're in...
It would be awesome (EDIT: to have something like that) for music as well
As a washingtonian who has been strongly in support of charter schools for years without any knowledge of Gates' involvement, this story seems to be choosing a very strange case-study for criticizing billionaire philanthropists. Perhaps it has not occurred to the author that many people support charter schools because they're actually a good idea?
The fundamental problem with saying that this money should go to the public school system in order to make it better is that we don't know how to make the school system better. It doesn't matter how much money is thrown at anyone in education because everyone is doing it wrong. Throwing more money at the public educational system will simply result in schools that are exceedingly good at cranking out students that excel at taking tests and memorizing useless facts instead of actually being good at something.
Every argument against Charter schools that I heard during the debate was focused almost universally on money. It was always about money. Teachers seem convinced that in order to make our school system work, they just need more money, when in fact the entire public educational system has already driven off a cliff.
Charter schools won't be better than public schools because of money, they'll be better than public schools because they try fundamentally different ways of teaching kids. Nobody can fix the educational system until we find better ways to educate children. Until we can find a way to instill creative problem solving and encourage innovative thinking instead of violently shoving children's brains into boxes, nothing is going to change, no matter how much money is thrown at the problem.
In a world where computers are better at following instructions than any human being ever will be, creativity is the one single advantage we have, and the regulations hovering over the public school system are doing their best to utterly destroy any creative spirit our children might have had. Our society is being shaped not by the kind of intelligence that is measured by a test, but by the innovative spirit of people who think outside the box. It's time the educational system started thinking outside the box, too.
This prequel to this saga - Bill Gates screwing around using private donations to public schools - resulted in lots of horrendous education for kids in Seattle, even those typically considered part of the middle class. Bill Gates destroyed public education in Seattle for a generation most of my millennial friends from the area hate his guts.
I think we should get rid of standardized testing. If we are to instill creative problem solving, etc to our kids, how do we achieve that by making every kid take the same damn test?
I also think we should get rid of school ratings. Fundamentally, a society is a group of people that band together and solve each others problems to benefit as a whole. Education is one of the basic requirements that should be provided to new members of society so that they can contribute to the problem solving. So then why make school ratings? Every school should offer the same quality of education, no matter where.
Sure, charter schools will likely bring new methods of teaching that get rid of standardized testing, but it won't fix the problem of school ratings and the competitiveness that comes with it...
> Perhaps it has not occurred to the author that many people support charter schools because they're actually a good idea?
No more than the opposite point of view, which wins with a fraction of the backing.
> Charter schools won't be better than public schools because of money, they'll be better than public schools because they try fundamentally different ways of teaching kids.
