I find the hysterical arguments against DRM hard to grasp. Accessing various types of IP content is not a human right. There is an abundance of content available in the US which is not DRM'd. It just happens to usually of low quality.

FWIW, the contribution of the artist is only a small cost of the "product" that we consume. There are many other people who work on the teams that create content, and without them it won't reach a mass market (publishers, finance, legal, marketing, logistics).

I find the arguments that somehow DRM is detrimental to the production and distribution of high quality content to be obtuse.

To take another example I am familiar with: software for audio production. Many of the best creators of such software have moved to a very annoying and powerful form of DRM: the use of a physical dongle. Most of them say that without this, they could not be in business, as the pirating of such software is rampant. The DRM doesn't stop it, it merely throws enough roadblocks in the to get a significant percentage of users to pay who otherwise wouldn't.

> Accessing various types of IP content is not a human right.

DRM interferes with various legal usage of content (fair use), especially because of anti circumvention provisions which are derivatives of DRM (like DMCA 1201). Plus DRM is always a violation of privacy and security. You need to analyze it deeper, beyond PR labels put on it by the DRM proponents.

There is no acceptable reason for DRM proponents to institute a police state approach to "protect their IP".

> I find the arguments that somehow DRM is detrimental to the production and distribution of high quality content to be obtuse.

I fully agree with that. High quality products can be and are produced and sold successfully without any DRM. And on the contrary, DRM always degrades the quality of any product because it cripples its usability.

> I am familiar with: software for audio production. Many of the best creators of such software have moved to a very annoying and powerful form of DRM: the use of a physical dongle. Most of them say that without this, they could not be in business, as the pirating of such software is rampant. The DRM doesn't stop it, it merely throws enough roadblocks in the to get a significant percentage of users to pay who otherwise wouldn't.

The pirating of such software is rampant despite any DRM they put in it (as you said yourself it doesn't stop it, and once DRM is broken - that's it, piracy ensues). So they can stop wasting their time and resources on putting that DRM there, and instead of crippling the product for paying customers reallocate efforts to making their product more attractive for them.

I'm simply discussing this because I know the market, but it's a clear case of developers using DRM to minimize piracy, not to control the distribution channel.

The product is attractive to them already, they are illegally downloading it for use already. By making it more attractive do you mean lower their price to compete with piracy? Hard to stay in business when you compete with illegal free copies of your software.

In this sense, nothing is a "human right" per se, not even not being murdered.

Human rights are what we define them to be.

Now you might change your argument to "it's not a serious enough right".

But in that case, I'd argue that the issue of open access to cultural artifacts, even if it's Ben Stiller and not Plato or the Principia Mathematica, is quite serious matter.

if Plato were DRM-ed, the license servers would probably be not available today, and thus the Plato itself. In that regard DRM to today's cultural artifacts is like Alexandria library fire to the artifacts of ancients.

there is significant difference - knowing the format (or even just basic principles of the format like in case of compression) one can restore the content ( http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/ ), while in DRM case knowing format isn't enough. Another illustration - one can apply some analysis and probably read lost ancient language texts while it is fundamentally different from reading cyphertext even in known language. I.e. DRM is intentionally and explicitly converts "information" into highest entropy content, i.e. "erases" the "information". Basically what flame does to human artifacts.

Plus, there are formats that would be able to be read a trillion years for now. Plain utf-8 or ascii text for one.

I obviously fail to grasp why DRM is so bad, or its importance. I just can't fathom why everyone thinks it's so sinister. I mean, don't get me wrong, it coukd be annoying as fuck, but just don't visit that website? I don't do things that make me unhappy.

Also, the point some people are making about distribution channels, I would like to point out that we, people who frequent HN, are sometimes too idealistic, which is good, but can be a fallacy sometimes (at least I belive so).

Imagine you're Paramount, you spent years working on a movie, and you want the product of your hard labour (and that of thousands of your employees, probably) to be distributed the way you want and how you want it. I think that's fair. Yes, there's still gonna be piracy (and I thank God for that), but DRM gives them that option to protect themselves against it, if only at least legally. If someone is so horrendously against DRM, then they don't have to watch your movie? I find the whole affair as simple as that.

And like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_Am...

But that's the result, not the reason why it's sinister. It's sinister because it shifts from presumption of innocence to police state method of "all guilty by default". Like the Sony exec quoted in the first link above expressed it:

>>> The industry will take whatever steps it needs to protect itself and protect its revenue streams... It will not lose that revenue stream, no matter what... Sony is going to take aggressive steps to stop this. We will develop technology that transcends the individual user. We will firewall Napster at source - we will block it at your cable company. We will block it at your phone company. We will block it at your ISP. We will firewall it at your PC... These strategies are being aggressively pursued because there is simply too much at stake.

And in practice it's always bad because it's not a theoretical "protection of content", but something actual running in your private digital space (your computer, your OS, your program), with the sole purpose of not trusting you and doing whatever (you usually have no clue what - DRM is a black box). Something not trusting you should be not trusted in return - i.e. always treated as potential malware.

Indies don't make nearly as much money as studio titles, nor do they have such a huge investment on the line. Consider that for something like a new superhero movie, the production costs are easily >$100 million and marketing costs are about the same (a 50:50 ratio of production to marketing investment turns out to produce the optimal return, based on empirical measurements). $200 million and up is a lot of money, so films like this are largely financed by presale agreements with distributors. Yes, this can be offset by stars taking a profit share instead of up-front payment and by wealthy investors with deep pockets - but there are limits to both approaches, and neither is sufficient for really expensive projects of the kind the public has come to expect.

Of course things like Kickstarter and so on are great and will continue to gain in importance. However, they are much ,much better for established media properties (eg cancelled cult TV shows with an existing fan base, or projects by existing celebrities in other media, like if Justin Bieber decided to start making movies) than they are for innovative products (with new actors/ directors/ writers/ characters).

No doubt it will continue to grow and before the end of the decade a crowdfunded project by a bunch of unknowns will turn into a monster runaway cinema hit. But then it will revert to the mean. Anyone who is a filmmaker is familiar with the 'first time director X made a hit movie with a tiny budget of $Y' story. Blair Witch Project! El Mariachi! Primer! We love stories like this but there are a few things to bear in mind. First, the low-budget figure is not what it cost for you, the consumer, to see it, but what it cost to get it in front of a studio executive who OKed spending the money on making it market-ready. Second, it's untrue because there was a list of free stuff as long as your arm in the way of donations from friends of favors owed or suchlike, that most people don't have access to. Third, there were hidden costs in time or lost production quality. And fourth, and by far the most important, only one film every few years out of many thousands made every year hits a sweet spot and recoups some very large multiple of its original budget. It's like getting a royal flush in poker, or successfully splitting your blackjack hand multiple times: it's always a possibility, you could hit an enormous jackpot if you succeed, but odds are that you won't.

To paraphrase the famous Dov Simens, that's why they call it 'show business' and not 'show luck.' The business model is that you make an entertaining movie that people want to watch, movie theater owners rent it from you in order to rent out seats and sell expensive snacks, and then later streamers rent it from you and a you make some additional money on hard copies. (There's whole additional business model built around merchandise/franchise income like toys and theme park rides, but those are generally limited to family-friendly sci-fi and fantasy films with vast marketing budgets.) You can't run a business around the idea of producing surprise movie hits on a shoestring. You build one around the idea of being able to reliably pick projects with commercial potential and reliably match your investment with the profit potential. Essentially it's fund management in a market where many of the producers and consumers behave irrationally and unpredictably. If you want to do big deals, then you need to be able to sell the film before it gets made. Publishers are hard-headed about these things not because they are stupid, but because the alternative is losing a ton of other people's money and having to exit the industry in fairly short order.

So there's more DRM-free content every year, yippee. That's wonderful. It's wonderful in the same way that you can get better digital cameras for less every year and so on. But tell me what fraction of industry revenues this content accounts for, and what the economic inputs and outputs are. It's great to see Louis CK put out DRM-free editions of his stand-up performance, but his downside risk on that was maybe $10,000, $25,000 at most. Plus he was already famous. It's great that Veronica Mars raised $5.7 million on Kickstarter, but it only made 2/3 of that back at the box office although I anticipate it will break even by the end of its second financial year. And again, that was from a base of a multi-awarded hit cable show that ran for 3 years and had already had several million invested in it. Kickstarter works extremely well if you already have a franchise to leverage, because the marginal cost to the fan-investors of backing the project is pretty low relative to the opportunity-cost value of the time they have already invested in the franchise. But if you don't already have a brand, it's a very different situation.

I've brought this up again and again on DRM-related threads here. Publishers don't want to make consumers' lives difficult or prevent you from enjoying yourself - that's a juvenile and inaccurate picture. They're businesses that compete intensively against each other and launch a large number of extremely high-risk products each year, many of which never break even. The portion of the public that goes out and expends effort to discover artistic quality is tiny. Most people want to be entertained - and given that the #1 whine about DRM is the 'inconvenience' it imposes on consumers (eg the original article's complaint that having to stop the movie so one family member can let the cat out is an unacceptable loss of enjoyment), I'm pretty sure that the anti-DRM lobby is not champing at the collective bit to free starving artists held hostage by studios, but rather to watch more or less the same expensively-produced and marketed blockbuster entertainment as everyone else in their demographic cohort.

> Publishers don't want to make consumers' lives difficult or prevent you from enjoying yourself

They obviously want that. Since they use DRM which doesn't affect pirates but affects those who buy stuff. So the obvious conclusion is that either publishers are morons, or they want to insult all their users, or they use DRM for completely unrelated sinister purposes.

What I meant above about competition is simple - the more successful DRM free projects there are, the easier it is to disprove that DRM is needed. The size of the budget is completely irrelevant to the fact that DRM is ineffective against piracy. It equally applies to a low budget or big budget project which spends millions on marketing.

Of course we are talking about publishers which are just clueless. Those who use DRM for side purposes won't care since they have other goals. Those will be forced by hard competition only. I.e. imagine a big publisher coming which doesn't want to be a part of their cartel and makes DRM-free releases. Many would prefer that, and it can force other publishers to drop their crooked reasons when they'll start losing profit.

> It's great that Veronica Mars raised $5.7 million on Kickstarter

That's a bad example. WB didn't allow it to come out DRM-free despite it being crowdfunded. It should be a lesson not to trust these backwards thinking publishers ever.

You keep looking at it as consumers v producers in a zero sum game. This is a wholly inaccurate model. distribution is a business fundamental for reasons that I've explained above. In fact, it's a legal fundamental as well, because thanks to antitrust laws in the US film studios are prohibited from owning distribution channels like chains of cinemas

That's a bad example. WB didn't allow it to come out DRM-free despite it being crowdfunded. It should be a lesson not to trust these backwards thinking publishers ever.

It's a great example of the reality of film industry economics, even though it doesn't support your point. So what if they didn't let it come out DRM-free? Are you saying it would have been a runaway hit otherwise? No chance. At that, they gave refunds to annoyed customers who had problems with the Flixster purchase. If you think that the mediocre sales are the result of DRM you're looking at it from inside a bubble.

First, backers of the movie were entitled to a digital download as part of the Kickstarter reward. they didn't like Flixter, so WB issued refunds to people who had filed a support ticket, allowing them to download it via more popular outlets like iTunes or Amazon. This had zero effect on buyers who downloaded through those two main platforms. It may have deterred some potential online purchasers, but not many, I don't think.

As a rule of thumb, about 30-35% of respondents in surveys cite DRM policy as a major influence on buying decisions, in fields from e-books to videogames. As a second rule of thumb, home viewing revenue is about 50% of theatrical box office. (I'd have to write a few thousand words to fully describe sales channels and common deal structures in the industry. studios are very tight-lipped about the terms of individual deals, because that's very valuable commercial information, but we can also rely on the aggregate sums shown on tax returns and compare them with known box-office revenue, historical models, and so on. I'll skip the in-depth explanation and a raft of citations if you're OK with that; I have no reason to mislead you about this). So we can figure that potential lost sales from WB's DRM policy - which they are likely contractually obliged to stick to anyway - is about 1/6th of box office. Let's be generous and say it's 20% due to the extra publicity. It would actually be a lot less since core fans who were Kickstarter backers got digital copies and would not have had any incentive to purchase them separately absent DRM, but let's leave that aside.

Now, VM had production (including marketing) costs of ~$5.7 million. Box office revenue after 6 weeks in about 300 theaters is $3.3m, plus a few hundred thousand $ for worldwide (unsurprisingly low, given the limited international audience for the TV show). That's pretty bad from the studio's point of view. The studio (qua publisher) gets ~50% of the box office, so to break even the film needed to make $12m. Of course, the upside is that Kickstarter backers wanted a Veronica Mars movie more than they wanted financial profit, so Warner Brothers hasn't actually lost any money, but that's beside the point here. If we take our guess above that 20% of potential home viewer revenue was lost due to anti-DRM sentiment, that's about $700,000 at the very most. ---

Those will be forced by hard competition only. I.e. imagine a big publisher coming which doesn't want to be a part of their cartel and makes DRM-free releases. Many would prefer that, and it can force other publishers to drop their crooked reasons when they'll start losing profit.

Jeepers, biased much? Look, that's not going to make any difference because audiences don't go out saying things like 'let's go watch a Paramount film tonight' or '20th century Fox is my preferred studio.' Marvel, Disney and Pixar are unusual because they have such strong brands, but they operate within pretty narrow market/genre parameters. Film products are not easily substitutable, so your basic supply-and-demand model isn't applicable here because we're not talking about commodities.

Here's an alternative scenario: a big studio decides to do DRM-free releases, and its domestic and overseas distribution network cuts presale revenue offers by half. The upside potential is maybe 11-12%. The downside potential is not being able to take large projects into production because you either can't raise sufficient funding or you can't get a financial institution to provide bridge financing or issue a completion bond (which is essentially production insurance).

I'm sorry, but you seem to view studios like cartoon villains twirling their mustachios as they sit on top of piles of ill-gotten loot. The reality of film financing is that it involves large numbers of stakeholders in a very high-risk market requiring extremely conservative contractual arrangements. From the distributor's point of view, they have little incentive to pay large sums of money to a studio or production company that won't guarantee them exclusive rights within a particular territory. After all, the distributor isn't likely to capture any of the extra revenue from DRM-free digital copies.

So, it means they lie when they insist that DRM is about piracy. And if they lie about this, they can lie about whatever else it is for. So it's logical to assume it's something bad. The unethical nature of DRM and its derivatives like DMCA-1201 which are forced on people through undemocratic means only prove the point that intentions behind it are never good.

> It's a great example of the reality of film industry economics

I meant it's a bad example of competition that can be used as a case study. Because it didn't turn out to be DRM-free despite being crowdfunded. My point above was not to debate the benefits or downsides of crowdfunding vs. publisher funded production but to say that successful DRM-free examples provide practical ways to demonstrate that DRM is not needed. So Veronica Mars is not relevant to the subject at hand.

> First, backers of the movie were entitled to a digital download as part of the Kickstarter reward.

They made a mistake of assuming it means what any normal person would expect - a DRM-free video file. Not some DRM Flixter garbage. Their second mistake was trusting WB to act decently like many other authors of the crowdfunded projects who release their works DRM-free. But WB is WB. They had to know better that if the pledge never said "DRM-free" explicitly, they were risking never to get it.

> As a rule of thumb, about 30-35% of respondents in surveys cite DRM policy as a major influence on buying decisions, in fields from e-books to videogames.

Very interesting, good to know. Do you have any links to such surveys?

> Here's an alternative scenario: a big studio decides to do DRM-free releases, and its domestic and overseas distribution network cuts presale revenue offers by half.

What does the network care? Network is the middleman, not the owner of the IP. According to Netflix for example, they don't care about DRM and wouldn't use it if not for publishers' demands (I don't believe them though, since they have some content which they own, and it's not available DRM-free either). So why would distributors care about DRM? Usually they blame all that on the publishers, not the other way around.

And if some distributors want exclusivity - they can get it. They can agree that the publisher will sell that content only through their channel. What does it have to do with requiring DRM? Same thing can happen with a DRM free release.

Here are some papers examining the issue through surveys: http://www.mtm.uni-koeln.de/team-loebbecke-publications-conf... http://people.cs.uct.ac.za/~aarnab/drm/papers/survey.pdf http://www.nclnet.org/images/PDF/ncl_dvdsurvey_report_040620... http://www.mirlabs.org/iasl/volume_1/IASL_Vol_1_Paper_12.pdf http://beta.orionshoulders.com/Resources/articles/26_22273_I... (last one only for statistical masochists)

And if some distributors want exclusivity - they can get it. They can agree that the publisher will sell that content only through their channel. What does it have to do with requiring DRM? Same thing can happen with a DRM free release.

No it can't, what are you smoking? Are you going to put up money to buy territorial rights for content which the publisher is going to give away DRM-free? Of course not, there's a high risk that you'd never recoup your investment. Territorial markets matter a lot, because those block sales represent the production's best hope of breaking even. All those markets are different, which is why distributors exist in the first place; they know their local markets better than any individual studio or producer can, and they have the cash flow to write a check based on the budget and the quality of the cast attached to the project.

This is how most commercial movies get financed: a large chunk of the budget is ponied up in advance by the international distributors. In turn, they have some control over the release window (which varies by country for all but the most giant projects, because every country is different with different holiday weekends etc. which are more important to consumers than all but the very biggest movie releases), and they impose touch contractual requirements on the studios. This is a completely different market from Netflix. When Netflix licenses something, they (in most cases) already know how it performed and can negotiate the cost of the license based on that date. International distributors are taking much larger financial risks at a much earlier stage of the business cycle. They're like VCs, not simple retailers.

I don't mean to be rude, but you're making these breezy and uninformed statements about a ~$35 billion industry that's been running for over a century and is one of the most competitive and meritocratic sectors of the economy. You keep saying how stupid the people at the studios are, and yet you obviously don't know the first thing about how the industry functions.

Some mention the same idea I brought above:

> DRM systems were widely resisted by many other interviewees. They were quite openly considered rather as a cause to piracy than a tool to inhibit it.

DRM, on the other hand, causes the most inconvenience for customers, and little to none for pirates.

Digital content is easily duplicatable. When DRM is broken, pirates redistribute it to all others without limit. In the bank analogy (to make it comparable), it's like becoming an infinite fake bank, so all subsequent criminals don't need to rob the original bank anymore, but can take from that secondary source as much as they want to. That's exactly what makes DRM completely irrelevant in reducing piracy.

You said it's economics, yet your comparison doesn't make any sense economically. Banks analogy is not similar at all. The fact that DRM can be broken makes it completely irrelevant because of the nature of the digital space. Once it's broken, duplicates of DRM-free pirated material are shared ever since. Purpose defeated. As Cory Doctorow often points out, one of the core mistakes of DRM proponents is trying to measure the realities of the digital world applying the physical world logic.

Anyway, I thought we already agreed above that DRM is not used for the purposes of preventing piracy. So why are you going back to it?

> Are you going to put up money to buy territorial rights for content which the publisher is going to give away DRM-free? Of course not

You still didn't explain why. DRM has no effect on piracy. Content with DRM which the publisher A agreed to sell through distributor B will be pirated the moment it will appear from B. So, why can't that agreement involve DRM-free content? The result (piracy wise) won't be worse.

> there's a high risk that you'd never recoup your investment.

How is that risk high when there is no DRM, and low when there is one? I don't see any connection between DRM and risk. It's like saying that sailing on a ship with broken lifeboat which is beyond repair has less risk than sailing on a ship without one. Risks are the same because the lifeboat is irrelevant (in our case that's DRM).

> All those markets are different, which is why distributors exist in the first place; they know their local markets better than any individual studio or producer can, and they have the cash flow to write a check based on the budget and the quality of the cast attached to the project.

That's fine, but again, what does it have to do with requiring DRM? With all your attempts to explain why publishers or distributors might require DRM, you still didn't provide any sensible reason for the root cause of requiring it so far. I get the reason of "We need DRM because the other side requires it", even though it's a bad justification. But I'm asking about the root. I.e. who requires it first. Publisher? Distributor? We already agreed that it's not because of piracy. So why can't they drop DRM from all this then?

It's very similar, because of the abstract nature of money. Think about it.

You keep offering your premise 'DRM has no effect on piracy because it be broken' - as an argument, but it's only your opinion, not a fact. You don't put up with DRM because it's technically easy for your to circumvent, but a lot of people do and are even willing to forego consuming something until it becomes affordable or accessible. By your logic, DVD sales and streaming revenue should already be zero because pirated versions are available. Since people are clearly still willing to pay for these products and services, how do you explain that?

We already agreed that it's not because of piracy. So why can't they drop DRM from all this then?

You keep saying this, but I don't agree with it. DRM makes piracy more difficult, which imposes a delay on the time between release and the availability of pirated versions; it limits piracy to those who know how to break the DRM, making it easier to identify vectors of piracy; it distinguishes pirated from non-pirated content and so has an evidentiary function in copyright infringement cases.

It also provides a way of tracking distributors' activity and preserving publishers' options to serve media to new channels on a timescale of their choosing, allowing them to figure out how to market it, package it, and charge for it, which are reasonable sorrt of things for businesses to want to do.

I'm not going to keep up with his conversation if you just keep repeating your own opinion over and over and trating it as fact. It isn't.

Sorry, but you are wrong. It's not an opinion, but fact which can be demonstrated by observing how fast pirated materials with DRM stripped off appear after DRM-ed releases come out. Q.E.D. DRM never deters piracy. And as you said, dropping DRM can gain as much as 1/3 of sales which are otherwise lost due to users opposing it. So not dropping DRM is simply insane from any business standpoint.

> You don't put up with DRM because it's technically easy for your to circumvent, but a lot of people do and are even willing to forego consuming something until it becomes affordable or accessible.

No, you didn't get what I was saying. That's not how it works. It works like this:

1. DRM-ed release comes out.

2. A few pirates who know how to break DRM break it and make the content available DRM-free to other pirates.

3. Any subsequent pirate who is interested in that content takes it from that DRM-free pirate source never dealing with any DRM.

4. Legitimate users on the other hand are left to deal with DRM junk.

That's it. I'm perplexed that so many people don't get this.

> By your logic, DVD sales and streaming revenue should already be zero because pirated versions are available.

No, not all people are pirates. However dropping DRM will turn part of the current pirates into paying customers increasing current sales of the same content. Plus it will gain sales from those who aren't pirates but simply oppose DRM. Total gain overall.

History tells another story, look at what Sony did last decade. Unless, of course, you consider installing a rootkit on Windows w/o users' consent that actually benefits the customers.

The main problem with DRM is that aside propaganda it serves no purpose as it can be worked around.

DRM for PC games has always been an iffy proposition anyway. It's just too hard to enforce and too easy to crack since you can just access the program on the stack and remove the DRM checks. This is harder to do on more secure platforms like mobile or consoles; which is where much of the media consumption has headed.

I didn't understand that. What does "protect the media" mean if it's not about piracy?

It's less about people using VPNs or downloading torrents -- you can't stop that as easily. But the legal distribution methods have to make an honest attempt at ensuring the contractual restrictions are honored or else they become meaningless.

I'm not arguing that these geographic or windowing restrictions are a good thing -- just that they're a thing and they have value in a contract that companies want to protect. The pirates aren't the issue here -- the competition is.