Except that it's not legitimate. First of all as the post above implied, DRM simply doesn't advance the goal of "living off one's art" in any way. Or to put it in business terms, DRM doesn't increase sales (because it doesn't reduce piracy). I'd even say it decreases sales because some users avoid DRMed products and it as well increases piracy (because some pirates see breaking DRM as sport - i.e. they are more likely to direct their attention to a DRMed product to pirate it, rather than to a DRM-free one).

Plus, it's not legitimate to employ overreaching preemptive policing justified by "need to live off one's art". Same way it's not legitimate to violate everyone's privacy by installing police cameras in people's houses as a preemptive measure against crime.

> How would content producers possibly deter copying without exerting control on the consumption hardware and software?

They can't deter it. They can reduce it (i.e. turn part of the pirates into paying customers). The way to do it is old and well known, yet many fail to remember it - treat customers with respect (and not as criminals by default). Establish more direct relation with your users, don't be a jerk, be user friendly and so on. People appreciate services which are explicitly DRM-free. On the other hand, paranoid attempts to "deter all copying" result in treating all customers as criminals by default, which turns many of them into pirates (i.e. serves exactly the opposite purpose).

For some reason not being a jerk and being user friendly is a novel idea for many legacy publishers which they find hard to digest. Independent studios get it way better.

I can't tell you how much I agree with you.

I'm puzzled that so many people find this idea surprising. It's already proven to work. Of course, it doesn't work if your goal is to get rich, and it doesn't work for faceless corporations.

And I wouldn't consider standardized DRM "overreaching preemptive policing". Compare that to the existing legal consumption options and you'll realize that this "policing" has been happening all along.

Look, its great to say that everybody should be nice, but you've got to realize that this existing control is the backbone of the big media industry. Without DRM and the control it ensures, there is no way to ensure advertisments get watched. The ability to track the success of an ad would be lost. As it stands, media consumption is very easy for the industry to monitor and control. This is a huge industry with enormous power- why would they give that up over some upset rights activists?

I'm all with you when it comes to indie studios. If the non-DRM party is going to win, its going to be with our wallets. I'd love to see more indie video and music. Maybe new non-DRM offerings will win out, as we are starting to see in the game industry.

tldr: At the end of the day, if you want to consume mainstream media, you've got to put up with the mainstream consumption hardware/software.

I don't put up with it, and hence have chosen to avoid devices which would impose DRM on me.

I'm a voracious reader. Several of my friends have asked why I don't have a kindle, and the answer is simple. Kindle may be the best reader right now, but unless I can freely move any books bought for it to another device down the road, I will REFUSE to pay the prices of e-books.

If I can not move it the same way I can move a physical book, I haven't bought it. Therefore, I will not pay even close to the amount of a paperback copy. Something like 30-40% of the physical copy price, at most, would be the correct range. And since I don't own it, I should expect to pay for it about the same amount I would get for it when taking it to a used book shop.

So, in reality the correct DRM'd e-book price for me would be something like 10-15% of the physical book's price. Anything more and I simply won't bother unless the book is supposedly really good. All in all, I'll rather leave the book unread for now and eventually get it for ~25% of the price second-hand.

That's a market the publishers don't make a penny on. Their loss.

I get the feeling it's the opposite. They didn't do any math and do it out of inertia or because "everyone does it", or because of the completely other and crooked reasons (like the article linked in the thread explains). DRM doesn't affect casual or non causal piracy - this was already discussed at length in the past here. Because once DRM is broken, piracy occurs using those DRM-stripped copies. I.e. it takes one pirate to break it in order for others to never deal with it. Therefore it doesn't lower piracy rate.

And I already explained how not using DRM can actually increase sales. And about DRM increasing piracy, there was an example from CD Projekt Red about their own game which they originally released with DRM (on disks) in parallel with DRM-free version (on GOG). And it was immediately pirated. But not the DRM-free version like you'd assume. It was the DRM-ed one! They said it was an interesting case study for them, which demonstrated that some pirates apparently break DRM for sport (i.e. who beats others to break DRM and pirate it). So it demonstrated for them that DRM boosted piracy. They never released games with DRM since, and advance the DRM-free distribution cause through their GOG service.

By the way, music is largely available DRM-free for quite a while already. You can buy DRM-free files on Cdbaby, Amazon or tons of other music sites. Which again demonstrates the point that DRM-free distribution works just fine.

> This is a huge industry with enormous power- why would they give that up over some upset rights activists?

That's exactly the point. DRM is all about certain control (over the market for example), but not about piracy. Surely those who have that control want to retain it. But they lie to the public claiming that DRM is used for preventing piracy, while really it's used for control. It just adds to the reasons to always oppose it.

Many who would casually pirate (or who would pirate without even realizing they were pirating) do not know about those DRM-stripped copies.

They could use the legal mechanisms that have existed in copyright law for a long time: they could find, and sue, infringers.

Part of the problem with DRM is precisely that it shifts the power to decide what infringement vs. fair use is away from the legal system, which has checks and balances and has to keep the interests of the public in mind, and toward those who control the technology. That is not an appropriate shift: copyright is a legal right to certain forms of control over work, given to creators as a compromise. It provides an incentive for them to produce that work, which is in the public interest. But how far that control extends should be a matter for the law, not media companies, to decide.

2) DRM is commercial control over hardware and software, as it's only available with "blessed" software.

That's not the only possible answer. In fact, there are already content providers (music, games) selling non-DRM'ed content. Another way of deterring copying is for the author to connect with his/her audience, participate in the community and make it morally hard for all of them to copy his work. This works and I've seen it happen. Some guys will be jerks and pirate stuff anyway (they will do this even with DRM), others will think "hey, the author is a nice person, and he/she makes something I enjoy. I'll pay for it and support him/her". This happens all the time with small-scale communities.

Of course, this requires work from the author beyond merely creating something, and it mostly works in the small scale, and he/she will probably not get insanely rich this way. But I doubt -- philosophically speaking -- that there is any inherent right to sell something in the large scale, without direct author-audience interaction, and expect police-state measures to work. I reject the assumption that everyone in the audience is a passive consumer and a thief who must be watched for their own good, and that there is no other way to handle the situation.

Imagine this fictional scenario. Copyright owners sell audio and audio/video files for download. These are without ads, trailers, DRM or other restrictions; they're high quality, complete, available right away, and in popular codecs and formats. In other words, just like Pirate Bay, but legal, and prices are very low.

What would happen if this were real? In the mad minds of the cartel, one person would buy each file, and copy for everyone else, and everyone would get the files from torrents, p2p etc..

In reality, if I'm paying Netflix rates for my files (divide say $15 over a month), and others can do the same, why would I copy it for them? They can just get their own. Moreover almost everyone would be willing to pay for their own, because they'd be getting a bargain, and on these terms they would be pleased to support the creators (who sometimes get some pennies from the middle-man companies).

If the content industry doesn't take this path, I see piracy becoming more and more mainstream. My mother (65 years old, not very geeky) pirates TV shows so she can watch them on her tablet on a plane because her Netflix subscription doesn't provide a good solution for that. How long do you think it will be before she drops Netflix because The Pirate Bay has a better user experience?

That's netowrk TV. Many of the most popular shows on paid cable TV channels. Also, those ads only generate revenue because people can't bypass them at broadcast times. Also, you're completely ignoring syndication revenues, which are often where the real money is.

My mother (65 years old, not very geeky) pirates TV shows so she can watch them on her tablet on a plane because her Netflix subscription doesn't provide a good solution for that.

I never cease to be amazed at the creativity of piracy apologists in coming up with new scenarios where piracy is the only solution. Seriously, what percentage of Netflix users are in transit without internet access so often that they're horribly underserved by the inability to pre-cache multiple TV show episodes?

It doesn't need to be the only solution. It simply needs to be the most economically viable solution to the consumer.

Joe Bloggs is an Englishman. He likes high-quality US television imports - Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, House of Cards, True Detective. He wants to obtain them for his viewing pleasure.

His options:

1. Go old school. pay £100-£150 for all the box-sets.

2. Go new school. Pay £7/month for Netflix (BB, HoC). Pay £30+ a month for Sky TV subscription with Sky Atlantic for the others. Plus £x, plus £y for everything else he needs - not even to mention movies, which are very inconsistent across streaming services. (I fear that we Limeys get less out of our Netflix subscriptions than you.)

3. Go illegal. Spend an upfront cost of time, electricity, bandwidth and risk of malware apocalypse/getting caught to get all this stuff on his hard drive.

Forget the morality of the issue. Never mind the legality: if Joe is a driver, it's a statistical near certainty that he speeds; if he doesn't take drugs, it's not because they're illegal. It's simple economics. If three is cheaper - in terms of time plus risk plus money - he will do number three.

As long as The Pirate Bay offers real advantages over legal services - principally, beyond the monetary price, everything you could possibly want is there in one place - then people will choose it. And just as it's unrealistic to expect media conglomerates to share the EFF's view of DRM, so it's unrealistic to expect media consumers to put up with the enormous inconveniences for the sake of some mythical starving artist grubbing away at the bottom of the Hollywood food chain.

When I am asked why I do not shop lift I say a bunch of stuff, but "it is illegal" is very far down the list.

Hypothetical-Bob does shop lift. When asked why he says a bunch of stuff, but will include some rationalisations for why this bit of illegality is okay. "At least I only rob big shops and it's all covered by insurance and huge profits" for example. His rationalisations might not be true nor even make any sense, but he believes them.

Hypothetical-Chris is a different style of thief. He burgles houses. Again, he'll justify it. "At least I'm not mugging old grannies".

Hypothetical-Dave does mug old grannies. "But I am a drug addict and I need the money And there is not treatment. At least I'm not like those scumbag paedophiles."

The illegality of an action doesn't appear to immediately affect whether someone does something or not. It does affect how sneakily they do it.

So that's the kind of attitude that many people have about piracy. But laws have longer lasting effects. They social engineer people into "acceptable" modes of behaviour. We combine advertising campaigns against drunk driving with stiff legal penalties. We back up outrage against racism with laws mandating equal pay and no workforce discrimination.

So, while DRM and anti-circumvention laws are hateful and stupid it is daft to think that they have no effect on rates of piracy.

There is very little piracy on Nintendo3DS games. This is not because people love Nintendo and want competition for Sony and Microsoft and mobile gaming. It's because the encryption has held and people who could work on breaking it don't want to risk the consequences. See the amount of piracy on regular DA or Sony PSP for examples of how rapidly people adopt piracy when it's available.

And people will pirate 99c games that have no drm.

That's also a matter of social censure though. I mean, every thread I've seen on this EME fiasco has included people looking forward to the Adobe CDM, in anticipation of its being cracked. Which is illegal.

See also people talking openly and frankly online about their usage of narcotics.

Which brings me to:

> So that's the kind of attitude that many people have about piracy. But laws have longer lasting effects. They social engineer people into "acceptable" modes of behaviour.

Again: drugs. Is taking marijuana less socially acceptable now after x decades of prohibition? No. It's completely bloody normal. And laws are slowly adjusting to the facts on the ground.

Will piracy become a big old taboo, like using child prostitutes? Will it continue to be 'normal', until anti-piracy people just give up? I don't have the faintest idea. This is going to run and run.

> So, while DRM and anti-circumvention laws are hateful and stupid it is daft to think that they have no effect on rates of piracy.

Daft indeed - everything has an effect. I'd want to see some numbers either which way.

Again: DRM has the effect, at the moment, of making it easier and cheaper to access content legally (by convincing Hollywood etc to license things to Netflix and co); but harder to use such content generally rather than under certain predefined conditions. Which one of these conditions is prevailing at the moment is a matter for statisticians and the like.

I would be surprised if Firefox's decision to implement EME mattered a hoot one way or another; DRM and non-DRM content will remain available through more or less the same channels as they were beforehand.

EDIT: on nintendo's encryption, this is (finally) some kind of concern. I notice that copy-protection is getting 'better' on certain popular music software (as well as more intrusive and annoying).

You missed the point he was making; it's still not acceptable to mug old ladies (or anyone else) to get money for drugs. Indeed, I predict that over time we'll see more and more drug use legalized, but any crimes committed under the influence of or in connection with drugs will involve substantially increased penalties, because the larger number of responsible drug consumers don't want to carry the can for people who can't or won't control their drug use and behavior.

some mythical starving artist grubbing away at the bottom of the Hollywood food chain

There are quite a lot of people, including myself, who make their living around the bottom of the Hollywood food chain. Attitudes like yours have made it incresingly difficult to launch small-budget projects of the sort that were designed to go direct to video, because ubiquitous low-cost piracy means that high-budget movies tend to crowd out low budget ones. Many world class directors, eg Martin Scorsese and James Cameron, got their start by doing low-budget exploitation pics that could be produced cheaply and sold cheaply. That market has been shrinking almost to nothing because piracy undermines not just cost structures but release windows, so in many ways it has become more difficult to bootstrap a film career than it used to be. Technology has made the process of shooting and editing a film a lot cheaper, but not across the board. Many economic inputs (like the cost of hiring locations or of feeding the cast and crew during production) cost as much or more as they always have, but it's a lot harder to raise a budget if you can't identify a predictable revenue stream.

Networks already do this on their broadcasts. Why couldn't they do it on free downloads as well? How many people are going to actively avoid the high quality, well-seeded, official download just because it has a few lower third ads?

From practical experience as an advertising buyer, I'd expect the CPM for those ads to be considerably higher than for the in-stream ads. Indeed, you'll see that most of the in-stream ads shown on network broadcasts are internal for other network shows, rather than being sold, strongly implying that the potential revenue is massively less.

As a result, just giving away free downloads with baked-in lower third ads would likely reduce the revenue from the shows being downloaded by a factor of 10 or more. That's gonna be a problem.

(Don't get me wrong - I'm not a fan of DRM at all and would love to find an equitable distribution solution to this problem. But as a professional in both the media and advertising industries, this sort of revenue generation is something I struggle with myself, and I know it's a non-trivial problem to solve.)

Of course, a Ferrari is a physical thing. But every Ferrar sitting in a showroom is one that nobody has been willing to pay for yet. Does that mean you should be able to take it for a ride when the dealership closes at night as long as you have it back there by opening time the following day (ignoring depreciation)?

Copyright law was, until quite recently about granting a monopoly on the large-scale or commercial use of a work. At-home copying for personal use was generally legal - even explicitly protected by law in some cases[0]. Same with multiplexing video on different screens, creating backups and skipping commercials.

DRM and legal provisions forbidding its circumvention change the rules quite a bit, stripping away significant rights from consumers. Losing rights one once had might well be grounds for a feeling of entitlement.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act#Exemp...