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shmerl
join:2013-10-21

shmerl

Member

If Netflix is so brave

as to oppose downstream net neutrality abuses from ISPs, why can't they oppose DRM enforced from the upstream content publishers the same way and "galvanize" their userbase to the cause? Instead, Netflix readily dances around publishers and pushes DRM into HTML5 standard.
silbaco
Premium Member
join:2009-08-03
USA

silbaco

Premium Member

Because that would be counter productive. They are a streaming service that wants to keep you subscribing. The best way to do that is to make sure people can't get your product without subscribing. If they were actually selling shows/movies, things would be different. But they are simply renting access to view it.

Plus content providers wouldn't cave so there would be absolutely no point in trying. You are not supposed to own anything from a subscription service. The only way to reasonable assure that is to use DRM.
shmerl
join:2013-10-21

1 recommendation

shmerl

Member

Counter productive to what? DRM doesn't work to prevent people from getting the same thing without subscribing anyway (i.e. those who pirate). There is no point to ever use DRM. I'm not talking about the fact that renting digital goods doesn't make sense in the first place - it's a separate subject. I'm talking about DRM being useless (let alone insulting to the users).

Why wouldn't content publishers cave? They need to sell their content, not to sit on it like on piles of gold.
silbaco
Premium Member
join:2009-08-03
USA

1 edit

silbaco

Premium Member

If it was not DRM protected, the ability to stream rip would run rampant. That is not in Netflix's best interest. You know what happened when people learned of the ability to stream-rip Spotify's web-player? It gained massive attention across media and social media alike within a day. The ability to download any song, for free, was too much for people to pass up.

No point to use DRM ever? Quite the contrary actually. Look at Spotify Premium for example. It offers the ability download all tracks for offline play. If those tracks were not secured with DRM, what would stop someone from simply accumulating a massive library and taking it outside the Spotify ecosystem? Nothing. How would they ever keep track of plays to pay license holders? How would they prevent you from burning albums to CDs and handing them out to friends? How would they prevent you from simply subscribing for a month every year to download all the music you can think of, then cancel again for the next 11 months because your music would be permanent? Again, they couldn't. DRM is not only to protect the copyright holders, but also the services themselves. Their "forced into it" mentality is nothing but a pity party to smooth over ruffled customer's feathers. The companies fully embrace DRM everyday and will continue to do so.

When you use the subscription model, you are not given a license to do whatever you want with the content. You are given a license to use the content for a contracted amount of time with restrictions. Like it or not, that is what you agree to. If they can't revoke that content when the payments stops or prevent you from easily committing copyright infringement, then the model is broken. DRM is simply enforcing the license you are granted, which ranges from very strict to very lenient. When it comes to subscription services, it is actually pretty rare that DRM gets in the way of legal use or innovation.
shmerl
join:2013-10-21

2 edits

shmerl

Member

quote:
If it was not DRM protected, the ability to stream rip would run rampant.
This is nonsense. Instant piracy of anything offered on Netflix or elsewhere is a fact. DRM there does nothing to reduce it, since it takes one to break the DRM in order for all other pirates to get it DRM free ever since without bothering with any ripping and etc. I.e. those who want to pirate will do it regardless any DRM in Netflix. So why should they insult their own users with this useless junk which only stands in the way and pollutes HTML standard with unethical ideas?
quote:
what would stop someone from simply accumulating a massive library and taking it outside the Spotify ecosystem? Nothing.
You miss the point. Which content there is not available from pirate sources? I doubt such thing even exists. Q.E.D. - DRM in Spotify does nothing at all as well. Why are they using it there then? No valid reason apparently.
quote:
The companies fully embrace DRM everyday and will continue to do so.
Why? Cory Doctorow compares such companies to adherents of Lysenkoism - false scientfic theory which was strongly held in the top echelons of USSR science, while real scientists understood it was all bunk. DRM is exactly the same thing - it's total bunk in a sense that it has zero effect on preventing piracy. All it does is hindering user experience for legitimate customers.
quote:
DRM is simply enforcing the license you are granted
As I said, DRM is simply not capable of enforcing anything, because the same content is published DRM-free instantly by pirate sources right after it appears in DRMed ones. So I see no difference in whether it's subscription model or purchase model regarding the need of any DRM ever. By not using DRM any service will only improve user experience and lose nothing.
silbaco
Premium Member
join:2009-08-03
USA

silbaco

Premium Member

Pirated content from other sources has absolutely nothing to do with DRM on Spotify. DRM on Spotify is designed to prevent pirating music from Spotify and it is has been extremely successful in doing just that. You have to go to fairly great lengths to copy music from Spotify, which the absolute vast majority are not willing to try. Same goes for Netflix. Not to mention most people have no idea these services even use DRM. The only thing they know is that the content cannot be easily copied and they must keep paying for it.

You don't think people will make unauthorized copies of Spotify's music or Netflix's movies and promptly cancel to avoid payment if DRM was lifted? Of course they will. Heck I have been reading forum posts on a weekly basis from people trying to do just that with Rhapsody for nearly a decade. If Rhapsody allowed users to cancel and keep all the music in their library, you can be very sure a sizable amount would cancel immediately. They would have nothing to gain from removing DRM. And the negative impact on paid purchased downloads would be significant.

And as has been said before, these services depend on being able to pay-per-play. Without DRM it would be nearly impossible to track plays of downloaded tracks/shows.
shmerl
join:2013-10-21

3 edits

shmerl

Member

quote:
Pirated content from other sources has absolutely nothing to do with DRM on Spotify. DRM on Spotify is designed to prevent pirating music from Spotify and it is has been extremely successful in doing just that.
Are you saying that DRM wasn't broken already? Because Netflix one surely is broken. From the time any DRM is broken - it's obsolete. You keep repeating that it takes great length to copy it from Spotify or Netflix (i.e. assuming it involves some process of breaking DRM). It might involve effort, but you miss the point I made above - it's enough for one pirate to apply that effort, and that content can be pirated outside Spotify, Netflix and etc. ever since, so the fact that those still have DRM on that content becomes completely irrelevant to any ideas of preventing piracy.
quote:
Without DRM it would be nearly impossible to track plays of downloaded tracks/shows.
How so? Statisics of downloads don't require any DRM. Any DRM-free stores can easily gather statistics of purchases (examples - Humble Bundle, GOG etc.). And Youtube is a perfect example of a streaming service which has views statistics without enforcing DRM. And why would they care about number of views of the downloaded content? They care about streamed one, since that's an expense for them (on their servers and network).

By removing DRM services gain the simple point of not being jerks by treating all customers as criminals. The negative impact is simply non existent as I explained above. Some publisher execs however harbor the false Lysnekoist theory that DRM helps them preventing piracy. But it doesn't make it any more real.
silbaco
Premium Member
join:2009-08-03
USA

1 recommendation

silbaco

Premium Member

Piracy outside the services: Does. Not. Matter. If people wanted to get content from somewhere else they wouldn't be using Spotify and Netflix. DRM on the services is designed to protect those services from infringement and prevent people from easily downloading their favorite content from those services so they keep subscribing. Clearly, it is working because Netflix and Spotify downloading is virtually non-existent and completely nonexistent by the average user.

The model works per play. Not per download or stream, per play. Because that is the one and only way they can reliably pay copyright holders for the use of their share of the content. Since Spotify and other music services all offer offline downloads, the plays of those offline downloads are just as important as the streamed ones.

On to the topic of Youtube, Youtube downloaders have been downloaded tens of millions of times. You think all those downloads are of public domain videos? Hell no. And that's from an already free service. The ability to download from a paid service just as easily would detrimental to Spotify and Netflix, potentially costing them millions of subscribers.

Jerks? People agreed to the terms when they started subscribing. Judging by the amount of subscribers Netflix has, it's pretty clear relatively few people feel like they are being treated poorly. What is DRM prohibiting them from doing that they were granted permission to do? Pretty much nothing.
shmerl
join:2013-10-21

4 edits

shmerl

Member

quote:
Piracy outside the services: Does. Not. Matter. If people wanted to get content from somewhere else they wouldn't be using Spotify and Netflix.
A golden phrase. Since that's where all the piracy basically occurs. If the piracy does not matter as we just established, then it's completely idiotic to degrade the user experience for legitimate customers (who aren't pirates) with DRM.
quote:
DRM on the services is designed to protect those services from infringement and prevent people from easily downloading their favorite content from those services so they keep subscribing.
You are contradicting yourself. You just said that those who pirate won't be using the services anyway. So the DRM is protecting what from whom exactly?
quote:
The ability to download from a paid service just as easily would detrimental to Spotify and Netflix, potentially costing them millions of subscribers.
That's a fallacy. You said yourself, those who want pirated free download would do it outside the services anyway. And they are already out there, regardless any DRM. Insisting that DRM in any service prevents piracy is pure bunk. People want streaming services because of convenience of using the cloud, not because they don't want an ability to download the content at all.
quote:
Jerks?
Yes. Treating their legitimate users as criminals is not just being jerks. It's being unethical.

PaulHikeS2
join:2003-03-06
Fitchburg, MA

PaulHikeS2

Member

I think you are missing the point...I don't think you are deliberatly being obtuse. His point is that without DRM, piracy would exist within the service. Those who currently pirate would not be using it. The key is the word currently. Without DRM, piracy within the service would become commonplace.
shmerl
join:2013-10-21

4 edits

shmerl

Member

quote:
His point is that without DRM, piracy would exist within the service.
I see no logic in this. Since if any of the users of the service will decide to pirate, they can do it right now, going to pirate sources outside the service which easily provide that content. DRM does nothing to stop them from doing it. So potential piracy within the service changes nothing really. Therefore DRM is pointless to begin with.

To make it clear, take these two use cases.

Use case 1: The service has no DRM. Some user of the service decides to pirate and takes that content from the service source.

Use case 2: The service has DRM. Some user of the service decides to pirate and goes to pirate sources (since pirates since long already broke that DRM and distribute the same content), and takes that content from the pirate sources.

The end result in these two use cases is precisely the same - the content gets pirated by pirates, and not pirated by honest users. So let's see how these use cases actually differ:

Use case 1: The service does not utilize unethical preemptive policing and legitimate users aren't treated as criminals and the usability of the service is not degraded for them.

Use case 2: The service treats legitimate users as criminals using unethical preemptive policing and degrades usability in a whole number of ways.

That's the only actual difference about DRMed and DRM-free services that I see. Use case 1 is user friendly and customer oriented. User case 2 is user hostile and simply dumb from the business perspective (one has to be an idiot to insult own users expecting them to like it).