[zerocrates]

I have a hard time getting too worked up over EME. Netflix's content providers want DRM (as probably does Netflix itself, for its self-productions), and the EME-based stuff seems to be a clear win vs. Flash or Silverlight. The alternatives are clinging longer to Flash and friends or pushing things yet further out into apps where services are free to have whatever DRM they want.

Sure, you could instead hope for a world where the the studios don't want or mandate DRM, but that's pretty pie-in-the-sky thinking, especially for a cheap subscription service like Netflix.

[wallacoloo]

> Sure, you could instead hope for a world where the the studios don't want or mandate DRM, but that's pretty pie-in-the-sky thinking, especially for a cheap subscription service like Netflix.

Whether the studios want or even mandate DRM is irrelevant. DRM is fundamentally not securable (in the sense that it will always be breakable).

Bits are (nearly) free. When I buy digital goods, I'm not paying for the goods. I'm paying for the service and ultimately just voting with my money ("make more films and services like this, please", so to speak).

Illegal film services offer me superb service. I can download whole seasons of shows in whichever quality I want in the click of a button. I get archivability - I don't have to worry about the media ever becoming unavailable due to licensing, censorship, the publisher going out of business, etc. And I get desktop integration; I can hit the super key, type 'Sherlock' and hit enter, and an episode starts playing immediately. Netflix requires that I open a new browser (Google Chrome b/c Firefox on Linux doesn't work), type a URL, authenticate, and then proceed with the above steps, all on the assumption that they even have what I'm looking for (new shows don't get added very quickly) and that I have a solid internet connection. After that, the video has to buffer and I can't seek randomly.

If purchasing rights to this media involves supporting such an anti-user system, I simply won't purchase the media. It's a shame for the artists - I wish it were different - but in the meanwhile I will support the arts by dumping the money I would have spent on Netflix, Google Play, etc into more usable and pro-consumer/pro-artist systems like Bandcamp and Patreon.

[Matt3o12_]

Why do companies still want DRM. I can understand that they wanted it when it was new but DRM has been proven to be worthless in terms of adding copyright protection and be a pain in the ass for the end use (I can't watch Netflix on my PC because the VGA adapter does not supper DMR). It is only a matter of hours before a cracked movie lands on torrent sites. So what is the purpose of DRM?

[zerocrates]

It seems that the intent is just to raise enough of a barrier to prevent casual copying: so, make it so there's not some 1-click program you can install that can dump all of House of Cards to your desktop.

Of course, this doesn't do anything about torrenting which can accomplish just that. I don't know if they're attempting to target people who are scared or morally opposed to torrenting, but would copy off a subscription service?

[shmerl]

DRM has nothing to do with preventing copying. I'm surprized some still assume that's the reason it's used.

[Matt3o12_]

What is it used for then?

[shmerl]

Various crooked reasons. Some common ones include:

1. Covering incompetence. Poor sales of bad product are blamed on pirates, and those who were responsible can say "but we don't sit idle, we put another DRM in place".

2. Control over the market (standards poisoning, excluding competition, lock-in and etc.). That's what mobile carriers did to prevent people from switching to competitors.

3. Satisfying their hunger for power and ability to tell others what to do or not to do. DRM allows creating new "laws" without any democratic process. As soon as something has DRM attached to it, they can forbid what they don't like using DMCA-1201.

And so on and so forth. Those who use DRM know perfectly well that not only it can't reduce lost sales, it only increases them. So they use it for very different (and crooked) reasons, unless they are simply completely clueless.

[tombert]

While I think DRM is largely a load of BS, it has been implemented with some efficacy (see: Darkspore), which has still not been cracked.

So I do think the intention is to reduce piracy....Whether or not that's effective is a philosophical discussion.

[muddi900]

People used to say about PC games, but the Denuvo encryption is unbreakable right now. The hackers and the studios are not on equal footing anymore.

This will happen to web DRM as well.

[gergles]

EME is just Flash 2.0, only it's even worse, as it relies on architecture specific binary blobs being sent to your browser and running in the (privileged) context of your graphics card driver. At least in Flash, the Flash VM could theoretically have provided some degree of sandboxing.