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> 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. |