[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.

[shmerl]

> see: Darkspore

Wasn't its DRM broken? They always are. Some observe, that the mere presence of DRM is an incentive for some to break it, since they see it as a sport.