Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by izacus 3689 days ago
With what? EME is a "cure" for a problem you shouldn't have in the first place. Idiotic technology to do nothing useful and solve no problems to make some content company executives feel better about their liability.

EME does abosolutely nothing to prevent piracy and only serves as another roadblock for people to jump before seeing videos.

3 comments

Just because you shouldn't have a problem doesn't mean you don't actually have that problem.
It does accomplish a few things.

1. Makes it easier for them to control access by legitimate customers. Yes, this is pretty always consumer hostile BS, but it's a use case.

2. If someone does come up with an app to download shows or whatever, they have the legal argument of "you broke DRM to do this".

Bad actors exist, hence the technology does something useful.

Piracy [probably] isn't a problem for you, but if you think it isn't a problem at all, then you should read this:

http://www.greenheartgames.com/2013/04/29/what-happens-when-...

We are talking about online video, where DRM is astoundingly ineffective. Any release is almost immediately available to download.

Whether or not piracy is a problem is immaterial to the importance of DRM if DRM has no effect on piracy.

All it shows is that there is certain group of people which will pirate even if the content would be given for free.

The people that would view paid content should not be punished with DRM, that only works on certain platforms and certain browsers.

It actually makes pirated product much better than original. Pirated videos besides being free work on all platforms, you can view it on your computer, phone, tablet. Living or visiting a different country does not revoke your rights to see it, and you can make as many copies of it as you want.

DRM does nothing to stop piracy.