[Silhouette]

After a lot of thinking about DRM over the years, I realised this is one of the great myths.

Yes, DRM is often readily broken. And yes, much of the content is available via "alternative sources" for those who know where to look and how to protect themselves from whatever else might try to come along for the ride. Those who really want to rip something and have a bit of know-how will most likely be able to do it sooner or later.

However, DRM can still prove a significant impediment to casual copying, which in itself may protect significant revenues for the content providers. DRM also makes it very clear to those with access to the content that certain things -- say, trying to keep permanent copies of content streamed from sites like Netflix that rely on subscriptions to operate -- are not intended to be possible. Again, in a culture where a lot of people have barely even heard of copyright and just assume anything available online is free, that can be a big win.

[roywiggins]

> Those who really want to rip something and have a bit of know-how will most likely be able to do it sooner or later.

The kind of piracy it does prevent is putting movies you've watched onto a USB stick and handing it to a friend who doesn't pay for a subscription.

For distributing pirated content online, people wanting to download pirate content still have to spelunk through torrent trackers or Popcorn Time or whatever to actually get the video, whether it was distributed originally with DRM or not. DRM-free just makes life a little bit easier for the uploaders.