Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by fastball 3487 days ago
Not true.

An important use for DRM in regards to streaming services is to prevent people on shared networks from getting access to the data. For instance, if I was in a college dorm with dorm-wide wifi, and I was watching my de-DRM'd Netflix, anyone on the dorm intranet could snoop my packets and get the data being transmitted to me by Netflix, for free.

That is nigh on impossible to do when the content is encrypted with DRM.

4 comments

Never in my times of working for content provider / transport was that even remotely the reason for DRM.

It was always passing the legal buck ("It wasn't us that let those evil evil pirates steal your series, we did all we could, look at that DRM software certificate!").

Snooping packets in dorm rooms? No.

Not to mention that even if it were an issue, TLS would be a much easier and cheaper solution.
To be fair, simple end-to-end encryption of non-DRM'd material would accomplish the same.
What? You're just talking about TLS. This has absolutely nothing to do with client-side DRM modules.
TLS solves that problem.