[throwaway613834]

>> It could be easy to view but hard to save and distribute. Why can't it?

> They've been trying to accomplish this for many years now, to no avail.

Any evidence that they haven't had any success whatsoever in making it harder to save/distribute?

[wvenable]

It's trivial to get almost any media content you want online for free right now.

[throwaway613834]

I don't think so. See my reply to the sibling comment.

[prophesi]

Sure. Search for a recent videogame on pirate bay, download a youtube-to-mp3 browser extension, get the calibre DeDRM plugin. Or, if you really want to understand my point, download and learn how to use a disassembler.

For the casual law-abiding user, it succeeds in making it harder to save/distribute. For everyone else, it's only a matter of time before the DRM is broken.

[throwaway613834]

First and foremost that depends on the content being popular. For example there's a ~30-minute video I paid for on Amazon Videos that I would love to have a copy of so that I don't need an Amazon account and internet access just to play the video, but I can't. Why? Because of their DRM and the fact that I can't find it anywhere else. (Admittedly I haven't directly searched on piracy sites since I'm not into that sort of thing, but Googling didn't pop anything up even on piracy sites, and I would be surprised if it's actually out there somewhere.) Sad reality is it's not even because I wouldn't pay for it; I already paid for it once and I'd even pay for it again if someone sold a copy. But the DRM is "working" in terms of making it too hard to get a copy.

But even if some content is popular, DRM certainly prevents people like me from saving a copy, since I'm not one to go on piracy sites and the only reason I want a copy is so I don't have to get authorization from someone every time I want to play something I already paid for. It might be a dumb business decision since I'd already pay for it before getting a copy anyway, but maybe they think that still makes business sense even if I'd pay for it. Regardless of that it still seems to be working as intended.

[prophesi]

Just run a screen recorder next time you're online. (Trivial) Problem solved.

[throwaway613834]

Yeah, but that doesn't give me a "copy". It will lose quality (and I expect frames as well), and it requires letting the computer run through the entire movie at normal playback speed, which I haven't gotten around to doing. Again, it's been enough of a deterrent for me to do this, which is my bigger point. I never said it's 100% foolproof, just hard enough to be a deterrent.

[floatboth]

Yeah, DOOM (2016) took four months to crack https://torrentfreak.com/denuvo-removed-from-doom-after-game... — and after the crack, the DRM was removed.

And casual users might be law-abiding in the USA, but not everywhere :)