[zelon88]

I never understood the point of DRM.

"10 extremely determined people want to steal my intellectual property! I'll go miles out of my way to design this in such a way that 1,000 people have a crappy experience to slow down the 10 people who want to be pirates!"

Vendor makes a shitty product

Pirates find a workaround, pirate shitty product anyway

Vendor makes shitty product even shittier for all 1,000 people to agin try to stop the same 10 determined pirates

[bunderbunder]

There is a different philosophy of DRM, maybe less well-known because it doesn't tend to produce newsworthy examples, that says that the goal is to provide just enough of a nudge toward paying for the product that you're not operating completely on the honor system.

Under this approach, you really only want to make pirating the software just a little bit less convenient than paying for the software for most users. Because most potential pirates aren't determined attackers, they're just regular folks who are every bit as lazy and strapped for time as everyone else, and therefore won't bother to spend a few minutes keying in credit card information if they don't have to.

It's sort of analogous to turnstiles at train stations. Virtually anyone can go around or under them if they want to, but that's not the point. The point is that hopping a turnstile is just a bit more of a hassle than fishing your transit card out of your purse. Just enough more that most people would rather do that.

[taneq]

> The point is that hopping a turnstile is just a bit more of a hassle than fishing your transit card out of your purse. Just enough more that most people would rather do that.

I don't think it's even that it's more hassle, it's just a reminder of how things are meant to work. Most people will do the right thing voluntarily once their attention's been brought to it. Sort of like the courtesy lock on a bathroom stall - it's not to physically prevent entry, it's just to indicate that entry would be impolite.

[zelon88]

I wouldn't say that's necessarily true with software. Most of the time with software if I'm looking into pirating something it's because I want it. I don't need it, and therefore the cost is unjustified. Usually I try to go the open-source route, but let's talk hypothetically here. There is a commercial product that I want, but don't need.

I'm never going to buy it. Even if pirating it is unsuccessful, I'll just go a different route. So trying to prevent me from pirating the software isn't protecting profits. It's not persuading me to purchase anything. It's persuading me to look for a free alternative or a competing product. It's taking away it's own market share by pushing me away. I always laughed at Microsoft's efforts to combat pirates. From their perspective any machine running Windows, pirated or legit, is worth more to Microsoft than that same machine NOT running Windows, NOT supporting the Windows ecosystem, and supporting the competition instead. Even if they have to give the product away for free.

If there's a product I need, or a product I need to have licensed for business reasons, I will buy it regardless of whether or not I can pirate it easily or not.

So, at least for me, pirating something is less a question of whether or not I can get away with it than it is a factor of what I find that functionality to be worth. If a $100 piece of software is too much for me I'll pirate it or go somewhere else, but I'll never buy it.

Conversely, if the vendor saved themselves the development time and skipped the DRM to drop the price down to $75 I might consider buying it, even though I could easily pirate it.

It comes down to value. Just because a vendor wants to make $100/unit doesn't mean their product is worth $100/unit, and it doesn't mean I'll ever pay $100/unit. If another product can do the same task for $50/unit that's likely the route I'll take.

[barry0079]

The silliest part of this is pirates usually get to enjoy a better product because of their actions.

[ceejayoz]

For example, the unskippable piracy warnings on DVDs.

[dawnerd]

And more recently with uhd. Those disks were supposed to be “uncrackable”. Well thanks to some older uhd drives pirates now have full disk rips and as far as I know they’re not even breaking encryption.

[applecrazy]

Oh, the irony is palpable.

[jacquesm]

Not only that: they end up enabling the pirates because the pirates are then able to provide the potential users of the product with a major reason for breaking the social contract (and the law): a much better user experience than the original.

[nottorp]

Back when I was buying DRM-infested games on disc (lately I don't do AAA crap because it's boring, so the only DRM i have to deal with is Steam), the first thing before even unpacking the discs was to download the nocd crack.

Those pirates provide a good service to the legitimate owners as well ;)

[magnetic]

I'm not a big fan of DRM and don't want to defend it, but your description is a bit incomplete.

Those 10 determined people/pirates go off and put the cracked software (or the serials) up for download for the "not so determined" pirates who just want to download a cracked version (or serial) that works. Those don't have the skills (and willpower) to do the work needed to crack software.

Those, however, aren't 10 people: the ratio of cracker to "not so determined pirate" is an important part of the puzzle. Perhaps 1000 people will get the cracked version. I don't know, but the 1-to-many relationship is quite obvious from a distribution system such as BT or Mega.

I'm not trying to justify DRM (and certainly not what these guys have been up to), but your presentation makes it look like measures such as these are trying to fight a super-minority of folks (ie 10 out of 1000, or about 1%), when reality is most likely very different.

I have an app on the Mac App Store (I won't spam you with the download link since it's irrelevant to the discussion and I'm not here to fish for downloads) with analytics that report that many "purchase attempts" fail with a strange error (ie not a cancellation by the user, not a problem reaching servers, etc), and I have no other choice but to imagine that these are from people who are trying to pirate my app. And it's nowhere near a 1% fraction.

In my previous company, we'd have server side verification of receipts (per Apple rules), and about an hour after we'd release our software, we'd see a torrent of verification failures in our logs.

Software piracy is quite widespread and is an issue that we shouldn't gloss over. Still, I wouldn't condone what these guys seem to have been doing.

As a side comment on style, you could have made your point without saying "Vendor makes a shitty product" as there is no need to denigrate products that vendors make in such a generalized manner. You'll be taken more seriously if you can adopt a more balanced stance.

[dawnerd]

I’ve pirated apps before buying to make sure I’d like them and they work. It’s surprising how many apps don’t have trials or trials that are not so limited you don’t get an idea how it works. This is really true for Mac AppStore apps.

[magnetic]

I've heard this rationalization before, but I doubt it's a widespread practice in the pirates' world. Look, people are selling their soul to get "free products" (think about all the use cases where you are the product when using all the nice "free services"). Free is awesome. We're used to free. We demand free. We get offended when some app asks for $1.99 (I exaggerate for style of course, but as someone who has an app on the Mac AppStore, this comment has a reason rooted in reality - and for the record my app is Free while you try it and you pay to unlock it so you can customize it).

It's an interesting rationalization for an illegal activity, but you are not forced to go down the path of illegality by pirating a software you want to try. You can ask the author for a trial version, and if that leads nowhere, you can just skip this software. Not happy with the terms of the deal? Don't take the deal! The author would be wise to have a trial option, but doesn't owe it to anyone.

Personal anecdote time: when I was much younger I wanted to buy an exotic car and the dealer didn't offer test drives (understandably). I'm not sure it would feel acceptable to anyone if I had snuck into the dealership at night and took the car out for a spin around the block and put it back after an hour just to "test it out". I realize many flaws can be pointed out in my analogy easily, but the point is that one can get away with "illegal software test drive" because it's software and one would never think of doing it with hardware, because the risks of getting caught (and their consequences) are too high when we deal with tangible assets vs sitting home downloading cracks or serialz.

[xoa]

I think there are a few main kinds of reasoning behind DRM (non-exclusive, more then one could be involved in any specific case). One is psychological, one is pure greed and generally not explicitly acknowledged, but the last is potentially reasonable in specific situations.

The first essentially boils down to the well studied psychological phenomena of Loss Aversion, which is what you refer to and purely emotional, the feeling of "someone is TAKING my work!" It has been very well studied that humans in general have a strong natural tendency to prefer to avoid losses vs thinking about gains, and in fact the psychological power of losses can be vastly more (2x+) vs gains. This phenomena is used extensively in marketing and other areas involving behavioral economics. It is not usually logical, and particularly not in the case of IP infringement where the emotional response fails to consider both that there is no actual loss and that IP itself is not a natural construct and imposes societal costs. Nevertheless, it's definitely powerful and it fuels some of the emotional outrage many honestly feel at infringement, even if it's not merely illogical but outright economically self-destructive (they spend more on DRM and cause more pain to legitimate customers and in turn drive them away then they ever get back).

A second, purely greed one, comes down to controlling power. A lot of big publishers/organizations in particular saw (and still see) DRM as a way to extract far more money and rent seeking through extreme personalized spatial and temporal slicing of IP licenses. Basically, a much more extreme version of what the music and movie industries saw with the various format transitions (tape to CD to online, VHS/DVD/Blu-ray/online). Those were enormously lucrative since they could simply take existing IP and repackage it and sell it all over again, repeatedly. Their golden vision for DRM was payments not just for formats but everything. A different fee to play in each car, in each player, per units of time, every new bit of hardware, etc. Fundamentally DRM represents arbitrary control beyond the bounds of law, and that control can be used for a lot more then merely preventing infringement. Fortunately this vision was at least partially thwarted, but it'll be an eternal battle as lots of money will always be on the table here.

The third most arguably legitimate use is an extremely time-limited-then-eliminated application for the kinds of major entertainment IPs that experience extreme reverse J-curve demand patterns. Ie., a majority of total lifetime demand may come in the first few days/weeks/months before exponential falloff and a move into low long tail territory. This can simultaneously represent the time when costs are highest too, due to factors like simultaneous online resource demands and (in the case of video games) ongoing development work/support engagement. For movies and video games your numbers (10 vs 1000) are backwards or worse, an enormous number of people will pirate if it's convenient enough. But these are very low effort, casual pirates, not dedicated ones, and they also are time pressured. They aren't fundamentally unwilling to pay for whatever it is either if they have to because they want it right then to be part of the cultural zeitgeist and experience the social networking at its peak period.

In this last situation, limited time DRM can be a practical choice in some cases. If it's cheap enough it only needs to last a month or two, or even just a few weeks, to generate significant economic return. Then it can be completely removed for the long tail as the entertainment IP gets into sale territory, which may bring in some more people who care and eliminate ongoing support costs as well as ensuring that all existing owners will not experience problems as the publisher attention winds down.

Of course, getting rid of it there promptly is key and something that publishers too often ignore (or they're actually looking towards #2, and hoping to monetize it in other ways with the aid of ongoing control). In principle though this is relatively innocuous, since the biggest practical problem with DRM is in the longer term. If for example it was mandated by law that all DRM had to be removed within 6-12 months of an IP launch it wouldn't be ideal and there'd still be moral concerns and arguments but it might be a practical compromise too given the realities of human psychology.

[baud147258]

Regarding the end of your post, you apparently make the point that, for a game, if a DRM is not cracked just after the release (let's say 1 to 2 months), the sales of those would be higher than the sales of games which are available at release?

The problem is that the recent examples of games not being cracked on release (like the latest Tomb Raider) does not fit with your reasoning, since they did not have sales number above the norm.