[Silhouette]

You seem to be ignoring the other, more legitimate motivation for DRM schemes: rampant piracy meant that as many as 90% of copies of some games were illegal. With production costs today so much higher, a lot of modern games probably couldn't have been made in that environment.

Walled gardens and proprietary lock-in schemes are still undesirable from the user's perspective, and I suspect many of us might support stronger consumer rights in this area, but just switching off all protections without a change in culture so people do respect the rights of creators as well is unrealistic.

[matheusmoreira]

The real value of game stores isn't the DRM, it's things like simplified installation and automatic updates. They're essentially package managers. Before this, games came in several CDs which were fragile and players had to download and apply many incremental patches just to play online. Stores like Steam changed everything. Few people remember how it used to be before them.

Copyright infringement is inconsequential when faced with these benefits and simplicity. Infringement takes effort. In order to infringe, people have to fiddle with torrents and trackers, search for the data they want, evaluate the quality of each torrent and trust that the executables they download are not malicious. This isn't something your average person is going to do even if it costs $0. Lots of people do it because the creators themselves leave them no choice: refusing to do business in the consumer's country, including invasive malware in the form of DRM and anti-cheating software that renders games unplayable for reasons such as lack of internet connection or use of a virtual machine. People go out of their way to make the "pirate" version the superior version.

[Silhouette]

Just to be sure I've understood your argument, you're claiming that providing easy access to copyright-protected works is sufficient to prevent piracy, as no-one will attempt to pirate things that are readily available on a legal basis so DRM is pointless?

I agree that not providing a good, legal means to get something is an incentive for pirates, but the idea that all piracy just goes away if you do is absurd. Some people tried experiments with this a few years ago, and found that even for something that you could literally get legally for free just by downloading it from the original website, a high proportion of the copies being played actually came from other sources and were not legally obtained.

I've run a business that creates original content and makes it available through an online portal. My team and I have on occasion watched, in real time, over periods of hours or even days, as some people have gone to lengths that were hard to believe just to scrape our content in a way that would let them set up a copycat. Obviously we shut them down before they could pose a serious risk to the business, but it was a great demonstration of the weakness of arguments that people are basically decent and will buy stuff legally if you make it easy. Some people are like that, many people even. And more people will buy stuff legally if you don't make it unreasonably difficult. But many people will still try to rip you off, no matter what you product costs or how easy it is to get.

[jasonv]

We've been at the DRM game a long time, through games, music, videos, etc. They all work about as well as they've worked before.

If you want to control your hardware, do what you will. But I'm not happy if you need controls in all my hardware.

There's an argument to be made that the encumbrances you hope for are largely controlled by global corporations who yield to governments, and aren't aligned with the rights of individuals and culture at large (extended copyright, CPU backdoors, carrier backdoors, etc).

Loss is built into every business model. Loss prevention is a reasonable response. But this cycle of "more controls, more DRM, more backdoors" returns again and again, and is worth resisting.

[Silhouette]

Loss is built into every business model. Loss prevention is a reasonable response. But this cycle of "more controls, more DRM, more backdoors" returns again and again, and is worth resisting.

I think you have to look at the issue from both sides. When I was younger, I was the same idealistic anti-DRM person as others commenting here. I took the same black and white views about how it's unjustified and since it will inevitably be broken it's pointless.

Then I learned something about the real economics of content creation at different scales, and some of my own business interests have intersected with this area from the other side. That tends to give you a more nuanced view of the situation.

FWIW, I'm a strongly liberal, pro-rights kind of person. I don't imagine I like hostile DRM measures or systems I can't fully control any more than anyone else here. But not liking them is different to not understanding the motivations for them or accepting that in some circumstances they may be a justified and proportionate response to a demonstrable threat. People did rip software and music and movies and so on, on a massive scale, before we evolved the modern culture. Different media have tried to solve that problem in different ways.

With music, where it's viable to have a very low cost product, we have solved it to some extent by making legitimate channels easier to access at a price where buying legally isn't a big deal. In other news, most music files you download aren't DRM'd at all these days. The flip side of this one is that a lot of the artists themselves are now basically getting scammed by the big music distribution services paying them a tiny fraction of the revenues they're bringing in and some pretty shady rights transfer agreements. But in terms of legal copyright for the final listener, it's essentially a solved problem.

With software or movies, you often can't afford to distribute everything easily at throwaway prices, because the costs involved in production are much higher and you need the people who benefit from the product to contribute a fair part of that cost or the whole production becomes unviable. Part of the reaction here has been the unfortunate trend towards only investing the big money in smash hit franchises that are sure to make a huge profit even if they suffer significant infringement as well. Plenty of people will go to the theatre to watch the next MCU movie or will buy the next installment of Assassin's Creed or next year's version of their favourite sports game where the only thing that changed significantly was the players and teams in the database. But for anything that isn't a sure-fire hit, you can probably drop a couple of zeroes off the budget anyone will give you now.

Even with the sure-fire hits, you can expect that Assassin's Creed title to have some sort of phone-home lock when it launches, which will probably protect a large amount of revenue in the opening weeks until someone cracks it.

And of course for software that is more expensive still -- like business applications that used to cost hundreds per seat before -- the move to SaaS and online hosting has a very convenient side effect for the developers that it becomes essentially impervious to piracy if they do it right. Not that everyone does, as Adobe has demonstrated yet again just this week.

I think the fundamental problem is that copyright has evolved to a strange and not entirely logical position in law today. It intends to prevent actions that could cause severe damage to a legitimate creator who made and released work in return for the rights the law claimed to offer. And yet it remains primarily a civil matter, and infringements tend to be of such low value individually that they aren't worth pursuing through normal legal actions and as such render the associated rights largely unenforceable in practice, even though the collective damage from infringement may still be severe. So big rightsholders resort to things like DRM and lobbying for otherwise nonsensical laws that try to criminalise circumvention of DRM schemes even if the original act of copying would itself have been legal.

If there were meaningful criminal penalties for knowingly redistributing works in violation of copyright, which were enforced by public authorities like any other crime, but if there were also much tighter restrictions on what DRM was allowed to do and obligations on those releasing works using it to ensure the legitimate rights of people who paid for access were respected, we might be better off. But in reality, criminal copyright laws for commercial infringement are still rarely enforced and the vast majority of infringement goes unchallenged, so rightsholders continue to resort to the IP version of street justice and throwing their considerable legal and lobbying weight around to get their way, often to the detriment of legitimate customers who are happy to pay a fair price for works they enjoy but then suffer the consequences of broken DRM or bad legal actions or whatever.

[matheusmoreira]

I didn't say it was going to prevent copyright infringement. I said the infringement was going to be inconsequential. Does it really matter if some minority chooses to download data via unofficial channels? I doubt that. I also doubt the idea that "as many as 90% of copies" will be illegal.

The more you try to prevent copyright infringement, the more it is justified. Prevention requires the destruction of free computing and networking as we know it. Today we enjoy near total freedom as computer users: we can run whatever software we want. The computer doesn't ask whether copyright holders like the software before running it. In order for copyright to be enforceable, that freedom must be sacrificed: only "approved" software must run. I'd rather see the abolition of copyright than live in such a future.

These DRM technologies are becoming extremely invasive. It's gotten to the point they've become malware rather than merely annoyances. So an illegal copy is better even for paying consumers just because it lacks the DRM.

> I've run a business that creates original content and makes it available through an online portal. My team and I have on occasion watched, in real time, over periods of hours or even days, as some people have gone to lengths that were hard to believe just to scrape our content in a way that would let them set up a copycat.

What kind of content?

[Silhouette]

I said the infringement was going to be inconsequential.

Yes, but you've given no evidence to support your position. It just seems to be your personal view/assumption.

The more you try to prevent copyright infringement, the more it is justified.

Someone is doing you harm in an illegal way, and you take steps to protect yourself from the damage, and that makes it more justified for them to do you harm in an illegal way? That's not exactly a strong moral or legal argument.

What kind of content?

Educational and uncontroversial. But in a niche market, where creating good original content requires real work by dedicated people because most people aren't going to do it, and where someone setting up some copycat site in China or India really does pose an existential threat to the viability of the business.

[salawat]

It's hard to respect the rights of someone who is willing to sacrifice yours to ensure theirs.

That isn't even just a software thing. It's a fundamental problem of civil life; backed by willingness/asymmetry in means to practically apply force.

I'd gladly pay for a good game. I am very much less likely to pay for a game I cannot try. I will not do SaaS games anymore on principle. The business model may be the most advantageous in terms of operating game studios, but I'm done handing over information to third parties, and being left high and dry when they decide they want to fundamentally change things/not host infrastructure anymore. In that sense, I treat it like any other piece of software I rely on. If I can't mirror/host/modify/distribute/fork source; I'm not terribly interested.

For me a game is a tool. It is a tool through which wonder and joy can be experienced at the myriad of things we can coerce a computer into doing. Tell me I can't do anything with it except pay for it and let it take up space on my drive, and you've lost a sale.

Then again, as an astute architect once pointed out to me; clearly I'm not the intended audience; and the number of people committed to servicing the audience I'm a part of is few and far between. This will likely remain the status quo until the end of my days; and it isn't even like I've made a contribution to the space as of yet; so I tend to suffer in silence as the sinner with a rock should.

When the day comes that I do, (especially in the unlikely event the game is actually good) I may come down off the fence and make the debate space intolerable for game-industry status quo people.

[Silhouette]

It's hard to respect the rights of someone who is willing to sacrifice yours to ensure theirs.

Indeed. So how do you think game developers felt watching their hard work get ripped by pirates who would offer absurd rationalisations to justify breaking the law and taking something that other people spent a lot of time and money to make without paying for it?

I'd gladly pay for a good game. I am very much less likely to pay for a game I cannot try.

That is your prerogative. In days gone by, before online distribution was the norm and other strategies became viable, game developers used to release demos that featured, say, the first couple of levels of a game so you could try it out. This is hardly a new thing, and it's never something that many game developers were against.

If I can't mirror/host/modify/distribute/fork source; I'm not terribly interested.

Again, that's your prerogative. I actually have a lot of sympathy for this view; at my businesses, we adopt a very similar strategy in avoiding SaaS for anything critical to our business operations.

But we have to realise that we are in a relatively small minority here. As long as the online systems or DRM or whatever are reasonably transparent, most people simply don't care. As you say, the likes of us are not the intended audience of these products.

[som33]

American IP law was alway writtein in a one sided way to deny ownership rights to the general public, what about big media and game companies lobbying away the public domain?

So I won't feel anything for people like you and your pro drm arguments, none of this would be talked about pre-internet because the only way to give us software was to give us all the files.

The modern game industry is committing fraud and stealing software on a mass scale because of the criminally underhanded IP laws.

Steam/uplay/origin were forced into existence, no one wanted them and were imposed on the population because game consumers were 100's of miles away.

The internet is just one sized world computer and programmers and ceo's know they can now issue commands down the wire to impose their will on the computer illiterate.

[Silhouette]

your pro drm arguments

I don't know what a pro-DRM argument looks like here. Do you think an argument that solving a problem where two huge groups have each been abused by a significant fraction of the other group over a multi-decade period in a way that affects everyone's lives and billions in economic activity might need more nuance than giving one side everything it wants and putting the other side in front of a firing squad is pro-DRM?

none of this would be talked about pre-internet

Most of this wasn't very relevant pre-Internet. You couldn't see a new work you'd spent the equivalent of $100,000,000 developing with a team of hundreds over a period of years being cracked and then copied to millions of people within a matter of hours pre-Internet.

In those days, sure, you got all the files, but you also probably got asked to read a word from a certain page in the manual or something when you loaded the game as a crude but surprisingly effective form of copy protection. You couldn't just look anything you needed to know up online because that sort of "online" didn't exist back then. Sometimes people did distribute cracked versions of games, but again they didn't circulate rapidly among the community because they had to be individually copied and shared around on physical media.

Using the capabilities of the Internet to counter widespread abuse facilitated by those same capabilities is hardly a radical strategy. Absent a radical global overhaul of IP law (which I'd fully support, but I don't see happening any time soon) relying on technological solutions to protect itself is all the creative industry has.

Clearly you have strong views on this, so how would you resolve the impasse in a way that better respects the rights of consumers without obliterating all viable business models for creators?

[som33]

>Clearly you have strong views on this, so how would you resolve the impasse in a way that better respects the rights of consumers without obliterating all viable business models for creators?

The creators need to get fucked because piracy was never an issue, EA, Microsoft and activison became huge companies before they started coding their software in criminal underhanded ways enabled by the internet. The internet has merely enabled creators to steal from the public because the public can't reach them, that's how we ended up with steam/drm.

Your pro creator stance, is a non argument. When steam was released I didn't know the FTC existed or I would have called the FTC and blew the whistle on the fact that Valve, EA, activison, and sony were lying to the public selling them stolen games, and RPG's (aka mmo's).

Any client-server piece of software, mean's your being robbed, there's no rational reason not to get complete set of files that runs locally on your machine. The end game for microsoft and other companies was to kill the idea of local applications users own and control (aka get rid of everyones basic human rights to own their shit).

You don't seem to get the entire tech industry is run by criminals, you're trying to apply capitalistic idea of property rights to ELECTRONS, it's impossible to make files uncopyable, as it is impossible to make water unwet unless you physically put defects into the hardware and software or hack it (aka encrypt files and basically hack your own software).

Big media companies have gained huge profits by fraud (aka stealing software by taking advantage of a compute illiterate public).

Valve, and the entire industry is criminal and corrupt as fuck... it's literally selling you incomplete programs.

Why the hell should anyone need permission from your a rack of servers colocated somewhere to use their videogames? That's feudalism right there.

Your whole worldview is based on laws written in country who's citizenry are idiots and who've been living in a lawless oligarchy for 2 centuries.

Every time IP law came up for extension big business always extended it and the public domain lost, you don't live in a democracy.

So trying to argue with you, would be trying to argue with an illiterate peasant who has no idea that he has been giving a free pass to a corrupt lawless oligarchy to steal all human culture and lock it down behind bullshit one sided intellectual property laws that were specifically written to deny basic human rights to the citizens..

AKA the right to OWN what you buy, software licensing should have never gotten the ground, and both businesses and consumers should have gotten full property rights transfer to anything they buy.

You don't get software licensing was a one sided con because our christian grandmothers and grandpa's had no idea how technology worked, it was magic for 99% of the public which is why silicon valley got to write laws in such a criminally human rights denying way to begin with.

If anything the creators have been stealing from the public domain for two centuries, it's on people like you why we should believe someone who is defending the rich, their big media companies and their lobbyists from removing basic rights everyone should have - the right to own what they buy outright, the right to repair it, the right to modify it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/...

[StavrosK]

And the solution to piracy turned out to be "make legitimate stores more convenient than pirated ones". It's not that DRM got so good that I can't find a game on the Pirate Bay, it's that Steam is so convenient that I don't bother to.

Given that, DRM is entirely useless, and I prefer to buy things from GOG.com whenever I can.

[Silhouette]

Given that, DRM is entirely useless

This is a common claim, but it's not realistic.

The commercial success of modern AAA titles with budgets comparable to Hollywood blockbusters is often extremely front-loaded. That is, like new movies, these games typically make a disproportionate part of their lifetime revenue during the first few weeks after release. No-one in the gaming industry expects a DRM scheme to protect a AAA title indefinitely, but if some online-linked scheme can take even a few weeks to crack after launch, that can make a huge difference to the total revenues brought in by a game.

At the other end of the spectrum, the commercial success of a small indie game might be determined by selling a few hundred extra copies. If some simple copy protection efforts can significantly reduce casual copying, that could be the difference between making money and losing money.

People sometimes look at DRM as if it's some black-and-white issue for the creators, something that has no benefit if it's not 100% effective. That's not how the real world works.

[gfxgirl]

The counter argument is every netflix show and movie, every hbo show, every amazon show, is available via torrent moments after it comes out. And yet Netflix and Amazon are an N and A in FAANG. They're hugely profitable, even though it can all be pirated trivially.

Similarly there are things like humblebundle which releases all software DRM free (or did) yet devs are making money.

This isn't about zero piracy. It's about whether or not DRM is effective. I think sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. I'm not sure I can put my finger on where it is and where it isn't.

As one example, my impression is it's important for software like Maya, 3DSMax, Autodesk. I'm confident most companies i've worked for would not bother purchasing the appropriate number of licenses if they didn't have to. It might not even be deliberate. It's just if the software wasn't DRMed they'd just install on each new employee's machine and put it on a forgotten TODO list to buy a new license. The software is large enough and the market small enough that DRM matters.

On the other hand, examples of Netflix above, it not clear it matters for movies. Nor is it clear it matters for AAA games or even many popular Indie games.

[Silhouette]

Even in the case of services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, the DRM measures are a significant impediment to casual infringement, and in particular to "ignorant" casual infringement by the kind of person who would quite happily put a whole show on their YouTube channel and then write something like "No copyright intended" in the description as if that meant they hadn't just flagrantly broken the law. For any big name, mass market title, there will probably be a way to acquire it illegally relatively quickly after release for those who know where to look, but there is a very long tail of infringement beyond that point and that's what they're trying to control with these kinds of measures.

As a pertinent illustration, a while back Google started adding a download icon to the default toolbar for HTML5 videos in Chrome. It didn't do anything you couldn't do before just by using the context menu and saving. And yet Internet forums were swamped by complaints from people who made DRM-free videos available on their sites in the immediate aftermath, because viewers assumed the presence of the icon meant it was now OK to download the videos to keep or share arbitrarily. My businesses typically don't employ any fancy DRM schemes for content we provide to customers once they've paid and logged in to whatever system they're using. But that week, after spending an insane amount of time chasing down copies of multimedia content that was for paying customers only yet suddenly started popping up on every hosting/sharing system you can think of, we did implement a really dumb "breaking change" in how we served videos, just to get rid of that icon, and it solved our problem overnight.