[otrahuevada]

The purpose of DRM is ultimately asserting the will of a couple corporate ghouls over your use of the thing they basically cheated you into renting.

Which wouldn't even be a thing if intellectual property rights, which are at the core of the whole debate, were untransferable and only endured for the lifetime of the creator.

If anyone were able to lobby those simple, clear changes into law, the effects of that would probably be Earth-altering.

[dahart]

What do you mean by “cheated you into renting”? That sounds like you’re suggesting you’re being forced to spend money against your will without your knowledge or consent?

I also don’t understand your suggestion for fixing copyright law. What constitutes a ‘creator’ in the case of a company that makes something? (Same question for a band, or any group of multiple people.) How would you handle accidental death? What about a company acquisition? How do you define ‘untransferable’? Are you saying it should be okay for a company creator to hold the copyright forever as long as the company is in business, but individual people can’t give or sell copyrights? That would be a boon for Disney and very bad for individual artists. It doesn’t seem like your suggestion is prepared to deal with the realities and complexities of business and life…

[xhkkffbf]

Sorry to be a bummer, but I make my living creating copyright protected material. DRM protects me and my livelihood.

Yes, I often cut deals with the people you refer to as "corporate ghouls". While I often lament the terms, they aren't horrible. In the end, I make enough money to avoid searching for a job with other corporations trading in material goods.

I would feel differently about the system if it weren't performing relatively well for most people. You say these ghouls "cheated" you into "renting" things. I'm not disputing the various philosophical sophistries that people use to complain about artificial scarcity etc. I just know that this evening, I"ll be able to get a nice movie that cost millions of dollars to make and spend only a few dollars to watch it in my living room. That only works when piracy doesn't.

[otrahuevada]

Your use of scare quotes on plain self-evident terms kinda makes me think this is going to be entirely pointless, but here goes nothing.

Do you understand that your being more or less content with the results of a deal does not have a bearing on how good, or decent, or moral, the system overarching that deal is?

Tons of people seem more or less into Nestlé products despite their long track record of profiting from slavery, do you believe that being the case makes agricultural slavery a good thing?

On your last statement, how exactly do you think not paying for a thing you wouldn't pay for anyway prevents that thing from existing? Like, if I torrent "Superheroes in Body Gloves 27" instead of, you know, ignoring it, then a time travelling ghost will materialize in the set and kidnap the directors? Or how would that work

[dahart]

FWIW, it seems like the parent comment was just quoting you, not using scare quotes. I didn’t find your use of the words particularly self-evident, it might be worth patiently explaining what you meant rather than attacking.

Parent’s valid and legitimate point is that if nobody pays for the content then it’s not a viable business model and it won’t get made in the first place. You can’t pirate a movie that doesn’t exist.

[otrahuevada]

At least according to their own accounting, movies lose otherwise hilarious amounts of money all the time and they seem to still exist somehow.

"Piracy", which in reality is probably better called "online jaywalking" as it, too, is a made up faux-pas created so as to allow a couple soulless drones to make more money, hasn't to date represented an obstacle to content creation, they still happily churn products all the time, so I don't see any reason to think it will become an existential threat to the studio suits any time soon.

And maybe it should. Which is kind of core to the whole debate; is it actually good to anyone in any way to have a business based around forbidding free access to easily duplicable cultural products? Should such a thing even be allowed to thrive?

[dahart]

Easily duplicable cultural products? You’re suggesting that you should be able to take something someone else made because it’s easy to do? It would be easy to steal your computer from you — should that make it legal for me to do so? You think movies should become historic cultural relics with free access to all whenever they are popular? If your wish came true, how exactly would the movie’s creation get funded in the first place? Movies often costs tens to hundreds of millions to produce, and they only take on that level of risk because of the financial return of people who pay to watch them. How do you think that would work if movies were free to everyone?

Do you have a job? Do you work for a company that makes money? Would you be okay with the product you’re working on being taken for free by people who insist they shouldn’t have to pay for it?

Your language feels really very hyperbolic to me. There are many real people with real jobs trying to make livings, even if the corporations they work for are greedy. DRM can indeed be shitty and it often oversteps copyright, but we can ignore DRM here because the argument you’re actually making is one against respecting copyright law and against respecting artists.

> is it actually good to anyone in any way to have a business based around forbidding free access to easily duplicable cultural products? Should such a thing even be allowed to thrive?

Yes. The answer is yes, without question. This has been debated by scholars and lawmakers and artists and business people for hundreds of years, and we have a compendium of laws that protect the people who make content precisely because it does, in fact, do them some good.

See Chesterton’s Fence: you don’t get to nuke the existing system until you actually understand why it’s there and how it got there. If you believe it serves zero people but still manages to exist, that means that your belief is wrong and you need to do some research.

The biggest problem with your argument is you’re blindly focused on the execs and profits of only the very largest media conglomerates, and you’re ignoring not only the tens of thousands of artists they employ, but you’re also ignoring all smaller businesses that aren’t making enormous profits and can’t afford to give away their content for free.

> movies lose otherwise hilarious amounts of money all the time and they seem to still exist somehow.

The amount of money someone makes is not any of your business, and it does not justify stealing the things they make without their permission. Copyright law can and does apply even to works that don’t cost money, and it also applies equally when someone’s enjoying handsome profits. You are not legally invited to copy anything based on someone else’s income.

Studios sometimes do lose money on movies and they survive because they make multiple movies. Studios also sometimes report misleading sales figures. I’ve worked in films and games as an artist, and watched studios do “creative accounting”. Reports of losses don’t prove anything, and don’t justify breaking copyright law.

[otrahuevada]

> Easily duplicable cultural products? You’re suggesting that you should be able to take something someone else made because it’s easy to do?

No, I'm not. What's more, that's an easily disprovable lie: My duplicating of a file does not somehow delete the original. My downloading of this page hasn't done anything to your post.

> Movies often costs tens to hundreds of millions to produce, and they only take on that level of risk because of the financial return of people who pay to watch them.

Financial return that, according to themselves, is at best terrible? And that you, too, keep mentioning, despite loudly proclaiming they are of noone's interest?

> Do you have a job? Do you work for a company that makes money? Would you be okay with the product you’re working on being taken for free by people who insist they shouldn’t have to pay for it?

My job does not rely on handing copies of our product's binaries to people if they pinky promise they'll only use it in a way we approve of though. And if we, too rented garbled copies of it with time-limited access to the ungarbling machinery, we probably should disclose that beforehand so that prospective customers don't end up feeling like they've been defrauded.

> you’re also ignoring all smaller businesses that aren’t making enormous profits but can’t afford to give away their content for free

I'm not asking anyone to give anything away for free. And in any case the fact that the gatekeeping-culture-industrial-complex also exploits other smaller creators could easily also be considered problematic in and by itself.

> The amount of money someone makes is not any of your business

Oh but it is, specifically when they make it into a battle cry to invade my privacy and impede my agency in a deeply dumb search of unapproved copies of whatever they feel like claiming to own.

[qwytw]

DRM for software or games (which is what I assume you're talking about) is hardly comparable with DRM for movies/tv shows, they serve a very different purpose. It's basically impossible to prevent users from copying video files so it has basically no effect on piracy rates or rather it can only increase due to the horrible UX.