Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gjsman-1000 1047 days ago
The dumb thing though is that DRM... kinda works?

I know that we techies can bypass it fairly easily, regardless of type... but I do understand the argument that 95%+ of people can't bypass DRM even if they tried their hardest, it's just too complicated for them. Which in a sense makes it effective and purposeful?

Ugh.

2 comments

The thing is, it's so easy to get an HD DRM-free copy of pretty much any movie, tv show, etc that there's no real point - anyone who wants to share a copy of anything can do so very easily without bypassing DRM, because someone else will have already done it.
> it's so easy to get an HD DRM-free copy of pretty much any movie

To a techie. The amount of people who find torrenting too confusing and overwhelming or are afraid of legal consequences or don't even know it exists is, once again, the vast majority (unless we are talking about Eastern Europe and third-world countries).

Even if you could prove that the US had, say, 10 million people that torrented actively (which is, honestly, a big stretch in my opinion), the pitch to movie studios is that they should abandon DRM because 10 million people can bypass it and 320 million people can't; and 320 million people don't even know the DRM is there or something they should care about. Not a winning sales pitch there.

The hard part for people is not obtaining a copy of the media which DRM is "supposed" to prevent. The hard part is setting up the multiple services that makes all this convenient with slick interfaces that people are used to similar to Netflix. That would still require just as much effort with or without DRM.
I know there are people who sell Fire sticks on Facebook marketplace with Kodi pre-configured to use shady streaming sites on it. Or they would charge to "jailbreak" your Fire Stick and set it up for you. Many non-tech people would go this route. Not sure if these still work, but they were popular for a while.