[transcriptase]

>due to the arms race that large corporate machines will win

Much like how the entirety of Hollywood, book publishers, academic publishers, and game developers have won against piracy despite being some of the largest corps on earth and dedicating untold billions to the issue over the past 30 years?

[blanched]

They won the long game. Everything is rented and DRM now. Very little of what most people buy digitally is truly owned.

[digitaltrees]

They didn’t win because of DRM. They won because of the regulations that grant a monopoly for a specific term in the form of a copyright. Society has recognized that incentivizing creative acts requires a temporary grant of monopoly to ensure the necessary scarcity to make money and recover the costs of creation. The real problem is Disney keeps expanding that time period so things never enter the public domain

[hurril]

This is again conflating at least two things and this is so prevalent in this context. Let us not conflate how annoying DRM:s are to us users that buy the things, with pirates thinking they somehow have a right to use any software without paying fairly for it. I would even go as far as to say that you pirates are the reason I have to have a DRM in the shit I bought and paid for.

[the_af]

> I would even go as far as to say that you pirates are the reason I have to have a DRM

I think this is largely an incorrect take. DRM is anti consumer, not anti piracy. In fact, it has done very little to deter actual piracy (and remember it only takes ONE person to break the DRM), while affecting some casual pirates and all legitimate users. In the process, they got rid of reselling stuff you own.

It's anticonsumer, not antipiracy, never forget that. It means something like this would have happened regardless of pirates.

[hurril]

Would the DRM exist without piracy?

[jimmydorry]

They succesfully did away with 2nd hand markets and the concept of "owning" anything. So yes, I would imagine DRM would continue to exist without piracy.

[the_af]

> Would the DRM exist without piracy?

I think so, because their main goal is to prevent unwanted use of the digital product -- to the detriment of end users -- in more ways than just piracy. In fact, they don't solve the piracy issue.

[digitaltrees]

I am not sure how I am conflating two things, it would be helpful if you could expand or connect to my argument. Perhaps I am misunderstanding.

My argument is that the grant of monopoly is a regulatory decision and the real cause of "winning". No amount of DRM would confer the same benefit because the ability to bypass it through piracy would be totally legal with no economic or other consequences and so a robust cracking and distribution ecosystem would emerge. Thats a drastically different story than when napster gets shut down, and limewire gets shut down and pirate bay gets shut down every time it relaunches. Imagine a world where there is are 1000 pirate bays

[transcriptase]

Piracy is as easy now as it was pre-DRM. DRM is the digital equivalent to security screws on electronics, in that they’re a mechanism for lawyers to argue their client made an attempt despite being easily bypassed with a trivial amount of effort.

[digitaltrees]

Exactly this. The real power is in the regulatory grant of a monopoly that comes with rights like the ability to sue for damages, issue take down notices etc. the DRM does allow restrictions on distribution because many people can’t be bothered to remove them, but more importantly the act of removing them is evidence of the intent to knowingly violate the copyright which might be harder to prove otherwise

[Paradigma11]

Almost all Pirates do no encounter DRM in any way.

[duzer65657]

they didn't win by attacking piracy head-on though, they made capitulation easy & nice enough for us to happily go along.

[rob74]

They did a bit of everything: attacking head-on, lobbying, providing alternatives. And eventually, it worked.

[secretsatan]

Think people are getting annoyed again at having to pay even more than we did for cable to get all the streaming packages.

[befictious]

all's fair in love and war

[rcxdude]

And now that they're trying to push up the margins and the streaming ecosystem is fragmenting making everything into a series of bundles again, piracy is on the rise again.

[Manuel_D]

No? DRM gets cracked and the pirate sites still have loads of the latest shows, games, etc.

[jpfromlondon]

did they? Is piracy now impossible?

[ChoGGi]

Not according to /r/CrackWatch

They've got some sort of hypervisor bypass for basically all Denuvo games.

[mavhc]

Except the only way to watch some shows is now piracy, they've been erased from streaming and never available on disc

[array_key_first]

They did win for a while because they stamped out 99% of piracy. In the early days of streaming it was legitimately difficult to argue for piracy. Streaming was just too convenient and too cheap.

But, they are greedy above all else. And so, we are once again seeing a resurgence of piracy. Large corporations seem to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

[PostOnce]

They have a finite # of employees, a finite budget, and a finite amount of time.

Hobbyists do not. ROI is not a factor.

[pixl97]

As yes, the hobbyist built nuclear weapons program.....

Legalize recreational plutonium.

[tempest_]

To be fair the state works pretty hard to crush "hobbyist" nuclear weapons programs so you don't really know how far it could get.

[fc417fc802]

By the time you're building (or buying) the necessary highly esoteric and expensive ultracentrifuge setup I think you would be well outside the realm of "hobbyist" unless someone insists on the most unreasonably pedantic definition for the term.

Unless we're only considering final assembly. Just gotta get that weapons grade fissile material supplier lined up. That might or might not qualify as rich hobbyist territory depending on how high a price tag is permissible.

[tempest_]

You don't have to use the ultracentrifuge, though I don't suppose the power plant you would need for a diffusion plant would be much more attainable.

[cyberax]

In theory, there's also direct laser-based isotope separation. It's a technology that is being actively suppressed, and that's one case where I very much in favor of that.

[bryanrasmussen]

so which one is it here?

This subthread starts off with the argument that the big corps will never beat the little determined hackers, one of the founding myths of the early internet. And then every now and then a strong little branch of the argument runs up against an example and it becomes well sure, the little hobbyist hackers don't have anything there but that is because the big corps/gov/billionaires/whatever put so much into beating them.

I mean reading it all certainly sounds like the people on the little guy's side are overestimating the value of pluck, an observation Hollywood generally makes just before the heroes with pluck win for ever!

[AnthonyMouse]

> And then every now and then a strong little branch of the argument runs up against an example and it becomes well sure, the little hobbyist hackers don't have anything there but that is because the big corps/gov/billionaires/whatever put so much into beating them.

It's almost never about the level of resources the organization puts in. The usual reason is that there isn't enough incentive to do it. What is a hobbyist going to do with a nuclear weapon? Why spend your time creating one if you, like the overwhelming majority of people, have no desire to blow up a city?

Preventing something that hardly anybody would be trying to do even if it wasn't being suppressed is a lot more practical than preventing something millions of people would do given the chance.

[cmxch]

You don’t happen to know a certain Doc Brown?

[SecretDreams]

Yes. Winning against piracy doesn't mean you completely eliminate piracy. It means you scare enough people into not doing it and make it a bit harder to do for others.

Losing to piracy would see companies like Netflix and Spotify not thriving.

[fc417fc802]

> It means you scare enough people into not doing it and make it a bit harder to do for others.

By which definition they utterly failed.

> Losing to piracy would see companies like Netflix and Spotify not thriving.

Not at all. Netflix and Spotify do well because they are a good value proposition for the average customer. Piracy is free at point of "purchase" but is (and always has been) expensive in terms of various sorts of overhead.

[black_knight]

As long as enough people keep the pirate bays open, it will be there as an alternative when the services start their inevitable enshittification.

I for one do not enjoy the “Which service has the classic film I wanted to watch this week?” Nor having to switch services every time I want to see a new TV series.

We need (and have!) similar “free” alternatives to the watermarked generative services. Just like I hate the yellow dots on my printed images, I am not happy to have my creative assets (I do nothing nefarious) stained with SynthID.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Winning against piracy doesn't mean you completely eliminate piracy.

But this is moving the goalposts. You can win against piracy either by making piracy less attractive or by making the paid offering more attractive. The first has utterly failed, piracy remains easy as a rule, and to the extent that they've succeeded it's not only disproportionately by doing the second thing, the DRM itself is a net negative because it has such a small effect on the ease of piracy while making the paid offering worse.

[UqWBcuFx6NV4r]

What? Some nerds on private trackers and kids on 123movies or whatever is not piracy winning by any material stretch.