[Zak]

I'm skeptical. Most TV shows are broadcast free of charge and supported by ads and product placement. Paid streaming, digital downloads and DVD sales are supplemental revenue streams. Offering inexpensive, high-quality DRM-free downloads is compatible with making money from overlay ads and (where applicable) product placement.

If the content industry doesn't take this path, I see piracy becoming more and more mainstream. My mother (65 years old, not very geeky) pirates TV shows so she can watch them on her tablet on a plane because her Netflix subscription doesn't provide a good solution for that. How long do you think it will be before she drops Netflix because The Pirate Bay has a better user experience?

[anigbrowl]

Most TV shows are broadcast free of charge and supported by ads and product placement.

That's netowrk TV. Many of the most popular shows on paid cable TV channels. Also, those ads only generate revenue because people can't bypass them at broadcast times. Also, you're completely ignoring syndication revenues, which are often where the real money is.

My mother (65 years old, not very geeky) pirates TV shows so she can watch them on her tablet on a plane because her Netflix subscription doesn't provide a good solution for that.

I never cease to be amazed at the creativity of piracy apologists in coming up with new scenarios where piracy is the only solution. Seriously, what percentage of Netflix users are in transit without internet access so often that they're horribly underserved by the inability to pre-cache multiple TV show episodes?

[tragic]

> I never cease to be amazed at the creativity of piracy apologists in coming up with new scenarios where piracy is the only solution.

It doesn't need to be the only solution. It simply needs to be the most economically viable solution to the consumer.

Joe Bloggs is an Englishman. He likes high-quality US television imports - Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, House of Cards, True Detective. He wants to obtain them for his viewing pleasure.

His options:

1. Go old school. pay £100-£150 for all the box-sets.

2. Go new school. Pay £7/month for Netflix (BB, HoC). Pay £30+ a month for Sky TV subscription with Sky Atlantic for the others. Plus £x, plus £y for everything else he needs - not even to mention movies, which are very inconsistent across streaming services. (I fear that we Limeys get less out of our Netflix subscriptions than you.)

3. Go illegal. Spend an upfront cost of time, electricity, bandwidth and risk of malware apocalypse/getting caught to get all this stuff on his hard drive.

Forget the morality of the issue. Never mind the legality: if Joe is a driver, it's a statistical near certainty that he speeds; if he doesn't take drugs, it's not because they're illegal. It's simple economics. If three is cheaper - in terms of time plus risk plus money - he will do number three.

As long as The Pirate Bay offers real advantages over legal services - principally, beyond the monetary price, everything you could possibly want is there in one place - then people will choose it. And just as it's unrealistic to expect media conglomerates to share the EFF's view of DRM, so it's unrealistic to expect media consumers to put up with the enormous inconveniences for the sake of some mythical starving artist grubbing away at the bottom of the Hollywood food chain.

[DanBC]

I do not shop lift.

When I am asked why I do not shop lift I say a bunch of stuff, but "it is illegal" is very far down the list.

Hypothetical-Bob does shop lift. When asked why he says a bunch of stuff, but will include some rationalisations for why this bit of illegality is okay. "At least I only rob big shops and it's all covered by insurance and huge profits" for example. His rationalisations might not be true nor even make any sense, but he believes them.

Hypothetical-Chris is a different style of thief. He burgles houses. Again, he'll justify it. "At least I'm not mugging old grannies".

Hypothetical-Dave does mug old grannies. "But I am a drug addict and I need the money And there is not treatment. At least I'm not like those scumbag paedophiles."

The illegality of an action doesn't appear to immediately affect whether someone does something or not. It does affect how sneakily they do it.

So that's the kind of attitude that many people have about piracy. But laws have longer lasting effects. They social engineer people into "acceptable" modes of behaviour. We combine advertising campaigns against drunk driving with stiff legal penalties. We back up outrage against racism with laws mandating equal pay and no workforce discrimination.

So, while DRM and anti-circumvention laws are hateful and stupid it is daft to think that they have no effect on rates of piracy.

There is very little piracy on Nintendo3DS games. This is not because people love Nintendo and want competition for Sony and Microsoft and mobile gaming. It's because the encryption has held and people who could work on breaking it don't want to risk the consequences. See the amount of piracy on regular DA or Sony PSP for examples of how rapidly people adopt piracy when it's available.

And people will pirate 99c games that have no drm.

[tragic]

> The illegality of an action doesn't appear to immediately affect whether someone does something or not. It does affect how sneakily they do it.

That's also a matter of social censure though. I mean, every thread I've seen on this EME fiasco has included people looking forward to the Adobe CDM, in anticipation of its being cracked. Which is illegal.

See also people talking openly and frankly online about their usage of narcotics.

Which brings me to:

> So that's the kind of attitude that many people have about piracy. But laws have longer lasting effects. They social engineer people into "acceptable" modes of behaviour.

Again: drugs. Is taking marijuana less socially acceptable now after x decades of prohibition? No. It's completely bloody normal. And laws are slowly adjusting to the facts on the ground.

Will piracy become a big old taboo, like using child prostitutes? Will it continue to be 'normal', until anti-piracy people just give up? I don't have the faintest idea. This is going to run and run.

> So, while DRM and anti-circumvention laws are hateful and stupid it is daft to think that they have no effect on rates of piracy.

Daft indeed - everything has an effect. I'd want to see some numbers either which way.

Again: DRM has the effect, at the moment, of making it easier and cheaper to access content legally (by convincing Hollywood etc to license things to Netflix and co); but harder to use such content generally rather than under certain predefined conditions. Which one of these conditions is prevailing at the moment is a matter for statisticians and the like.

I would be surprised if Firefox's decision to implement EME mattered a hoot one way or another; DRM and non-DRM content will remain available through more or less the same channels as they were beforehand.

EDIT: on nintendo's encryption, this is (finally) some kind of concern. I notice that copy-protection is getting 'better' on certain popular music software (as well as more intrusive and annoying).

[anigbrowl]

Again: drugs. Is taking marijuana less socially acceptable now after x decades of prohibition? No. It's completely bloody normal. And laws are slowly adjusting to the facts on the ground.

You missed the point he was making; it's still not acceptable to mug old ladies (or anyone else) to get money for drugs. Indeed, I predict that over time we'll see more and more drug use legalized, but any crimes committed under the influence of or in connection with drugs will involve substantially increased penalties, because the larger number of responsible drug consumers don't want to carry the can for people who can't or won't control their drug use and behavior.

[anigbrowl]

Which is preceisly why publishers seek to impose deterrent penalties for copyright infringers, so as to increase the perceived risk.

some mythical starving artist grubbing away at the bottom of the Hollywood food chain

There are quite a lot of people, including myself, who make their living around the bottom of the Hollywood food chain. Attitudes like yours have made it incresingly difficult to launch small-budget projects of the sort that were designed to go direct to video, because ubiquitous low-cost piracy means that high-budget movies tend to crowd out low budget ones. Many world class directors, eg Martin Scorsese and James Cameron, got their start by doing low-budget exploitation pics that could be produced cheaply and sold cheaply. That market has been shrinking almost to nothing because piracy undermines not just cost structures but release windows, so in many ways it has become more difficult to bootstrap a film career than it used to be. Technology has made the process of shooting and editing a film a lot cheaper, but not across the board. Many economic inputs (like the cost of hiring locations or of feeding the cast and crew during production) cost as much or more as they always have, but it's a lot harder to raise a budget if you can't identify a predictable revenue stream.

[thenomad]

How do you plan to make offering DRM-free content compatible with overlay ads? Are you suggesting having the ads actually baked into the video stream?

[dublinben]

>Are you suggesting having the ads actually baked into the video stream?

Networks already do this on their broadcasts. Why couldn't they do it on free downloads as well? How many people are going to actively avoid the high quality, well-seeded, official download just because it has a few lower third ads?

[thenomad]

The problem is that networks ALSO include interstitial ads.

From practical experience as an advertising buyer, I'd expect the CPM for those ads to be considerably higher than for the in-stream ads. Indeed, you'll see that most of the in-stream ads shown on network broadcasts are internal for other network shows, rather than being sold, strongly implying that the potential revenue is massively less.

As a result, just giving away free downloads with baked-in lower third ads would likely reduce the revenue from the shows being downloaded by a factor of 10 or more. That's gonna be a problem.

(Don't get me wrong - I'm not a fan of DRM at all and would love to find an equitable distribution solution to this problem. But as a professional in both the media and advertising industries, this sort of revenue generation is something I struggle with myself, and I know it's a non-trivial problem to solve.)

[anigbrowl]

The existence of TiVo suggests that the answer is 'lots of people.' And 'a few' lower third ads? In the US, an hour of prime time usually means 15 minutes' worth of advertising. DRM is a heck of lot less distracting when I'm trying give my attention to a program.

[dublinben]

DRM is pretty distracting when it prevents you from watching the show at all though.

[anigbrowl]

Oh bullshit. That's like saying capitalism is preventing me from enjoying my Ferrari because I don't have enough money to buy one. Why do you start from a false premise of being entitled to watch anything you feel like at the price of your choice? Just because the marginal cost of copying is low does not create an entitlement on your part, nor does it reflect the fact that the fixed costs of production are often terribly high and have to be recouped by selling a large number of copies.

Of course, a Ferrari is a physical thing. But every Ferrar sitting in a showroom is one that nobody has been willing to pay for yet. Does that mean you should be able to take it for a ride when the dealership closes at night as long as you have it back there by opening time the following day (ignoring depreciation)?

[Zak]

Most of the things DRM is used to prevent would otherwise be classed as fair use.

Copyright law was, until quite recently about granting a monopoly on the large-scale or commercial use of a work. At-home copying for personal use was generally legal - even explicitly protected by law in some cases[0]. Same with multiplexing video on different screens, creating backups and skipping commercials.

DRM and legal provisions forbidding its circumvention change the rules quite a bit, stripping away significant rights from consumers. Losing rights one once had might well be grounds for a feeling of entitlement.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act#Exemp...