10 ms·

(I ran engineering for a DRM firm for several years about the same time as Peter put this out.) It was pretty stunningly apparent at the time that the Internet

(I ran engineering for a DRM firm for several years about the same time as Peter put this out.) It was pretty stunningly apparent at the time that the Internet was very good for information sharing, that crushing Napster hadn't exactly stopped people from sharing digital media, and that trying to make media exceedingly secure and hard to use was not a winning strategy. If you want a customer to pay for your product, you have to offer value - if it's both more expensive and harder to use, you've made adoption pretty unlikely. In '03, MP3 players were entirely prevalent, mostly didn't support useful DRM, and the music industry mostly sold little silver discs which came with no restrictions. So it wasn't that the threat model to make music readily redistributable for free was "the smartest black hats out there figure out how to crack your crypto and DRM", it was "an average user rips a CD into MP3s and shares it". As you might expect, it was frustrating to try to deal with the competing demands from Hollywood at the time. People mostly didn't bother attacking the DRM - they just went and created or file-shared to get the more usable files without the protection layer. But there was still a great deal of insistence that whatever content protection layer was put in could be a vault to keep media safe forever, rather than a speedbump to piracy. (Meanwhile, of course, CDs were raw bitstreams of high fidelity audio data...)

TheAmazingIdiot 14y ago
I used to pay for content: movies, games, and some music. I didn't spend all that much, but I did buy them. Then, corrupted audio CDs were sold. My sister got bit by one. So we downloaded it where it wasn't sold as damaged: Suprnova. During that time, stupidity was occurring with DVDs with rotating CSS keys and 'bad block filled with data'. I was downloading films I wanted to archive, but couldn't easily rip. Games were not that bad, but soon became horrendous in terms of screw-user checks, up to the point of driver breaking installs of trash-ware and other nefarious garbage. I trusted the pirates more than the companies. I've been burned enough times. Why pay for crap quality when free is better?
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  True that. Everyone is fretting about movie/TV show availability on Netflix, etc., but I sidestepped that and just built an HTPC[0] and combined it with a private torrent site that has all the movies and TV shows I could ever want. In technical terms, it is far and away the best solution. 0: http://lifehacker.com/5936546/how-i-built-the-media-center-of-my-dreams-for-under-500 http://lifehacker.com/5936546/how-i-built-the-media-center-o...
- tptacek 14y ago
  Because the people that sweated and risked their livelihoods to produce these titles didn't actually offer them to you for free; instead, they were coerced into accepting free distribution when their work was illegally copied by companies that fund themselves by viagra and Adult Friend Finder ads. Meanwhile, almost universally, the offerings nerds entitle themselves to are luxury goods that no person can claim an inherent right to access, so, not only are content producers and financiers coerced into having their return on investment redirected to porn ads and porn ad brokers, but that's happening solely to provide nerds with access to luxuries. Most of which they could trivially have afforded anyways. But keep telling yourself piracy strikes some blow for justice. I don't know the statistics but I'd have to guess at least 80% of nerds like us pirate content every single week, and nobody wants to think of themselves as an asshole. Rationalize however you need to.
  - rsync 14y ago
    There's a third way here ... and that is to buy the content, keep your proof of purchase, and then download/rip/torrent the content in the manner that works best for you. It's win win.
    - illuminate 14y ago
      I can't buy the Blu-Rays as each episode is released, so I'm not sure how this is supposed to work.
      - tptacek 14y ago
        You wait until they're available and purchase and watch them then.
        sounds 14y ago
        Remember that these same companies are actively lobbying for oppressive laws behind closed doors, actively inserting malware into their installers, actively disabling and deleting content users still legitimately have a right to access, illegally invading sovereign nations (New Zealand / megaupload), actively working against artists (Hollywood Accounting), actively terrorizing 9-year-old girls, to name a few. I don't pirate. However, "take the moral high road" is not a valid argument here. If you were telling the artists to "boycott the corrupt labels and take the moral high road," maybe you'd have some weight. For the fans, stick to the "what gives me the most bang for my buck."
- jeremiep 14y ago
  I trusted the pirates more than the companies. Many of us still do, and will for as long as these companies assume most of their users to be thieves. It's also usually the least creative people pushing DRM; Hollywood for instance is not known for its creativity but rather to suck dry the ideas of the handful of creative people it has. Same reason why open-source is more trustworthy than proprietary in general. These guys aren't trying to bullshit you into buying their product and aren't creating the product for the sole purpose of profits.
jeremiep 14y ago
If you want a customer to pay for your product, you have to offer value And one way to determine if some copyrighted content has value is to pirate it and consume it. It's the very same than me going to a friend's house, watching a movie and buying it afterwards because I liked it. Then you realize that your pirated copy plays without all the trouble of the DRM copy and you stop buying content altogether, which would cost more because of DRM anyways. People don't like being controlled and will always work very, very hard around this. The more someone is able to think critically for oneself, the least they like being controlled. The fact that a large portion of today's content is created solely for the purpose of making profits certainly doesn't help. I'm pretty sure if we fired everyone supporting DRM and used their resources to create quality content instead, the problem would simply fade away. Some of the games I previously bought were impossible to play with DRM; either they refused to start because I had a virtual disc emulator installed (to read linux images, of course!) or the DRM checks made the game slow. Getting the pirated copy gave me a much simpler installation process, no complains about my virtual disc emulator and no performance drops whatsoever. In the end, DRM really is an anti-pattern.

TheAmazingIdiot 14y ago

I used to pay for content: movies, games, and some music. I didn't spend all that much, but I did buy them. Then, corrupted audio CDs were sold. My sister got bit by one. So we downloaded it where it wasn't sold as damaged: Suprnova. During that time, stupidity was occurring with DVDs with rotating CSS keys and 'bad block filled with data'. I was downloading films I wanted to archive, but couldn't easily rip. Games were not that bad, but soon became horrendous in terms of screw-user checks, up to the point of driver breaking installs of trash-ware and other nefarious garbage. I trusted the pirates more than the companies. I've been burned enough times. Why pay for crap quality when free is better?

w1ntermute 14y ago
True that. Everyone is fretting about movie/TV show availability on Netflix, etc., but I sidestepped that and just built an HTPC[0] and combined it with a private torrent site that has all the movies and TV shows I could ever want. In technical terms, it is far and away the best solution. 0: http://lifehacker.com/5936546/how-i-built-the-media-center-of-my-dreams-for-under-500 http://lifehacker.com/5936546/how-i-built-the-media-center-o...
tptacek 14y ago
Because the people that sweated and risked their livelihoods to produce these titles didn't actually offer them to you for free; instead, they were coerced into accepting free distribution when their work was illegally copied by companies that fund themselves by viagra and Adult Friend Finder ads. Meanwhile, almost universally, the offerings nerds entitle themselves to are luxury goods that no person can claim an inherent right to access, so, not only are content producers and financiers coerced into having their return on investment redirected to porn ads and porn ad brokers, but that's happening solely to provide nerds with access to luxuries. Most of which they could trivially have afforded anyways. But keep telling yourself piracy strikes some blow for justice. I don't know the statistics but I'd have to guess at least 80% of nerds like us pirate content every single week, and nobody wants to think of themselves as an asshole. Rationalize however you need to.
- rsync 14y ago
  There's a third way here ... and that is to buy the content, keep your proof of purchase, and then download/rip/torrent the content in the manner that works best for you. It's win win.
  - illuminate 14y ago
    I can't buy the Blu-Rays as each episode is released, so I'm not sure how this is supposed to work.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      You wait until they're available and purchase and watch them then.
      - sounds 14y ago
        Remember that these same companies are actively lobbying for oppressive laws behind closed doors, actively inserting malware into their installers, actively disabling and deleting content users still legitimately have a right to access, illegally invading sovereign nations (New Zealand / megaupload), actively working against artists (Hollywood Accounting), actively terrorizing 9-year-old girls, to name a few. I don't pirate. However, "take the moral high road" is not a valid argument here. If you were telling the artists to "boycott the corrupt labels and take the moral high road," maybe you'd have some weight. For the fans, stick to the "what gives me the most bang for my buck."
jeremiep 14y ago
I trusted the pirates more than the companies. Many of us still do, and will for as long as these companies assume most of their users to be thieves. It's also usually the least creative people pushing DRM; Hollywood for instance is not known for its creativity but rather to suck dry the ideas of the handful of creative people it has. Same reason why open-source is more trustworthy than proprietary in general. These guys aren't trying to bullshit you into buying their product and aren't creating the product for the sole purpose of profits.

jeremiep 14y ago

If you want a customer to pay for your product, you have to offer value And one way to determine if some copyrighted content has value is to pirate it and consume it. It's the very same than me going to a friend's house, watching a movie and buying it afterwards because I liked it. Then you realize that your pirated copy plays without all the trouble of the DRM copy and you stop buying content altogether, which would cost more because of DRM anyways. People don't like being controlled and will always work very, very hard around this. The more someone is able to think critically for oneself, the least they like being controlled. The fact that a large portion of today's content is created solely for the purpose of making profits certainly doesn't help. I'm pretty sure if we fired everyone supporting DRM and used their resources to create quality content instead, the problem would simply fade away. Some of the games I previously bought were impossible to play with DRM; either they refused to start because I had a virtual disc emulator installed (to read linux images, of course!) or the DRM checks made the game slow. Getting the pirated copy gave me a much simpler installation process, no complains about my virtual disc emulator and no performance drops whatsoever. In the end, DRM really is an anti-pattern.