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0 pointsrayiner12y ago0 comments

You're assuming that market mechanics for music and movies is the same.

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6 comments · 1 top-level

shmerl12y ago· 5 in thread

I assume that DRM has no effect on piracy (it doesn't) and it always degrades usability (it does). Which means scraping it off always has no financial impact except for improving usability of the service and reducing costs of using DRM itself. Better usability + more user friendliness = more satisfied users + more new users = more profit.

rayinerOP12y ago

I don't think it's a reasonable assumption to make that DRM has no effect on piracy. It won't stop sophisticated pirates, but I do think it stops people from releasing an easy-to-use app that lets your grandma store Netflix movies locally.

selmnoo12y ago

Reminder to everyone: use downvote only for poor behavior, not disagreements. Appreciate that rayiner often provides intellectually honest contrarian viewpoints to many arguments. If people like him weren't here, this place would just be a big and disgusting circlej erk round the clock.

sp33212y ago

Grandma doesn't need to store Netflix movies locally. She can head to the Pirate Bay (with adblock lol) and download the video that a "sophisticated pirate" kindly ripped earlier. She never has to deal with the DRM at all.

mikeash12y ago

Why bother with letting grandma store Netflix movies locally in a hypothetical DRM-free world when you can just use BitTorrent to download them now?

There's no reason a BitTorrent movie downloader couldn't be made just as easy to use as a Netflix downloader. If one doesn't already exist, it's not because DRM is somehow stopping it.

shmerl12y ago

> I don't think it's a reasonable assumption to make that DRM has no effect on piracy.

It's not just reasonable, it's easily demonstrated in practice, when goods released with DRM are pirated almost right away (with DRM being scraped off). Sophisticated pirates are needed to break DRM. Unsophisticated ones get it from them without any hassle. Which means that DRM has no effect altogether except on legitimate users!

I.e. the vast majority of pirates never deal with any DRM, and experience of legitimate users is always degraded by it. It's pure common sense that removing DRM would always improve any service. And the fact that it's not happening is caused by other reasons (see above).

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