The real value of game stores isn't the DRM, it's things like simplified installation and automatic updates. They're essentially package managers. Before this, games came in several CDs which were fragile and players had to download and apply many incremental patches just to play online. Stores like Steam changed everything. Few people remember how it used to be before them.
Copyright infringement is inconsequential when faced with these benefits and simplicity. Infringement takes effort. In order to infringe, people have to fiddle with torrents and trackers, search for the data they want, evaluate the quality of each torrent and trust that the executables they download are not malicious. This isn't something your average person is going to do even if it costs $0. Lots of people do it because the creators themselves leave them no choice: refusing to do business in the consumer's country, including invasive malware in the form of DRM and anti-cheating software that renders games unplayable for reasons such as lack of internet connection or use of a virtual machine. People go out of their way to make the "pirate" version the superior version.
Just to be sure I've understood your argument, you're claiming that providing easy access to copyright-protected works is sufficient to prevent piracy, as no-one will attempt to pirate things that are readily available on a legal basis so DRM is pointless?
I agree that not providing a good, legal means to get something is an incentive for pirates, but the idea that all piracy just goes away if you do is absurd. Some people tried experiments with this a few years ago, and found that even for something that you could literally get legally for free just by downloading it from the original website, a high proportion of the copies being played actually came from other sources and were not legally obtained.
I've run a business that creates original content and makes it available through an online portal. My team and I have on occasion watched, in real time, over periods of hours or even days, as some people have gone to lengths that were hard to believe just to scrape our content in a way that would let them set up a copycat. Obviously we shut them down before they could pose a serious risk to the business, but it was a great demonstration of the weakness of arguments that people are basically decent and will buy stuff legally if you make it easy. Some people are like that, many people even. And more people will buy stuff legally if you don't make it unreasonably difficult. But many people will still try to rip you off, no matter what you product costs or how easy it is to get.
We've been at the DRM game a long time, through games, music, videos, etc. They all work about as well as they've worked before.
If you want to control your hardware, do what you will. But I'm not happy if you need controls in all my hardware.
There's an argument to be made that the encumbrances you hope for are largely controlled by global corporations who yield to governments, and aren't aligned with the rights of individuals and culture at large (extended copyright, CPU backdoors, carrier backdoors, etc).
Loss is built into every business model. Loss prevention is a reasonable response. But this cycle of "more controls, more DRM, more backdoors" returns again and again, and is worth resisting.
Loss is built into every business model. Loss prevention is a reasonable response. But this cycle of "more controls, more DRM, more backdoors" returns again and again, and is worth resisting.
I think you have to look at the issue from both sides. When I was younger, I was the same idealistic anti-DRM person as others commenting here. I took the same black and white views about how it's unjustified and since it will inevitably be broken it's pointless.
Then I learned something about the real economics of content creation at different scales, and some of my own business interests have intersected with this area from the other side. That tends to give you a more nuanced view of the situation.
FWIW, I'm a strongly liberal, pro-rights kind of person. I don't imagine I like hostile DRM measures or systems I can't fully control any more than anyone else here. But not liking them is different to not understanding the motivations for them or accepting that in some circumstances they may be a justified and proportionate response to a demonstrable threat. People did rip software and music and movies and so on, on a massive scale, before we evolved the modern culture. Different media have tried to solve that problem in different ways.
With music, where it's viable to have a very low cost product, we have solved it to some extent by making legitimate channels easier to access at a price where buying legally isn't a big deal. In other news, most music files you download aren't DRM'd at all these days. The flip side of this one is that a lot of the artists themselves are now basically getting scammed by the big music distribution services paying them a tiny fraction of the revenues they're bringing in and some pretty shady rights transfer agreements. But in terms of legal copyright for the final listener, it's essentially a solved problem.
With software or movies, you often can't afford to distribute everything easily at throwaway prices, because the costs involved in production are much higher and you need the people who benefit from the product to contribute a fair part of that cost or the whole production becomes unviable. Part of the reaction here has been the unfortunate trend towards only investing the big money in smash hit franchises that are sure to make a huge profit even if they suffer significant infringement as well. Plenty of people will go to the theatre to watch the next MCU movie or will buy the next installment of Assassin's Creed or next year's version of their favourite sports game where the only thing that changed significantly was the players and teams in the database. But for anything that isn't a sure-fire hit, you can probably drop a couple of zeroes off the budget anyone will give you now.
Even with the sure-fire hits, you can expect that Assassin's Creed title to have some sort of phone-home lock when it launches, which will probably protect a large amount of revenue in the opening weeks until someone cracks it.
And of course for software that is more expensive still -- like business applications that used to cost hundreds per seat before -- the move to SaaS and online hosting has a very convenient side effect for the developers that it becomes essentially impervious to piracy if they do it right. Not that everyone does, as Adobe has demonstrated yet again just this week.
I think the fundamental problem is that copyright has evolved to a strange and not entirely logical position in law today. It intends to prevent actions that could cause severe damage to a legitimate creator who made and released work in return for the rights the law claimed to offer. And yet it remains primarily a civil matter, and infringements tend to be of such low value individually that they aren't worth pursuing through normal legal actions and as such render the associated rights largely unenforceable in practice, even though the collective damage from infringement may still be severe. So big rightsholders resort to things like DRM and lobbying for otherwise nonsensical laws that try to criminalise circumvention of DRM schemes even if the original act of copying would itself have been legal.
If there were meaningful criminal penalties for knowingly redistributing works in violation of copyright, which were enforced by public authorities like any other crime, but if there were also much tighter restrictions on what DRM was allowed to do and obligations on those releasing works using it to ensure the legitimate rights of people who paid for access were respected, we might be better off. But in reality, criminal copyright laws for commercial infringement are still rarely enforced and the vast majority of infringement goes unchallenged, so rightsholders continue to resort to the IP version of street justice and throwing their considerable legal and lobbying weight around to get their way, often to the detriment of legitimate customers who are happy to pay a fair price for works they enjoy but then suffer the consequences of broken DRM or bad legal actions or whatever.
I didn't say it was going to prevent copyright infringement. I said the infringement was going to be inconsequential. Does it really matter if some minority chooses to download data via unofficial channels? I doubt that. I also doubt the idea that "as many as 90% of copies" will be illegal.
The more you try to prevent copyright infringement, the more it is justified. Prevention requires the destruction of free computing and networking as we know it. Today we enjoy near total freedom as computer users: we can run whatever software we want. The computer doesn't ask whether copyright holders like the software before running it. In order for copyright to be enforceable, that freedom must be sacrificed: only "approved" software must run. I'd rather see the abolition of copyright than live in such a future.
These DRM technologies are becoming extremely invasive. It's gotten to the point they've become malware rather than merely annoyances. So an illegal copy is better even for paying consumers just because it lacks the DRM.
> I've run a business that creates original content and makes it available through an online portal. My team and I have on occasion watched, in real time, over periods of hours or even days, as some people have gone to lengths that were hard to believe just to scrape our content in a way that would let them set up a copycat.
I said the infringement was going to be inconsequential.
Yes, but you've given no evidence to support your position. It just seems to be your personal view/assumption.
The more you try to prevent copyright infringement, the more it is justified.
Someone is doing you harm in an illegal way, and you take steps to protect yourself from the damage, and that makes it more justified for them to do you harm in an illegal way? That's not exactly a strong moral or legal argument.
What kind of content?
Educational and uncontroversial. But in a niche market, where creating good original content requires real work by dedicated people because most people aren't going to do it, and where someone setting up some copycat site in China or India really does pose an existential threat to the viability of the business.
Copyright infringement is inconsequential when faced with these benefits and simplicity. Infringement takes effort. In order to infringe, people have to fiddle with torrents and trackers, search for the data they want, evaluate the quality of each torrent and trust that the executables they download are not malicious. This isn't something your average person is going to do even if it costs $0. Lots of people do it because the creators themselves leave them no choice: refusing to do business in the consumer's country, including invasive malware in the form of DRM and anti-cheating software that renders games unplayable for reasons such as lack of internet connection or use of a virtual machine. People go out of their way to make the "pirate" version the superior version.