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Isn't DRM... Completely fucking pointless? I can go on The Pirate Bay and find 4K rips of all movies and shows I want. If DRM can't prevent that, what's the point?

All it does is infringe on our rights to be able to do what we want on our own devices. It's crazy.




> Isn't DRM... Completely fucking pointless?

> All it does is infringe on our rights to be able to do what we want on our own devices.

No, but this is exactly the point of DRM and the legal protections around circumventing it. It never was about copyright protection. Copyright infringement was already illegal before the DMCA, and the introduction of DRM didn't make a dent in the amount of copyright infringement.

The point of making DRM circumvention illegal is for me to be able to sell you a bunch of bits, but ensure that I don't have any commercial competition in regards to how you use those bits. You can't legally make a device that plays DVDs without the blessing of a cartel known as DVD FLLC. You can't legally make a device that plays music from iTunes without the blessing of Apple. Etc. It's about retaining monopolistic control over media distribution and use, by forbidding certain forms of competition in the market.

Getting a law passed that forbids market competition (in many countries! not just the US) under the guise of being about copyright protection, is one of the greatest cons I've ever heard of, but that is what has happened.


DRM is mostly legal instrument. If you want to be able to sue people based on circumventing protections, courts need to consider your "content protection" "effective", which essentially means that it takes more than five minutes to circumvent. It also means that, since we're now talking about DRM that'll be protected by patents, copyright and obscurity/NDAs, that these DRM mechanisms centralize power to the owners of the DRM. This can then be easily leveraged to control and restrict e.g. the features playback devices may have.


If this were true, DRM would be trivial and made with easy to implement things like "detect if user right clicks, and pop up a message saying 'sorry copying not allowed'".

DRM is not that - a massive technical effort has gone into implementing DRM deep in system architectures. Modifications have been done across every layer of the stack, across hundreds of companies of differing goals.

You only go to that much effort, at that great a cost, if you are hoping for DRM to actually work, rather than just be a thing you can hold up in court and say "we tried to protect it your honor, we really did".


The "level of security" (~tech effort) is the main competitive selling point when DRM-vendors lobby studios for endorsement. The studios are probably partly being sold a pipe dream of "unbreakable DRM", but the person you responded to also has a point.

Weak or nonexistent DRM reduces the provable malicious intent of a ripper. The more effort it takes to break a DRM, the less likely it seems that you don't understand that what you are doing is wrong.


Recent events have shown that even simple google cypher may be effective. Even more effective is modifying your product to fit customers by NOT region locking your content, by not splitting it over multiple platforms. Using law to pretend that the global network does not exist is simply dumb and leads to piracy. DRM won't save backwards digital rights owners.


Region unlocking is unlikely to help to curb piracy, as the poorest regions won't be able to afford to buy the digital 'goods' at 'worldwide' prices.


Clearly this is not well thought out, but nobody is going to admit it. Any law that is trying to control human nature is pointless.


Like the law that you are not allowed to punch someone in the face because they annoy you?

I don't think it's the best tool to teach people not to punch each other in the face, but I wouldn't go so far to call it pointless either.


> Any law that is trying to control human nature is pointless.

Yet religions still seem be around and getting humans to do dumb things? ;)


From the removed repo:

> This PoC was done to further show that code obfuscation, anti-debugging tricks, whitebox cryptography algorithms and other methods of security-by-obscurity will eventually by defeated anyway, and are, in a way, pointless.


> Isn't DRM... Completely fucking pointless?

It never ceases to amaze me how easy it is to boil frogs, even if the frogs in question are high-IQ, technically sophisticated HN readers.

Right now, you can still circumvent DRM, because you can still buy something that's approximately a general purpose computer (even if it will invariably already come with some remote-acessible hardware level spyware outside your control). But if current trends continue, this will not be the case by the end of the decade.

Also, preventing private individuals from receiving and distributing unauthorized copies is only one way in which DRM is useful to companies.



La France se libère, part deux?


Denuvo has been fairly successful despite what the pirates say. Several extremely popular games have gone many months with no crack. DRM isn't completely pointless, but it does require securing everything for it to work. Denuvo would be pointless if it weren't for the various secure virtualization features which are built into the CPU itself.


Denuvo actually didn't promise that it won't be cracked forever. It promise the consumer it won't be cracked in N day after the release. Primary purpose is to stop the day 1 pirate from hurting the selling count hard.

The movie industry doesn't seems like use it in the same way.

It's kind of silly that normal user was prevented from watch the video normally while pirates do whatever they want becuase the 4k hdmi hdcp can be easily removed by just a dongle.


DRM in the movie industry is mainly targeted at device vendors instead of customers. They want control over the playback experience and have a say which features the playback devices offer to users. Something that allows recording parts or skipping of the ads? Not great! That's also why there is a Widevine device revocation database for playback devices, while I'm not aware of something like that existing for Denuvo.


Sadly, if they actually cared about the consumer, then they would remove DRM after those N days. Since they don't, I just don't buy these games (Sonic Mania damnit!) , and I'm probably not alone..


There are suspicions that some publishers just pay money to the scene groups who able to circumvent it successfully.


Because it doesn't have to be 100% effective to do its job. If your choices are to fork over $20 for a copy, pay $10/month for a streaming service, or pirate it from a shady site, most people would go with the first two options. The main goal is stopping casual piracy, aka. asking your friend to make you a copy.


I find it goes the other way. I pirate things when legal services become too cumbersome, unethical, or dirty. DRM often does that. I won't avoid all DRM, but there's a threshold. The RIAA crossed with youtube-dl.

When I was in college, price was an issue, and piracy was there to save the $10/month for most students, but the alternative was not having the music/software/etc., rather than a legal sale. The actual financial loss was close to zero. I think the reason for DRM isn't so much to prevent profit-losing piracy, as control.

Movie and record companies want to differentiate pricing by market. They want records of who watch what and where. They want to be able to expire things, explicitly or implicitly (if I go Android<->Apple, my iTunes/Google Play collections become less helpful). That has business value.

As for paying customers, when I was a student, they could have milked me for $5. As a professional, I don't really care what it costs, and I don't want to bother with piracy, and I'll do whatever's most ethical. The RIAA just told me what's most ethical is not listening to new music, followed by pirating music, followed by buying music.

I got enough music.


RIAA is a cancer that is growing on artists. I don't know any who would like their art to be gatekeeped in this mafia-esque manner. These days most artist understand that legitimate fans will buy their art if it is easy and affordable. Nobody needs RIAA today and these type of organisations who profit off of artists without bringing any value should be made illegal.


Ah yeah, Amazon remotely removing 1984 from Kindles was incredible. It could only have been worse if it was Fahrenheit 451 !


That would be the case without DRM. With DRM my options are:

- Pay $20 for a copy that I can't play on all of my devices, and that I may be unable to play at some point in the future if the producer decides they don't want me to anymore.

- Pay $10/month for a streaming service that won't allow me to watch at full resolution on several of my devices, and has no guarantee that the content I want will continue to be available.

- Not consume the media at all.

- Download it from a shady pirate site, but then assuming it actually is what I think it is (which is questionable) be able to use it however I want.

No good options.


The piracy option is not all that shady at all (there are good sites, and even the bad sites just need you to know what a magnet link is and not clicking on other download links), and you can get DRM-less copies in any combination of size/quality/encoding you want. It always boggles my mind how people in developed countries have not (all) caught on to this. You can even easily stream the content, using, e.g., peerflix. There is even opensource software that creates a media server, though I have not tried them. And these are all just the mainstream stuff. There is lots of niche piracy, e.g., Telegram channels and groups that post books, movies, TV series, etc. Telegram bots that just give you any music you request (I personally found them better than a premium Spotify subscription). Google shared drives that have everything. Sites that offer direct download links of everything (these sometimes specialize to a certain category, e.g., games). Piracy is so mature that it was and is much better than the best money can buy.


Any peer-to-peer solution is very likely to (at least in my country) contain honeypots to find the IPs of people downloading (which is not illegal afaik) and seeding (which is illegal) copyrighted media. They then take those IPs to the respective ISP to obtain your identity and send you "pay us or we sue you" letters.

It's a pretty effective deterrent if you ask me.


Just buy a VPS/VPN that is okay with torrenting. (My suggestion is to try the different services and stick with one that doesn't ban you.)(I have never encountered one that cared, but some VPNs did feel like they throttled torrent traffic.)


Or just shut off your internet connection.


Plex + Sonarr + Radarr + Deluge running on a seedbox is far far beyond what most people think piracy is. That setup can search for shows for you across multiple public and private trackers, download them, sort them, watch for new episodes or movies, notify you when they are downloaded.


I personally have settled for the 3rd option and I don't feel any loss for that reason. The really create FOMO in people, just look at how many paid Disney to watch Mulan early even with a subscription.


The market is littered by art like products driven by analytics and it is hard to find good art. Sometimes I play some new releases on Tidal when I am working and there is rarely something that would make me store it in my own playlist. Everything is the same and they protect it like these were some nuclear plans.


I just started to learn about DJing, and the recommended software is Serato.

The lite version, you cannot use your own mp3s, but it has support for streaming services.

Spotify was removed months ago, but Tidal is available.

It is just so easy to create content now, the signal to noise ratio is pretty low.


Actually there are DRM-free websites selling music, e.g., https://bandcamp.com


That doesn't make any sense. Not only is it not any harder to get it from some website than from your friend, the way people get it from their friend is by sharing the original disc or their Netflix password, which the DRM doesn't prevent in any way.


Yes movie DRM does seem completely pointless. Game DRM on the other hand does seem to hold up for the first few months which is where most of the sales happen. It would be nice if devs dropped the DRM once it is cracked though.



Thanks for that. I found this interesting old discussion on Denuvo too (skim/skip the OP, seems to be BS, but the top comment is interesting).

https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackStatus/comments/43dgej/how_den...


Super interesting, thanks for posting


The point isn't to protect content, but to need permission from the DRM makers to make a viable browser (or TV, or music player, or ebook reader, or...) Without their blessing, it won't work with locked content, and your users will go to a competitor favored by the DRM owners.


Isn’t the point to generate license revenue for the DRM IP holders?


Not just pointless. It's unethical and crooked.


You can record data coming to the LCD panel or record the TV screen by a camera. With just degraded quality. On the other hand, I can't even take a screenshot of DRM-protected content on Android which can be very annoying sometimes.


DRM is an extra fee imposed on the parties that follow the letter of the law. It's like building permits but the transfer of wealth is to a private entity instead of the state (which has its pros and cons).


Like others said, for non-interactive media it is mostly pointless, but for executable code (especially stuff that's online or will update a lot, like games) it does some work.


We just stop consuming stupid DRM shows and music. There r tons of other media available and music from unknown talented composers/artists.


> The Pirate Bay and find 4K rips of all movies and shows I want.

What? There's almost no 4K rips for shows or movies. To me it seems it's working pretty well.


Private torrent trackers have them all. I’ve contacted multiple members and asked them for their secrets and none replied.

I’ve requested several Amazon and Netflix shows and got the pure, not reencoded, unencrypted files.


You're clearly not looking in the right places :)


For shows 4k is not the norm.


RARBG has 4K rips of the newest Mandalorian episode, which was released today. DRM doesn't work.


Not necessarily. It can be good in a different setting: guaranteeing that medical software is at least signed by the developer and untampered.


That's what cryptographic signatures are for. No need for DRM.


> Isn't DRM... Completely fucking pointless?

Yes. It just slows down the less skilled from breaking the protection.

There will always be one or a team of more highly skilled hackers that eventually defeats it.

It always only a matter of time when it gets broken. But again, there's always the analogue hole. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole




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