> The really insane part is that the DRM is pointless anyway

DRM may be pointless if you think its main goal is a way to prevent people from watching content they did not directly pay for.

But that is missing the point. It does not matter that you, an individual, can break it. It's a divide and conquer strategy: we as a community have to follow the rules and that's what matters.

DRM is about and has been extremely successful at giving content owners leverage over playback devices (you effectively cannot ship a playback device at any real scale without following the rules the content owners set) and transitively to players down the content pipe. That is why it is evil. It's the most clear manifestation of an unjust instrument of power over the user, to put it in Stallman words.

> (you effectively cannot ship a playback device at any real scale without following the rules the content owners set)

Except a desktop PC/laptop - hence https://youtu.be/HUEvRyemKSg

This is a really important talk, here's the Doctorow article based on it, if anyone wants to read instead of watch: https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

It's already happening too, note the way Netflix refuses to send higher quality streams to the PC, except through IE/Edge or the native app (which exhibits strange, tell-tale behaviors on multi-monitor setups).

I remember I has signed up for Audible - and was completely prepared to pay their subscription fees, despite a lot of content being available on pirate sites for $0. But I am old enough to value my time and pay reasonable fee for just mere convenience. And also it's the right thing to do, right?

Turned out, however, that I could not play this content on most of my devices, because it was DRMed into something awful, despite being regular sound files that anything can play underneath, and those devices did not support it.

So, I did two things: a) I downloaded the DRMed files that I had on my subscription, and spent an hour (probably should have taken less, but I have never done it before) on extracting regular MP3s from them and b) I cancelled my Audible subscription. So DRM wasn't just pointless to me, it was bad for both myself and Audible (I started with thinking they are awesome and now I low-key despise them).

You can get rid of the DRM easily with FFmpeg:

ffmpeg -activation_bytes 1CEB00DA -i test.aax -vn -c:a copy output.mp4

See: http://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-all.html#Audible-AAX

Thank you for that, I have a bunch of Audible titles that I want to listen to but I prefer another audiobook player.

The fact that it's a choice between "use the player I like" and "listen to the books I bought" is why DRM is evil.

I'm an admirer of well-done DRM technology but I think I agree with the subtext here, which is that DRM doesn't have much of a future. Ironically, the thing that is likely to end DRM is standardized DRM. By making it easier for technology/content companies to deal in premium content, content providers are making it easier to compete with them for their middleman role in funding content.

What annoys me is that DRM could be great for consumer privacy. I could have chat windows that are encrypted streams rendered fully in hardware. There are numerous legitimate reason to want to avoid data being generally accessible. But DRM seems to focus exclusively on content.

Maybe Mozilla should up this up to end users. Then Feinstein will make silicon valley break DRM and the NSA will enable 4k Netflix everywhere.

In theory I don't have a problem with DRM if it was "perfect" (worked everywhere, didn't suffer all the problems with current systems) but I just don't see that happening since the incentive to stop at "well it's good enough and it works on 95% of our customers machines" is always there.

I also don't really like blackboxes I can't at least theoretically look at the code for if I want to, I don't like it with the Intel manaement engines (and AMD) etc either but that is a trade off I have to make if I want to run new hardware, compromising my security so I can watch a movie is a lot less enticing.

This is the kind of future I fear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noir_(novel) (and if anyone is wondering my username isn't a co-incidence).

Standardized DRM also makes it much easier to break and distribute the content. Break it once and you're done. When any vendor can build in whatever kind of DRM they want, it requires a virtual toolkit that can overcome whatever DRM approach the vendor happens to have chosen that day.

The big guys know that DRM doesn't work. DRM is about putting "color onto the bits" so people can be sued.

Nothing more; nothing less.

Far too many people seem to not realise this, and if you want to argue with content producers about it, arguing over the existence of content on TPB won't get you anywhere because they're not totally blind and can see it doesn't stop content from getting there.

> color onto the bits

Does that mean (effectively) watermarking?

Do pirated releases even come from (defeated) DRM sources these days?

I believe it's a reference to http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

Just noticed the Terry Davis cameo in the comments with one of his random generated god quotes - http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23#terry-a-davis-1274100060

This article got even better.

I think he's referring to this classic article (or one of its follow-ups): http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

DRM isn't about making things impossible to pirate, it's about making them harder to pirate.

IMO, some people will always pirate your movie/music/games/whatever. But if the crack lasts a few weeks, or if you have to unplug your DVD drive to get it to work, or if it's a low quality cam rip, or if all the good torrent sites have been shut down and now the last ones are infested with spyware, or if there's a risk of getting sued by the MPAA... all of these are factors that'll tilt the pirate vs buy decision.