Torrent is something that I have nothing to complain about. It's decentralised. No big corporation is trying to control it. It's truly by the people for the people.

I wonder if more protocols like this will get invented and become mainstream. Or those glorious days are already behind us? Since every big corporation is just trying to grab market share by creating walled gardens for everything.

I assume that policing of torrent networks by the authorities will continue to increase. As a result, I'm hopeful that darknet (ie social connection based) solutions might emerge at some point. Why use a VPN and a tracker (private or otherwise) if I could request things via (anonymized) friend-of-friend-of-friend in a straightforward manner? That way you only trust your immediate network.

DRM are like locks on a house, just keeps honest people out

DRM are like locks on a gated community, just creates economic moats to enable rent seeking and prolong the status quo.

Except the lock is remotely controlled by your adversary.

And your house also belongs to them. According to your analogy.

And if you bought something from them, they're permitted to come in and take it away from you whenever they want.

You never bought it in the first place. The Adversary doesn't sell things anymore, it only rents them out.

Sounds familiar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19536991

Ok? That’s a strong argument in favor, isn’t it?

You've missed the joke. In the DRM case the honest people are the ones who should be allowed in, but the DRM only allows the pirates in.

No, I think you’ve missed my point. A technology that prevents generally honest people from slipping casually into dishonesty sounds valuable. Battling people who are determined to be dishonest sounds much less valuable.

Making a personal copy of a video you've paid for is in no way dishonest, and the user downloading it from a pirate site without paying is in no way impeded by DRM.

The only thing it could even arguably be doing is preventing users from uploading videos to pirate sites, but that is empirically a massive failure given that all of the videos are already on the pirate sites.

So all you're doing is battling the honest people who have paid and then want to make a copy for format shifting or some other fair use. And the legitimate value of battling that is a negative number.

I suppose in the case of Netflix and the like, it stops me from getting some lossless downloader browser extension that would surely exist but for the DRM and... what? Getting stuff to watch after I let the subscription lapse? Giving copies to my friends?

The former is about the same effort as torrenting and about as obviously dishonest. The latter is mostly possible using Netflix as intended as long as I don't mind sharing my password with them.

More like locks on a motel room.