From the article:

> Thanks to a technology called “Digital Rights Management,” sellers and buyers could negotiate a subset of rights and a reduced payment for same... In other words, we were told that we must reject the promise of unfet­tered digital in favor of locked-down digital, and in return, we would enter a vibrant marketplace where sellers offered exactly the uses we needed, at a price that was reduced to reflect the fact that we were getting a limited product. We got the limited product, all right – just not the discount.

I've never in my life expected, or witnessed, a company to reduce prices once they had a stronghold on a market. To assume this would be different with DRM or other consumer-limiting tech is idiotic.

So yes, it's a broken promise.

Here is their mission for clarity. "Digital Content Protection LLC (DCP) is an organization that licenses technologies for protecting premium commercial entertainment content."

There is not a single word about protecting consumers in this.

I would be interested in seeing an agreement anyone reached with any DRM licensing entity that was geared towards protecting consumers. The entire thrust of DRM was not to protect consumer rights, and every agreement these groups have come up with under which they undertake to promise various things is in line with that desire for control as far as I am aware. I'd love see a counter-example - and if we found one I would encourage using that scheme, but I am not aware of any.

Apple and Amazon have both pushed in various ways for broader user rights which have paid off commercially (apple made digital music much more usable than earlier efforts and as a result I think that helped their success). Apple's music store (not Apple Music) also pushed relatively successfully for DRM free offerings.

I'm not on HN enough to be as timely as I'd like - apologies for delay in response.

The big push in the rollout phase was around getting a lot of players to agree on a standard and hash out the $ flows for the tech etc. So my impression at time was again producers and also component makers were target of efforts and system design work.

Can DRM be used to offer certain things (all you can eat music for $10/month / tons of prime video for cheap)? Sure - and it can be used for that. Similarly with things like unlimited books. I have no recollection of any consumer protection promises - just that a variety of offerings might become available which they have.

Again though, some of the example promises might be helpful so we can discuss specifics.

I'm inclined to think he has some domain knowledge in this subject.

I'm pointing out that the DRM chain is built on a very large set of very detailed promises between the parties involved. The existing promises are for the most part public and can be read by anyone. I'm not aware of ANY language requiring ANY type of meaningful pro-consumer behavior. The promises are all about SECURING content and control by content PRODUCERS.

The whole problem with DRM is everyone got used to it and has started to ignore how bad it can be...

I include myself in the group of people who have gotten complacent. I'm good about not buying DRM music, but I put up with it with respect to streaming.

And I have thousands of dollars at this pointed tied up in DRMed eBooks. At some points I've been good about stripping the DRM and making a backup but haven't done it in years now... got complacent, so it's good for him to make a big deal out of this. I'd definitely be super upset if some other companies pulled a microsoft and erased my DRM eBook library.

Ironically I am pretty sure I have at least one of his books I bought from Amazon with DRM applied to it!

When the WIPO treaties were being lobbied for, Netflix didn't even exist, Amazon was a tiny internet bookstore that people made fun of and Apple was a slowly dying proprietary workstation company. The authors, TV networks and record companies who lobbied for the DMCA didn't do it so those companies could eat their lunch, but that's what happened.

It turns out that a studio has a lot more negotiating leverage dealing with many competing retail stores than with a small number of big and powerful tech companies whose customers are locked into their platforms by DRM.

It did what Sony and Paramount expected it to -- entrench the middle men -- only the old incumbents are not the middle men it entrenched. And if they would wise up to that and stop pretending they're the beneficiaries rather than additional unwitting victims, it would be a lot easier to undo this colossal screw up.

DRM took that away and said you will consume on terms that make money above and beyond the original sale. All that DRM has done is make it difficult for normal people to consume, and created an aversion to the tech as most people are keenly aware of the loss of autonomous access to something.

1. If you think it's harder for users to copy or use content outside of approved usage, choose your favorite TV show, and type the name of the show with the text "s01e01" into Google. You'll find links to stream it in low quality or torrent a high quality MP4.

2. Meanwhile, try downloading a book from Amazon and transforming it into epub so you can read it on a different reader. If you manage to figure out how to do that, please let me know.

It's not at all clear that the minor difficulty of 1 prevents so much lost profits that it outweighs the profits lost from 2. So it's absolutely not clear that DRM has resulted in extracting more money from users.

There is a very large number of freely-available books through Library Genesis and other sites, approaching 5 million. Some are newer, but I find this most useful for turning up old and hard-to-find books, generally published between 1925 and 2000.

More recent books are frequently available in ripped digital formats. Earlier can be found through the Internet Archive, WikiSource, and Project Gutenberg. A large number of the scanned-in books are actually very likely out of copyright due to failures to renew registration, but the fact cannot readily be determined.

There's a project that's taken machine-readable US Copyright Office records to find such works. The Internet Archive don't yet make use of this though per an email discussion a week or so back, that's in the works, though no announcement or dates have yet been made.

What's tremendously frustrating to me is the HathiTrust archive, which has access to scanned copies of library works, but won't make these generally available to either the general public or anything outside a small set of research libraries (your local public library, or even community college or small liberal arts school doesn't qualify). Again, frequently works that are out of copyright (known-public-domain works cannot be viewed or downloaded), hoarded for no reason.

It wasn't the last time I tried it, but I'd be happy to hear if this has changed.

I don't own a Kindle, which some people are saying is required for the Calibre method, which might have been the issue I had in the past.

I do a lot of dump-to-markdown then re-tag to preferred formats, largely using Pandoc. That's more intensive, but highly effective.

Sure. Use Calibre's "DeDRM Tools" plugin, decrypting the book with your personal key, and you'll be able to convert it to any format.

Which is to say, this is a cat-and-mouse game. There is a way to defeat Amazon's encryption for now, but there may come a day when we can't, and when Amazon cuts off support for all devices and applications that do not run their latest encryption.

I'm kinda surprised that they continue to even support MOBI, given that it's not originally their format and much easier to extract the EPUB out of than their homespun solution.

This tool allows removing the DRM from Audible books. [2]

[1]: https://apprenticealf.wordpress.com/2019/03/30/dedrm-tools-6...

[2]: https://github.com/KrumpetPirate/AAXtoMP3

You're gonna be ad-blasted, have inconsistent video quality, and be given a million popups.

Also, the availability is not nearly what you think it is.

https://www.google.com/search?q=battlestar+galactica+2003+s0...

If you're seeing ads and popups, you should get an ad-blocker and update it. No one should be seeing these in 2019. The quality I noted, but I also noted that you can torrent higher-quality video easily.

> Also, the availability is not nearly what you think it is.

> https://www.google.com/search?q=battlestar+galactica+2003+s0....

I clicked your link. Second page of results, first result, was a link to DailyMotion where the full 54-minute episode was available to stream in quality as good as it was in 2003.

I suspect the fact that this shows up on the second page of search results instead of the first is a success of DMCA threats against Google, not a success of DRM. But I'm sure if you added some combination of keywords like "torrent", "stream" or "free" you could get an illegal copy to show up as the first result.

I'm not encouraging anyone to do this. I encourage everyone to pay for content with money, preferably in the most direct way you can so the creators actually get the money. I'm just saying that DRM only affects people who want to do things the "proper" way. People who don't want to pay for content can easily bypass DRM with a Google search.

30 seconds and I can be quite sure there are no ads, malware, popups, and impeccable video quality.

They're all still being seeded with enough bandwidth to max my 100+ Mbps cable connection, too.

To make the new discs more palatable, Adam Sexton of Macrovision Corp., which makes copy-protection technology for music and movies, says they should be loaded with extras, such as live recordings or music videos. Consumers should expect to receive more when they put the disc into a computer, not less, said Sexton, a marketing vice president.

https://web.archive.org/web/20030920055153/https://www.mcall...

That's what I've come up with by digging into old mentions on sites, in HN discussions, and Google Books. Actual benefits discussion is very hard to find, and criticisms began quite early.

The McCalls article was linked from TechDirt:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20030911/0217252.shtml

Update:

There's also Macrovision's response to Steve Jobs, following Apple's decision to exclude DRM from the iPod (arguably a major factor in the latter's popularity, and path-paving for the iPhone):

DRM increases not decreases consumer value -- I believe that most piracy occurs because the technology available today has not yet been widely deployed to make DRM-protected legitimate content as easily accessible and convenient as unprotected illegitimate content is to consumers. The solution is to accelerate the deployment of convenient DRM-protected distribution channels—not to abandon them. Without a reasonable, consistent and transparent DRM we will only delay consumers in receiving premium content in the home, in the way they want it. For example, DRM is uniquely suitable for metering usage rights, so that consumers who don't want to own content, such as a movie, can "rent" it. Similarly, consumers who want to consume content on only a single device can pay less than those who want to use it across all of their entertainment areas – vacation homes, cars, different devices and remotely. Abandoning DRM now will unnecessarily doom all consumers to a "one size fits all" situation that will increase costs for many of them.

-- Frank Amaroso, Macrovision CEO

(Excerpted from the longer source.)

https://web.archive.org/web/20070306004546/macrovision.com/c...

"DRM advocates getting nervous about consumer backlash"

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2007/09/drm-advocates-ge...

At a conference convened by the overlords of DRM, Sony vice president Scott Smyers admits that he circumvents the copy protection on DVDs (CSS) in order to make backups for personal use. Apparently Mr. Smyers doesn't agree with Hollywood or the Register of Copyrights, both of which argue that "backups" can readily be had in the form of new copies you can buy at the store. The corporate hypocrisy is obvious: what the corporate parent demands (DRM that prevents DVD copying), even its own employee disregards. We can't blame him.

That’s not the context of Macrovision’s response. It’s not that Apple “excluded” DRM from the iPod. The real history.

2001- Apple did introduce the iPod with no DRM in 2001 but it made it hard to copy music from it.

2003 - When Apple introduce the music store, it added DRM support to the iPod, but for the time, and easy built in way to circumvent it - burn the music to a CD and re-rip

2007 pt. 1 - Every digital music store was struggling because their DRM wasn’t compatible with the iPod. The music industry wanted Apple to license FairPlay. Apple refused and Jobs posted his “Thoughts on Music” letter on Apple’s front page where he said instead of licensing FairPlay, if the music industry allowed all digital music sellers to sell DRM free music, they would have cross platform compatibility.

The Macrovision letter was in response to this.

See paragraphs 5 and 6.

The promises DCP LLC makes are very carefully laid out in the HDCP License Agreement and related documents. They primarily target content producers, not consumers, and seek to assure them of a relatively robust control system that can be shown to prevent users from doing things the producers do not want.

It's very clear - control over the content or bust. Enforcement is reasonable strict. Even to make HDCP components, to integrate components etc etc - all is carefully outlined. If you read these docs it will be CRYSTAL clear that the promise is not around preserving any user rights.