DRM will never stop the pirates. As long as you can reproduce something, you can always record the output. For example, you can always record your audio output from Spotify or video output from Netflix.

DRM is a minor annoyance and nothing more.

DRM has nothing to do with pirating. Piracy is just a nice excuse.

DRM is about killing the second hand market. About keeping the market segmentation between countries. About killing fair use.

It has been very succesful in all of this.

But with streaming subscription services there is no second hand market. So there it must be just for piracy?

I agree it's totally useless. Just takes one person to record the output and it's done.

Just wait until Apple decides to "protect" its users from piracy by running a Content ID system client side. Then even if you can download a pirated file, your OS won't play it. If you're lucky, it will just delete the file, rather than informing the police.

That's just another DRM to be disabled.

If we can't disable it somehow, we'll switch operating systems.

Keep in mind that we're still seeing jailbreaks for iPhones after all these years.

> If we can't disable it somehow, we'll switch operating systems.

I admire your optimism. Unfortunately, once Apple has shown it is possible to prevent the playing of unlicensed copyrighted works, Windows and Android will have to match this or be treated as second-class platforms by the media industries.

Very few people will be willing to buy dedicated Linux computers (with custom Secure Boot keys) for watching torrented videos, and such devices will then become subject to more and more regulations, like having to pay an annual fee to the government.

Wasn't Apple one of the major vendors _removing_ DRM back in the iTunes days?

Apple don't give two shits about piracy.

Their own pro grade software that is paid for (logic, final cut) is always cracked basically day 1 of release and they've never made any attempt to tighten up authentication

How would Apple determine between an mp4 that is a pirated movie or a personal video you've downloaded to edit in Final Cut?

The same way that YouTube determines whether there is copyrighted music playing in the background of the video you upload, or the way Apple determines if you are trying to upload illegal images to iCloud.

> and nothing more

I strongly suspect DRM is not a way to stop someone but a security theatre serving as way to make money off the licensing and hardware. That’s why the industry does and always will require it - not because they’re stupid to believe it protects something (though it nominally does) but simply because it greases their other hand.

Also, yeah, it kills the second hand market.

Let me give you an alternative view: DRM is a highly effective way for the movie industry to make money. No, it is not perfect, but DRM creates a system where:

1. Sharing is hard. Plenty of people legally purchase a movie, and then want to give it to their friends; DRM makes that difficult and thus generates at least some additional sales.

2. Forced obsolescence -- people who buy media legally can be forced to buy it again and again every time they buy a new entertainment device.

3. Creative business models -- in a world without DRM, you could not offer "rental" downloads, "streaming" would just be a form of "downloading," and the industry could not offer special "deals" like "family" passes that permit more than one account holder to view a purchased movie. All of these are ways to make money that could not happen in a world without DRM.

Yes, DRM is always broken after enough time -- that is not as much of a problem as you might expect. As long as the time between a DRM system being deployed and being broken is long enough that the industry makes back more than the cost of developing the DRM system, the system worked. Developing new DRM systems from time to time is just the cost of doing business, not really a problem for anyone in the industry, and as you point out it may even work to the benefit of certain participants.

I am not a big fan of DRM (in fact, I would argue that the entire movie industry needs to rethink its business model, embrace the true power of file sharing as a means of distributing movies and focusing more on using movies as a draw or value-add for other lines of business), but it is not as if the movie industry executives are a bunch of buffoons who continue to waste their money after decades of broken DRM. If DRM was not adding to the industry's profits they would have stopped bothering with it -- see e.g. the music industry, which has a somewhat different business model and which has largely given up on their DRM dreams.

Streaming-exclusive games are a notable exception to this, which is why it's so important to smash things like Stadia before they can gain a foothold.

Not even from a piracy standpoint, just a "I want to play this after the server/company shuts down" standpoint.

I know I won't spend a penny on a service like stadia or xbox game pass. Even if it does have good here and now offerings. Games are the last category of software you can still generally "buy" these days and get permanent access with a one-time payment.

>Games are the last category of software you can still generally "buy" these days and get permanent access with a one-time payment.

This isn't even remotely true.

Almost every game seems to have an online element and won't run at all if you aren't on the latest version.

Eh, it’s still ownership. If they wanna stop offering me updates they need to release Farm Simulator 2022, but Farm Simulator 2021 will keep working indefinitely. Steam let’s you play the vast majority of your library offline (99%+ of single player games).

Not for single player games, no. Or for many indie titles.

In actual fact, games need to be kept up to date in order to run okay on newer OS versions, and most of them are trying to get you to subscribe or otherwise DLC / microtransact you to death. Shame really

The analog hole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole

Which is one of the reasons behind the removal of the headphone analog output from various devices.

Which only raises the price of exploiting the analog hole by a relatively small amount -- it is not hard to buy better audio recording equipment to record the audio as it is being played, and the postprocessing needed to make it sound like the original is not very complex. A few thousand dollars (maybe low tens of thousands) wuold be enough to get you a rig that records a high-def movie with little noticeable loss, and anecdotally I have heard of such systems being used to rip TV shows as they air.

> buy better audio recording equipment to record the audio

Huh?! You can just buy a sound card or even a DAC for very little.

They believe the content creators are the victims