That said, the situation is quite a bit worse now as the modern DRM is harder to circumvent and geolocking more granular than ever before. But the intent to lock us down was always there from the movie industry, just not the capability until recently.
To be fair, those of us who tend to complain about these things also raised hell about DVDs back then. Geo-locking is such an obviously bad idea for consumers. It was such a relief when the restrictions were hacked away (was it that an encryption key got leaked? I don't remember the details).
At the time DVD started prolifering more and more player and TVs had full support for NTSC, PAL and SECAM, but you could still be stuck with some hardware only supporting standard and your DVDs would be black and white or scrambled on the display side.
Adding support for signals used in other regions to an analog CRT display meant adding more circuitry, so this feature was largely relegated to very high end sets and professional video monitors.
With digital flat panels, those analog signals were now being captured with an analog-to-digital converter. How to translate the sequence of numbers representing a formerly analog signal into something usable by the panel could now be defined in software, or even very compact digital hardware. This makes it more cost-effective to just produce one version of the decoder that works in all regions.
Especially as late as when the DVD came.
And the purpose of it wasn't geo-restrictions either.
Living in the SECAM region and wanting to watch US/british stuff makes it a lot more prominent issue that if you're in the PAL or NTSC area for instance.
> Geo-locking is such an obviously bad idea for consumers.
Depends a little on the consumers, really. Region-locking enabled them to sell cheaper copies in lower-wealth areas, the same way that movie ticket prices were lower. Without geo-locking, pricing strategy gets much more complicated, but it's a fair guess that consumers in regions 3-6 (that is, the majority of humanity) would have either paid more or gotten movies later.
You are missing the most likely option: they would have "pirated" those movies. So again, the geo-locking is not realy for the good of the consumer but to ensure every last bit of profit can be extracted.
Meanwhile, the main thing selling things cheaper to designated poor reason does is keep those regions from demanding fair payment for their work thus making them no longer poor regions that can be exploited.
Region-locking on Blu-Ray is 100% unnecessary. Fortunately, it has become increasingly common for discs to ship with no region restrictions.
Of course all of this is moot when you're just slapping that disc in an optical drive and ripping it to a NAS, instead of using an "official" player.
Also, a 1.2x playback speed for the video is not even that noticeable - certainly a much better experience than no video. I intentially watch a lot of video contents sped up like that, even movies sometimes. Audio needs processing though to not pitch shift.
Blu-ray on the other hand... well, where do I start? 128-bit AES, key revocation, host authentication, virtual machine fixup tables, digital signing, Media Key Block updating, Java applications... Let's just say Blu-ray is stuck in an odd place where the underlying technology isn't really that defeated, even though hackers have made keeping up with their stolen device keys from hacked players very impractical for the Blu-ray Disc Association. (Revoking a drive key requires a 90-day heads up for manufacturers to roll out new keys for the effected model, which means that if hackers manage to steal 4 device keys per year... from over a decade and a half of different players, many not receiving updates anymore...)
The encryption wasn't cracked, it was subverted by poor security practices.
If Xing hadn't screwed up, it may have been another decade before it was possible to rip a DVD, waiting for some other manufacturer to screw up.
It would almost seem like most of the engineering for the Blu-ray format went into things which very specifically doesn’t act in the interest of the buyer.
Given the current state of things, I wouldn’t count Blurays as media you actually physically own.
You’re permitted to watch them, for now, but there’s no guarantee that will remain true 20+ years in the future.
It doesn't seem like that. It is like that.
Welcome to modern tech, where the management, perception, control and tactical destruction of real value is the only place left to eek out a profit margin. We build 8 core CPUs and blow e-fuses in the factory to make them 4 cores. As resources dwindle and the planet fills with e-waste this disgusting, unethical wanton destruction of value continues because we've normalised it.
This is a bad follow-on example because artificial price differentiation is sometimes what it takes to make a business viable. Making an actually worse model in the processor case has far more fixed costs than re-using the existing pipeline. The business wouldn’t be viable selling all of the processors at lower nor would it be as strong leaving out the lower income segment.
The alternative world is you get no affordable processor at all and the 8-core version costs 200% more due to the volume lost.
Finally, this ignores that processors selected for lower tiers can be chosen precisely because they didn’t meet the bar for the high performance batch. So if they had proceeded to treat it as an 8-core it would have had thermal issues and an 80% reduced life.
No, you are making up a false dichotomy. There are many alternative worlds, including the ones where CPUs have no proprietary "intellectual property".
Sometimes wage theft is what it takes to make a business viable, so I don't really buy this as an argument.
> processors selected for lower tiers can be chosen precisely because they didn’t meet the bar for the high performance batch
This is a better argument
> The alternative world is you get no affordable processor at all
You probably do, just maybe their performance doesn't double every year. I would say that's probably an interesting tradeoff to make, depending on how catastrophic one thinks the state of the world is today.
It's almost as if there's a consistent economic process that leads companies to do this kind of thing again and again. We could call it "the tendency of the rate of profit to fall".
Not "deliberately". We build 8-core CPUs, discover four of them are a bit sub-spec, and blow e-fuses to disable those and sell it as 4-core. It's possible that those four disabled cores would be just fine, but I'm not selling you a chip that gets its sums wrong sometimes.
I guess people complained about how chip manufacturers sold CPUs rated at 25MHz that could be overclocked to 33MHz, but they too were not guaranteed to meet spec even if they worked.
I mean, you make a good point on reliability/quality, but there are surely cases where to create a product differential perfectly good (and known to be good) devices are crippled.
That seems ever less ethically defensible as we move into scarcity.
This is why overclocking used to work - if even a small proportion of the chips tested were good to 25MHz, that was a 25MHz batch, guaranteed good to 25MHz. If you got a "lucky penny" that'd go to 33MHz as per the design spec, then good for you! But it wouldn't be guaranteed to do that.
Which is why some of us were rooting for the somewhat-more-consumer-friendly HD-DVD. In retrospect, given the choice, there was no way in hell the industry was going with a "more consumer-friendly" anything.
https://aacsla.com/aacs-specifications/
Ultimately, if all the manufacturers decide to stop sale, there's nothing you can do about that. I'm not too worried about Blu-ray yet, as it is still in the PS5 and Xbox Series X, and I don't think gamers will be excited about losing physical media as an option (considering PS5 with Disc has outsold the Disc-free version, like, 4-1).
Even then, I'm still not 100% confident that I'll be able to access everything in 25 years time.
I have no reason the believe that Sony and Microsoft won't shut them down like they already have done with the PS3 store.
DVD region locking didn't need to be hacked away; it operates purely on the honor system. There are 8 regions, and a DVD contains a single byte specifying which regions it should be allowed to be played in. If the bit for your region is clear, you can play the DVD.
Or, of course, you can just ignore that byte, and play the DVD.
I think you're really stretching this one. These were dictated be the equipment of the regions. This was just as much of a pain in the ass to the studios as anyone else. If theStudios wanted to sell VHS in these markets, they HAD to make them in the format that would work in that region.
DVD/Blu-ray region was definitely something added on top of format limitations as DVDs were still PAL/NTSC, but by the time Blu-ray and HD arrived, those format limitations were less of an issue. It was all about the region locking at that point.
when governments ban imports / exports, its a matter of public scrutiny. So is protectionism.
But apparently we allow a private cartel to do the same thing to an enrire industry with no pushback.
This affects smart IoT devices, TVs, cars, etc. My xiaomi light does not pair with the app because its was meant for chinese market, and the guy that sold it to me claims its not hia problem either.
The only way out of this mess is a law to properly define digital ownership.
If you want a weired half renting half ownership, that should have to be explicit contract with a signature and maybe lawyers involved, so you know what you are signing up for.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controve...
[Even then, a Processing Key isn't nearly as interesting as a Device Key, plenty of which have been leaked since without much attention. Blu-ray has so many keys...]
Was region locking really that big of a deal?
No. Not in the US either, at least. Even if there was a part of the world where it was a big deal, I imagine if you were so big a cinephile for it to matter, you would know how to deal with it.
It's easy nowadays to get a DVD/Bluray player that is multi-region, if only because of an aftermarket mod. E.g. I have a Samsung one that happily plays both media from any region.
Which, as I've recently noticed, in turn has the interesting (and from the consumer point of view somewhat unfortunate) side effect that if a particular online release is pulled from distribution, it becomes completely unavailable (at least through legal channels) from one moment to the next.
Whereas with physical media first of all being pulled from distribution doesn't automatically mean that all existing stock in all stores worldwide is being recalled (it can happen, but the process is not as intrinsically linked as it is with digital distribution), and secondly in any case there's always the second hand market to completely legally fall back to, so the onset of unavailability is a more gradual process, especially for more popular media where there's a sizeable second hand market offering available.
With digital media on the other hand you more or less immediately have to fall back to under-the-table sources if that happens…
Maybe this is true from the perspective of the license but it's not something Apple enforces through tech. For example, I have a two iTunes accounts for two countries. I can purchase content through both and use that content anywhere without restriction. They make it a big pain because you can't switch your account to a different geo after it's created but with multiple accounts your content isn't actually restricted.
Yep, thank sucks. You can thank brexit for that. AFAIK services offered in one EU country have to work throughout the EU (so if you were in Germany it would have worked). This meant that on holiday (coming from UK to Spain) a few years back I was able to watch F1 live on my phone via the NowTV/Sky app. This year - geo restricted.
F1TV also added DRM this season, so open source clients for it no longer work. You're allowed to view up to 6 simultaneous cameras with your subscription (There's the main feed, the map view, the data view, and 20 onboard cameras). But there's no easy way to do this now aside from having 6 chrome windows with all their chonky borders taking up space, or using 6 different devices.
RaceControl [0] is an amazing open source client that offered split screen and synchronization of the videos (F1's own app has the onboard cameras about 20s ahead of the main feed, which means you either had to manually delay them all yourself or you get spoilers). Now it only works for archivee races.
Which is ridiculous because someone with an HDMI splitter can still strip the DRM and stream it illegally.
I'm probably going to end my subscription after this season and switch to watching pirated streams, because I'm being punished for having the gall to be a paid subscriber.
[0] https://github.com/robvdpol/RaceControl
In case robvdpol is an HN member, thanks for all the work you put into RaceControl. It was the best way to watch the sport.
Streaming services are a bit of a special case: they can have different access in different places, but the location that counts is the users home location. So e.g. a national sports league can license exclusive rights to different streaming services in different countries, and in your home country there is only one choice, but if you sign up with them and then travel, you still can access it, even though the "exclusive" contract for that country is with someone else.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/cross-border-portability-of-onli...
This is currently untrue for Apple/itunes and that's the only point they made.
There are currently no hoops for anyone to jump through unless you want to sidestep the law or licensing agreements, which is another discussion entirely.
Potential buyers still have to consider the original point however, as even if Apple doesn't enforce it currently, there is no assurance that it won't in the future. And there is no guarantee that it's gonna be the same if theyre buying on another platform.
Didn't Google and Amazon have competing platforms for example?
Obviously it would be better if we could be properly logged in into multiple accounts at the same time (The play store on android does support switching easily), but at least I can now (I think since iOS 15) get app updates while staying logged in in my main account.
Piracy returns?
It never gone. 4Tb USB HD + Good Torrent Tracker = All problems solved.
In the EU we have an interesting law regarding that, if you subscribe to Netflix in Germany and then travel to another EU country you'll still get the same catalog as in your home country.
If you have a US account and travel to the EU you'll get access to the catalog of the country you are in.
Second issue is if you bought it trough a service and keept it there, then you definitely not the owner...
I get your point but I don't see how this could actually work. As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone else and not from iTunes? And as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than what it is on iTunes? It's not like it would come with a box that would look used/damaged, or a DVD with scratches on it.
Because it is the same thing, but cheaper.
> And as a seller, why would I sell it at a lower price than what it is on iTunes?
Because otherwise people won't buy it from you, they'll buy it from ITunes.
Even if the lower price doesn't make sense for digital media that aren't degraded through use, lower price (that lets you recoup, say, 90% of what you paid) would be needed to make people go through hassle of not just buying it "new."
There are ways to correct this, such as imposing reasonable floors on the sale price, or not permitting the sale of a title for something like 30 days after a transaction.
I'm just saying that these things would need to be factored into any proper solution, ideally via legislation.
Those aren't "correcting" anything; the internet came along and stole their lunch. What needs correcting is the business model.
Surely you can understand that freely "loaning" digital copies - with none of the friction involved in physical media transport - would de-incentivize purchasing by others.
If you want that, fine. But that will jack up the price of movies, since a lot fewer of them will be sold.
I don’t see why the same couldn’t be done for other forms of media. Movies, albums, maybe even software licenses.
This system will likely result in a fairly minor decline in VOD revenue due to fewer individuals purchasing their own digital copy because they are once again able to loan works to others and take advantage of the same sharing of works that was taken for granted with physical media. If someone borrows a friends license to a movie to watch it once instead of being forced by the studios to buy or rent their own copy then there will be some lost revenue but I think that revenue only existed in the first place because of the walled garden scheme of owning nothing that exists right now. I also think if VOD licenses actually had value and guaranteed longevity they would be more appealing to consumers.
I'm not a fan of the walled gardens of streaming and the you-own-nothing credo that goes with it. I'm just saying that we need to be fair to all sides with the solution.
Sharing credentials on streaming services has happened exactly because it is the most seamless way to do it.
Interesting observation! Digital-only copies traded in a form not comprising the embodiment in a physical "vessel" allow for a theoretically efficient handshake-and-exchange process, but in practice, there's lots of friction involved.
Grievance: "Hey, you can't do that! It's too easy!"
Response: "Easy? Have you ever used an app with a 10-foot UI that's controlled by a TV remote?"
See also: <https://xkcd.com/949/> ("File Transfer").
If you want to evaluate how much the movies/content is really worth, just take the price you pay for a streaming service and divide it by the content you consume.
For example; $5 month, divided by 80 hours of viewing (which seems low for most) and you come to $0.06 per hour, or about $0.12 per movie. Using this conservative estimate, are you going to bother selling a digital movie for less than $0.12? No. But that is precisely why the industry has monopolized the market and added DRM, because they want to keep their fraudulent scheme going to deprive people of their earnings.
But what it’s really about is, as instituting a new form of slavery where you are given everything for “free” just like like slave of all other eras, but you are deprived of far more at a far greater intangible cost for it.
steam does exactly this. you can sell on steam and pay steam their cut, or sell steam keys elsewhere for the same or more money without steam taking a cut.
A seller would do this to undercut iTunes, making a sale much more likely.
>As a buyer, why would I buy an iTunes movie from someone else and not from iTunes
Because the seller would likely price it lower than iTunes.
The real question is: how does this affect the digital goods market overall? Does allowing re-sale make iTunes unprofitable? Does it make movie production unprofitable?
Second hand items are often
* Lower quality, as they've been used * Lack consumer protections
The first just doesn't apply to digital goods and the second is much more minor (not expecting technical faults to become apparent after a while owning a digital item).
Selling physical goods also has a reasonable time commitment to it, you have to physically move things - there's friction. Digital goods could be sold between regular people near instantaneously. Buying a DVD and selling it after watching is do-able but still some work. Buying a film second hand the moment I press play and selling it on a market straight away after I stop watching seems trivial. I know this is ~rental, but theoretically users only need to buy in total enough copies for the concurrent number of watchers. A big enough market and this could impact how things are released, a "watch anytime" vs a "you really need to be up to date (e.g. sports)" would make a vast difference in total required copies floating around.
The resale value impacts the price you can sell at too. If a customer knows they can easily sell an item for 80% of what they bought it for, they're likely to be willing to pay more for it. However the customer also takes on more risk.
It feels like such a small change, but I can see it making a very large difference.
I doubt it. Does reselling used physical books make the book publishing business unprofitable?
Disregarding piracy [1], if I can sell a digital item and lose access in the process (so that I'm not making duplicates out of thin air), then what's the harm? That it's easier and more efficient to do used sales this way? Well, aren't free market proponents all about efficiency? Or is it just when it doesn't affect their profits?
[1] If we don't disregard piracy, then all bets are off and whatever the publisher wants becomes irrelevant.
Which is exactly the problem with digital media – how do you prove that to the satisfaction of everybody involved, i.e. especially the rightsholders?
On the one hand, the fact that almost all of the music market and parts of the e-book market for example operate without DRM shows that in those cases the publishers/labels have somewhat resigned themselves to trusting the users to remain relatively honest in that regard, but I suspect that a platform explicitly designed for reselling digital content would still draw some additional scrutiny of the unwanted kind.
Somewhat ironically, DRM would solve that particular problem – at the price of introducing additional restrictions during day-to-day usage that I wouldn't be happy about, though, either.
E.g. looking at my personal music library, it would likely restrict the choice of software players and good luck implementing that kind of personalised DRM with hardware media players which might not even have any kind of internet connection. I've also invasively (albeit losslessly reversible) applied replay gain adjustment to my whole media library because some media players and e.g. my car radio don't support the tagging-based adjustment, and in some rare cases I even had to edit some files [1], neither of which would be possible with DRM-protected files.
And of course it would introduce a continuing dependence on the existence of whoever is providing the DRM in order to access those media files you've supposedly "bought".
[1] The version of 3:47 EST on iTunes turned out to be missing the mouse squeak at the end – because of no DRM, I was able to find a complete, but otherwise slightly worse-sounding version (more surface hiss) on Youtube, lift the squeak off of it, de-noise it, and tack it onto my purchased version without having to lossily transcode that the main bulk of that song again.
The platform and DRM. The single one use of DRM that would make sense, and it's disregarded.
> it would likely restrict the choice of software players
I'm confused. This has nothing to do with the matter at hand. For music, we've thankfully moved past DRM. For movies, right now you cannot play a movie you bought in one platform in another platform; that's already the status quo, so this would introduce no additional restrictions.
If you tweak and change your music files, that's a derived work, not the original work. You cannot edit up a physical novel and resell it, either. Regardless, music files have no DRM and they are not the topic of discussion.
Sorry, my fault, but I was looking at things from a more general perspective, as my impression is that there's not much of a second-hand market for non-DRM'd digital media, either.
Plus I was bringing up music in order to make a point that I wouldn't want to give up the lack of DRM just so I could more easily disprove any suspicion of copyright violation if I was to sell my music collection.
You're right though that given the situation we're currently in specifically with regards to movies and TV shows, DRM with transferrable licenses would still be better than the current situation we're in.
What you and many are are also missing, including the author, is that the whole system is a fraud because the prices we asked to pay (I refuse) are fraudulent themselves because of it. You are “buying” a movie at a price, precisely because the whole system is rigged in a fraudulent manner where you are not able to actually own it and you are not able to sell it, and you can’t rent it or even lend it; therefore it is not actually a market price, it is a monopoly price based on cartel control and total cornering of the market. It’s essentially no different than the fraudulent price of diamonds or any of the frauds that have been prosecuted where people corner and manipulate the market of, e.g., onions, famously.
Some may have heard the phrase “you will own nothing and be happy” expressed by your global rulers. This topic is precisely manifestation of that and people don’t seem to realize it. You own nothing related to media that you think you own and you think you are happy for it, without yet realizing what a fraud and trap it is, even as the encirclement of slavery progresses all around us.
Especially in America there are many people who, if you were to look at closely, literally own not a single thing they think they have; and in many cases own less than they are even worth. Every single thing can be yanked out from under people like that on a whim … legally. A recent famous example of that is the Tesla that was disabled because Tesla didn’t like something. Slaves of the past were also “happy and didn’t own anything” since their healthcare was “free” and their groceries were “free” and their housing was “free”, etc.; all provided for “free” by government of and by the feudal lord or plantation owners.
In case people have forgotten the most relevant case of what the author writes about; remember when Amazon simply deleted a book from users’ kindles without even asking, let alone receiving consent? This was about 4 years ago now. That book that Amazon just disappeared off people’s devices with no evidence of their actions other than some coincidental proof of purchase people had retained … 1984.
It's no different to the rest of them. If Stadia hasn't already taught anyone that it is a scam then I don't know what will.
Sounds a lot like a problem that NFTs could fix
Why would anyone ever pay full price for a "new" game if there were "second hand" copies that were completely identical to a new version available for less?
I don't care about EA or Activision losing out on that 10th private jet, but second hand sales would absolutely hurt small creators doing great work.
Another way to improve fairness to stores could be to allow them to charge a "transfer fee" of perhaps 5-10% of original MSRP for transferring any used content.
Another significant issue with digital movies and games is the inability to resell the content once you're done with it. You can sell your DVDs at a yard sale or on eBay but not your iTunes movies. IMO, our competition law should require vendors to allow re-sale of digital goods. Big benefit for consumers.