Some background: I developed a software binary sandbox, in the 90's; patent cited 500+ times ... mostly by developers of DRM. Now, I am working on an open source project.
IMO, DRM extends a presumption of scarcity. Hunters share their meat, whereas farmers guard their harvest. For the hunter, the kill is a short term abundance of value; if it isn't shared, it will spoil. For the farmer, the harvest is a long term store of value. Scavengers exploit the asymmetry of effort in which to obtain that value.
Once value became easy to copy, the symmetry of effort has shifted. As a result, culture is shifting with it. Freely copied recorded music shifted the value back to live concerts. Back to a short term abundance of value. When was the last time you posted on Twitter or FB? These are freshly hunted moments. Wait too long and that muse will spoil.
There is no presumption of scarcity, because scarcity is a real phenomenon.
There is a vast qualitative difference between the output of ten thousand amateurs and one highly trained and exceptionally talented artist (working in whatever medium.)
This an immensely unfashionable idea. But the real problem with DRM isn't that it does or does not enable copying, but that it presupposes that artistic output is a commodity that can be copied.
In fact artistic output - considered as the cultural influence of an entire career, and not as a series of copyable files or performances - is not fungible.
Not all content creators are equal. If you want quality as opposed to quantity, you need to set up a feedback function that makes some effort to reward and support quality, based on a more sophisticated metric than a lowest-common-denominator unit sales count in a mass market.
This is even more true of science. Ten thousand PhDs do not add up to one Newton or Einstein.
And politics. Ten thousand mediocre politicians do not add up to one Nelson Mandela or Gandhi.
By the time everyone is having the DRM or no-DRM argument they've already missed the point - which is that commodifying cultural output as "content" for industrial distribution mechanisms (including live tours) is to misunderstand how culture propagates and evolves.
And if you can't invent a system that finds and rewards talent - without reducing every transaction to the vapid foolishness of markets - then your culture, science, politics, art, and general joy in invention will stagnate and eventually disappear.
DRM is barely a footnote here. It's nowhere close to being the main problem.
Your entire comment boils down to repeating Sturgeon's Law over and over, which can be summarized as "ninety percent of everything is crap," which is to say, your comment is obnoxious and off-topic to the discussion of Digital Restrictions Management and its negative consequences (DRM only has negative consequences).
However, there is an idea there. HN user https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=maxxxxx made a very astute observation as to why so many "industries" (rich people that control companies) are so adamant about ramming DRM down everyone's throats:
Copyright and IP (and probably real estate) are pretty much the only way for capitalists to make money the more things like internet, 3D printing, AI, robotics and so on are available to the masses. To me it's the only way to keep the current power structures intact so for a lot of powerful people copyright laws are probably the most important laws. They don't need the state for personal protection (they can pay for security guards instead of police) but they need the state for protecting their livelihood.
The system you propose to invent is redistribution of wealth and socialism: free education for those that want to advance their abilities, and universal basic income to allow them the time to express those abilities. Liberating knowledge from rent-seeking should be the prerogative of everyone that wants to improve the human condition and advance humanity.
It's not that 90% is crap, it's that there's inherently expensive classes of content that won't be produced without a revenue stream. Pewdiepie could still do his thing on a shoestring, but Star Wars could not be produced.
> Copyright and IP (and probably real estate) are pretty much the only way for capitalists to make money the more things like internet, 3D printing, AI, robotics and so on are available to the masses
I tried to warn the capitalists, but they were too busy counting their $s from tracking you with AI and replacing your job with robots.
> Liberating knowledge from rent-seeking should be the prerogative of everyone that wants to improve the human condition and advance humanity.
A discussion of "knowledge" is important, but DRM is 99% about entertainment.
It depends on which part of the process you attribute "scarcity" to. If I drink your beer, it is gone; I have deprived you of it. If you send me a song you have enjoyed, you still have it, and no-one is deprived of anything.
Scarcity on the production side is different and real, but I'm more optimistic. The primary problem seems to be allowing high quality creators to survive full time.
Increasingly, it seems to me that people do want to reward other people for stuff that they care about. To return to the song sharing example, I've now been exposed to a creator I might care about, and decide to support in some way.
However, this is very different to people wanting to pay rights-holders groups (in money, surveillance capabilities, or attention) for stuff that they're not sure if they care about yet.
The brightest future I can imagine involves platforms which facilitate transactions (designed by the creator) and discovery, while having no stake in the IP itself. And it seems possible.
> But the real problem with DRM isn't that it does or does not enable copying, but that it presupposes that artistic output is a commodity that can be copied.
But does it? I thought one of the bigger arguments studios use is that art is not a commodity, hence licensing (enforced by DRM) and copyrights and please pay us.
> This is even more true of science. Ten thousand PhDs do not add up to one Newton or Einstein.
> And politics. Ten thousand mediocre politicians do not add up to one Nelson Mandela or Gandhi.
I'm less and less convinced of that. "Breakthrough discoveries" in sciences seem to be very incremental steps. That's, I think, the reason so many of those achievements were made simultaneously by different people in different parts of the world. When scientific knowledge reaches a given level, some discoveries become ripe for the taking, and they get plucked by whichever smart guy manages to figure it out first. I suspect the similar may be true of politics - even though history lessons tend to focus on individuals, it seems to me that big events were always much more about the environment than any individual decision.
That is to say, if anything, science is much bigger a commodity than creative arts - by very virtue of being constrained by reality. All practically useful maps of the same territory will look alike, after all.
> DRM is barely a footnote here. It's nowhere close to being the main problem.
I'm having trouble seeing what is the main problem you think about. If I try to do a root cause analysis of DRM, I always end up concluding the main problem is that content creators have to create content for a living - i.e. if creative work were to be entirely decoupled from monetary interests, more people would have access to more and better cultural works.
Considering your views, how would you describe the great rises of (European) culture e.g. in 15-17th centuries? What kind of system collected and rewarded talents like Michelangelo or Mozart? (Both made numerous gigs.)
If you only used fingerprinting/watermarking instead of DRM, you could very well imagine an alternate model where creators are rewarded, and can find an audience a bit better, piracy is kept to a minimum, and culture is better off. There will still be sites like solarmovie, popcorntime, and perhaps some rental revenue will be lost because it will be easier to watch my neighbor or friends copy that he downloaded and walked over to my place with, but no one will be able to share it widely on youtube with anyone's fingerprint/watermark. The upside to culture? Anyone is free to edit/mix/use/peruse their fingerprinted/watermarked copy that they bought/rented. Unlike the consume-only model of the current Netflix/Amazon/Hulu/CBS/etc..
This is a long-term choice that I think both creators and consumers can make, but it probably won't happen as long as AT&T can make money off selling 4K copies of all Time Warner movies again, and as long as Disney never lets the copyright on Mickey Mouse expire. Copyright also has an important part to play in culture.
Patreon is an interesting model here. Not sure whether it rewards talent but I pay my creators because I want them to create more and I would suggest this will only happen if their creations find an audience. If that's not talent, I am not sure what is.
>it presupposes that artistic output is a commodity that can be copied.
In the Marxian sense, artistic output is a commodity, however every subsequent copy is a commodity with very little value, depending on the value of the copying machine etc.
> If you want quality as opposed to quantity, you need to set up a feedback function that makes some effort to reward and support quality, based on a more sophisticated metric than a lowest-common-denominator unit sales count in a mass market.
This only holds true if you start with the assumption that the output of those driven only by passion of the art is insufficient in either quantity or quality and must be supplemented with additional output driven by capitalism.
I know I don't know which is the "better" system, but I do believe a sincere discussion must be had along that spectrum ought to happen.
> the output of those driven only by passion of the art is insufficient in either quantity or quality and must be supplemented with additional output driven by capitalism
Isn't that obvious? "Passion for the art" is utterly incapable of creating something like a Pixar movie, which requires millions of dollars in compute costs.
This doesn't mean capitalism is the only funding source: maybe the government funds them, or crowdfunding, etc. But it should be obvious that modern appetites demand content that cannot be produced by a few passionate-but-broke individuals.
> Freely copied recorded music shifted the value back to live concerts.
Overall, I get what you're saying and I don't disagree with the premise (though I'm ambivalent about the conclusion), but the word "shifted" doesn't usually mean "eradicated"--most live concerts net vanishingly little money and that's a real impact on creators. Whether that's a net societal good or not can be argued about, but "shifted", IMO, paints a misleading picture.
Most other distribution methods for those artists have also been shown to net vanishingly little money. If you can't make money with a live performance, you sure as heck aren't making any selling CDs through a record company.
As a percent of which other sales exactly? If you mean selling merch and getting paid for the gigs, it's vanishingly small. At least for a band that does live performances.
The funny thing is, for a vast majority of bands there's almost no sense to sell their recorded music (in a digital form), only to give the fans the feeling of making a contribution.
If this were true in media, Mickey Mouse wouldn't still be copyrighted. DRM is recent, very recent, compared to analog media. It seems like the industry binged on copyright a little too much and by the time digital distribution came around, instead of using it to develop new talent and audiences, they decided to lock everything down with DRM. Must protect our copyrights! Prevent theft! Nevermind that DRM is mostly an added cost for the consumer, in exchange for no benefit, and the profits all seem to flow upwards regardless.
Social media is much better, and the cultural pay-off is much better in that what I create isn't being locked down and is available through APIs. Have you followed a twitter hashtag recently? People are as creative as ever. This does have it's own challenges as we saw in the last election. No substitutes for media literacy and good content...
IMO, DRM extends a presumption of scarcity. Hunters share their meat, whereas farmers guard their harvest. For the hunter, the kill is a short term abundance of value; if it isn't shared, it will spoil. For the farmer, the harvest is a long term store of value. Scavengers exploit the asymmetry of effort in which to obtain that value.
Once value became easy to copy, the symmetry of effort has shifted. As a result, culture is shifting with it. Freely copied recorded music shifted the value back to live concerts. Back to a short term abundance of value. When was the last time you posted on Twitter or FB? These are freshly hunted moments. Wait too long and that muse will spoil.