(I ran engineering for a DRM firm for several years about the same time as Peter put this out.)
It was pretty stunningly apparent at the time that the Internet was very good for information sharing, that crushing Napster hadn't exactly stopped people from sharing digital media, and that trying to make media exceedingly secure and hard to use was not a winning strategy.
If you want a customer to pay for your product, you have to offer value - if it's both more expensive and harder to use, you've made adoption pretty unlikely. In '03, MP3 players were entirely prevalent, mostly didn't support useful DRM, and the music industry mostly sold little silver discs which came with no restrictions.
So it wasn't that the threat model to make music readily redistributable for free was "the smartest black hats out there figure out how to crack your crypto and DRM", it was "an average user rips a CD into MP3s and shares it".
As you might expect, it was frustrating to try to deal with the competing demands from Hollywood at the time. People mostly didn't bother attacking the DRM - they just went and created or file-shared to get the more usable files without the protection layer. But there was still a great deal of insistence that whatever content protection layer was put in could be a vault to keep media safe forever, rather than a speedbump to piracy. (Meanwhile, of course, CDs were raw bitstreams of high fidelity audio data...)
If you want a customer to pay for your product, you have to offer value
And one way to determine if some copyrighted content has value is to pirate it and consume it. It's the very same than me going to a friend's house, watching a movie and buying it afterwards because I liked it.
Then you realize that your pirated copy plays without all the trouble of the DRM copy and you stop buying content altogether, which would cost more because of DRM anyways. People don't like being controlled and will always work very, very hard around this. The more someone is able to think critically for oneself, the least they like being controlled.
The fact that a large portion of today's content is created solely for the purpose of making profits certainly doesn't help. I'm pretty sure if we fired everyone supporting DRM and used their resources to create quality content instead, the problem would simply fade away.
Some of the games I previously bought were impossible to play with DRM; either they refused to start because I had a virtual disc emulator installed (to read linux images, of course!) or the DRM checks made the game slow. Getting the pirated copy gave me a much simpler installation process, no complains about my virtual disc emulator and no performance drops whatsoever.
I used to pay for content: movies, games, and some music. I didn't spend all that much, but I did buy them.
Then, corrupted audio CDs were sold. My sister got bit by one. So we downloaded it where it wasn't sold as damaged: Suprnova.
During that time, stupidity was occurring with DVDs with rotating CSS keys and 'bad block filled with data'. I was downloading films I wanted to archive, but couldn't easily rip.
Games were not that bad, but soon became horrendous in terms of screw-user checks, up to the point of driver breaking installs of trash-ware and other nefarious garbage. I trusted the pirates more than the companies.
I've been burned enough times. Why pay for crap quality when free is better?
Because the people that sweated and risked their livelihoods to produce these titles didn't actually offer them to you for free; instead, they were coerced into accepting free distribution when their work was illegally copied by companies that fund themselves by viagra and Adult Friend Finder ads.
Meanwhile, almost universally, the offerings nerds entitle themselves to are luxury goods that no person can claim an inherent right to access, so, not only are content producers and financiers coerced into having their return on investment redirected to porn ads and porn ad brokers, but that's happening solely to provide nerds with access to luxuries. Most of which they could trivially have afforded anyways.
But keep telling yourself piracy strikes some blow for justice. I don't know the statistics but I'd have to guess at least 80% of nerds like us pirate content every single week, and nobody wants to think of themselves as an asshole. Rationalize however you need to.
You can rant about "entitlement" all you wish, but the way to getting people to stop pirating content is to provide an alternative method of distribution than the one currently in place.
Steam, iTunes, Netflix, and perhaps one day HBO branching off into their own content publishing business.
A season's worth Game of Thrones Blu-Rays costs what, $50?
To access a year's worth of premium cable content would cost ~$1000 to ~$1500.
"I don't know the statistics but I'd have to guess at least 80% of nerds like us pirate content every single week, and nobody wants to think of themselves as an asshole. Rationalize however you need to."
This is pretty much the antithesis of rationalizing. You're fine with the system in place. Others are dissatisfied with piracy and want to support the creators without the "luxury" of dropping more than a thousand bucks a year for the one or two great shows worth watching on television.
A season's worth of GoT Blu-Rays costs $50 1-2 years after the series has been released on HBO. Content is much more lucrative during its initial release window; it has a very definite time-value.
People aren't complaining and breaking the law to get access to GoT Blu-Rays (well, actually, yeah some of them are). They're doing it to get access to GoT episodes that aren't available anywhere but on pay TV, because HBO uses them as an incentive to get people to subscribe to pay TV, which, when you think about it, is the only way pay TV could possibly ever work.
You know, I made some socks for you to buy, to subsidize the production and distribution of my artisan bleu cheese. My cheese startup failed, you filthy pagan pirates, because you failed to buy my socks!
Come on. We're supposed to just suck it up when someone offers us something for sale? You're kidding, that's not how markets work. If HBO does something stupid, they get penalized for it in the market.
Beyond that, the debate here is about DRM. Institutionalizing DRM (legal mandates, DMCA style legal penalties for "reverse engineering") probably causes more damage to society as a whole than allowing some smaller monetary amount of piracy. Clamping down on the civil rights of the populace as a whole in order to prevent a tiny fraction of the populace from violating already outrageous laws on "intellectual property" really isn't a good idea. Stupid laws and stupid enforcement of stupid laws make people disrespect the law and law enforcement.
The DMCA does not criminalize reverse engineering; my field is based in large part on routine reverse engineering of all sorts of software. While there is some grey area and certainly some overreach in the DMCA anti-circumvention mechanism, what it essentially criminalizes is an attempt to build a business on devices that circumvent content protection.
As a sometimes-reverser, I'm ambivalent about this. I wouldn't howl if anti-circumvention was eliminated (it won't be, but still). I'll howl with all the other security researchers when it's abused to stifle research and disclosure of security flaws (for the overwhelming most part, it isn't, but still).
I don't understand your sock/cheese metaphor at all. People can in fact bundle socks and cheese. Nobody would in reality stick up for you if you stole the socks to avoid the cheese. But nobody does bundle socks and cheese, because that's moronic. It is manifestly not moronic to bundle Game Of Thrones with ESPN.
Stop me if I'm wrong, I haven't had cable for a long time. We only watched Discovery and Food Network, and not even very much of those. We now get more Mythbusters and more cheesy cartoon series from Netflix or Denver Public Library.
ESPN is a sports network, right? "Game of Thrones" is a swords-and-sorcery type thing with a lot of sex, right (I've only read 20 pages of the first book). I don't see how that makes it "manifestly not moronic" to bundle the two. I personally might take a look a GoT, but you'd have to pay me to watch the manifest stupidity of ESPN. So, I personally don't see the immoronicity of bundling ESPN and "Game of Thrones".
But that was my point with socks and cheese: market places don't take into account whatever imaginary linkage I might assign or what Immoral MegaCorp assigns to bundling HBO and ESPN. What vone person values as "manifestly moronic" another sees as "manifestly awesome".
As near as I can tell, you're trying to argue that legislating some linkage via DRM makes that linkage valuable to the free market, when in fact, it does not, any more than my linking socks to cheese makes that linkage valuable.
The marginal cost to the cable provider of providing you with HBO versus ESPN+HBO is nil. Bundling makes perfect sense.
You might complain about cross-subsidization, but you are both payee and payer in that bargain.
If you could get only HBO, it would cost a lot more than what it costs on top of a cable subscription.
It's like two people buying a newspaper with two section. Person A only wants section A and person B only wants section B. They each complain about subsidizing the other section. They see the 50 cent cost and say "I would only pay 25 cents if I was only paying for the half I wanted!" But the costs to the provider for only providing you with one section is exactly the same. If they only gave each person just what they wanted, each person would pay, to a first approximation, 50 cents for getting one section.
"The marginal cost to the cable provider of providing you with HBO versus ESPN+HBO is nil. Bundling makes perfect sense."
To the provider. The customer is directly paying for Disney/ESPN/Fox and whatever else is on basic cable. I don't want to subsidize any of that crap, no matter how cheap it's being offered to me.
'tptacek claimed that bundling makes perfect sense. And it does, for the same reason that newspapers don't charge extra for the sports section.
Bundling happens in every industry with high fixed costs and low marginal costs.
I don't want to subsidize any of that crap
You are in a shared market.
CNN makes around $250 million a year from cable subscribers. Let's say 100 million households with cable just to make the math easy. So each is paying $2.50 for CNN.
Now, let's say all those households got to choose yes/no on whether they got CNN, and half those houses don't watch any CNN and half of them watch CNN regularly. They wouldn't be paying $2.50 each. They would, to a first approximation, be paying $5 each, because built-in to CNN's pricing to the cable companies was the fact that only half their customers watched it, and it doesn't cost the cable company any extra to provide it to those people who don't want it.
To a smaller degree, this is what happens if you shop at one store in a mall. You are "subsidizing" the other stores in the mall because they have joined forces to reduce their shared, fixed costs. But those other stores are also "subsidizing" you.
"They wouldn't be paying $2.50 each. They would, to a first approximation, be paying $5 each, because built-in to CNN's pricing to the cable companies was the fact that only half their customers watched it, and it doesn't cost the cable company any extra to provide it to those people who don't want it."
How do you know, if you are that you are indeed breaking DRM vs just doing complicated stuff with a firmware?
It seems obvious if there's PKI in there somewhere. But aside that, how do you tell the difference?
Might I add that the old proposed "Broadcast Flag" would have been a bit in the HDTV stream to signal no_copy. Changing that bit would have broken the DMCA.
Oddities like that render "intellectual property" useless. Since copyright (in the USA) lasts for life-of-author + 70 years, or 90 years for corporate authorship, you can't tell on the face of some information whether it is "property" or not. You need to know when/if the author died.
"A season's worth of GoT Blu-Rays costs $50 1-2 years after the series has been released on HBO. Content is much more lucrative during its initial release window; it has a very definite time-value."
So weigh the cost for monthly fees accordingly to the value-add and factor in for the lack of subsidization.
> "...the way to getting people to stop pirating content is to provide an alternative method of distribution... Steam, iTunes, Netflix..."
I agree with your point to an extent. The thing is that they're not exactly viable alternatives yet. Each service you mentioned operates off the same distribution model, each with their own custom DRM that sandboxes the user from leaving that platform.
Not every pirated work is a lost sale. In fact I'd wager an exceedingly small number of them are. The rest are downloaded by digital packrats, the future's archivists essentially, who just like to hoard stuff that has value, even if they never consume the media itself.
If I download, reshare and stock a movie that I never end up actually watching... What damage has actually been done? Someone somewhere, maybe, was made a new fan of a certain director or producer or genre?
There's a third way here ... and that is to buy the content, keep your proof of purchase, and then download/rip/torrent the content in the manner that works best for you.
Your license to the content, when you buy it, is tied to the medium you bought it on. You can buy the Blu-ray, watch the Blu-ray, but that doesn't give you a license to watch a downloaded copy.
True, but it does, at the very least, clear one's conscience a bit about downloading. I want to support the things I like. However, I hate many of the forms that they come on, and/or the venues in which they are presented.
For instance, I loathe my local theaters, but I love movies. I'll buy a ticket to the theater online, and then just pirate a copy of the movie so I can watch it in the comfort of my own home. Is it legal? Nay, but it does allow me to still support the content creators I like without having to deal with all the crap (unrelated to the core content) that I'd have to wade through otherwise.
That's the worst you can do, because you are still breaking the law, while at the same time voting with your wallet for something that hurts you.
Either pay for it and use it as is, or don't.
If you don't like DRM than you must realize that the only way they'll backtrack on it is if their bottom line is seriously injured. If you have no problem with DRM and the status quo, than the pirating you mention doesn't make sense.
Also, if you want to reward content authors, reward them in cases where the distribution suits your needs. E.g. I never buy movies in digital format, but I go to the movie theaters like once every 2 weeks (I'm the opposite of you, going out for movies is something I like, but my local movie theaters are making an effort in pleasing their customers). I don't buy music, but I go to concerts. I only buy ebooks without DRM, etc...
Remember that these same companies are actively lobbying for oppressive laws behind closed doors, actively inserting malware into their installers, actively disabling and deleting content users still legitimately have a right to access, illegally invading sovereign nations (New Zealand / megaupload), actively working against artists (Hollywood Accounting), actively terrorizing 9-year-old girls, to name a few.
I don't pirate. However, "take the moral high road" is not a valid argument here. If you were telling the artists to "boycott the corrupt labels and take the moral high road," maybe you'd have some weight. For the fans, stick to the "what gives me the most bang for my buck."
The only person here who seems concerned about 'showing' anyone is you, I'm afraid. We're just missing the 'inherent right to intellectual property at all costs' ethics update and can't be bothered with throwing money at incompetent salesmen.
Really, I'm surprised at your apparent inability to make cogent or compelling arguments when it comes to these sorts of policy issues, given the rather high quality of your thoughts on just about everything else. Ah, the mysteries of life!
Every movie ever published by a MPAA affiliate company has lost money, went in the hole and whatnot. Even that lowly named mass loser called Star Wars.
Or that's what they tell the IRS.
This isn't a battle over who's more morally right. Save that crap argument for church sermons. This is Hollywood politics: the kind when you jump state lines to get away from camera patents.
I do tend to stay away from attacking somebody to avoid discussing a certain point brought up. However, tptacek sure cuts the cake on this...
From his profile: "THOMAS H. PTACEK hopes, by strict attention to business, combined with moderate charges, to merit a fair share of patronage and support."
Does he hope to gain some sort of social credit by attacking and being so damned obtuse? I sure as hell hope somebody monied notices this.
And can we also conclude how tptacek treats his employees, if we are treated as such on a semi-anonymous blog?
I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine
I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal
And the straw boss said "Well, a-bless my soul"
You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
True that. Everyone is fretting about movie/TV show availability on Netflix, etc., but I sidestepped that and just built an HTPC[0] and combined it with a private torrent site that has all the movies and TV shows I could ever want. In technical terms, it is far and away the best solution.
Many of us still do, and will for as long as these companies assume most of their users to be thieves. It's also usually the least creative people pushing DRM; Hollywood for instance is not known for its creativity but rather to suck dry the ideas of the handful of creative people it has.
Same reason why open-source is more trustworthy than proprietary in general. These guys aren't trying to bullshit you into buying their product and aren't creating the product for the sole purpose of profits.
I'm amazed this entire discussion here focuses on "DRM good" vs. "DRM bad".
The point is, it does not matter. We have entered a world where for pretty much the first time, the marginal cost of creating a copy of something is zero, for all intents and purposes. We don't have any economic theories (or business models) that can deal with that yet.
DRM is simply a symptom of that. The question is not "can (and should) people be prevented from resharing content", the question is, "what does content creation look like in a world where everything is shared"
A while back I was at a friend's house when we decided to watch a movie. My friend mentioned that he could stream The Avengers from his Netflix account, so taking his word on it I was like "Ok awesome"!
It turns out he was wrong. A Netflix search showed that the movie was only available via mail-in DVD, not Instant Watch. I joked that I was impatient and didn't want to wait a couple of days for a DVD to be mailed.
"Not a problem" he said; my friend just hopped onto Usenet and downloaded a Blu-ray copy of the film in about 45-50 minutes, in about the time it took to cook some BBQ for the both of us.
My argument is not about the legality of this scenario; it's that rather decentralized, open networks are doing a better job at distributing high quality content than the very corporations producing and selling this content. Considering that you have to pay anywhere from $10 - $20 a month for Usenet access, people buy into this service not because they want "free" movies/music, they're paying for the ability to download virtually any movie/album they want... at any time they please. It's like Netflix Instant Watch on steroids, at a more affordable price.
>Considering that you have to pay anywhere from $10 - $20 a month for Usenet access, people buy into this service not because they want "free" movies/music, they're paying for the ability to download virtually any movie/album they want... at any time they please.
Dunno about that.
I'd wager that "free" is a pretty damn big part of it, bigger than the size of the catalog for many folks.
The most prolific Usenet users I know aren't using it for convenience or access to rare content. They're amassing a hoard of utterly mainstream movies (Avengers...) and video games that could be enjoyed conveniently for a reasonable price from any number of sources.
Personally, if I cared to watch Avengers I'd have paid $5 to start streaming it on my Roku from Amazon immediately.
"Dunno about that.
I'd wager that "free" is a pretty damn big part of it, bigger than the size of the catalog for many folks."
Many folks will refuse to pay under any circumstance. This is not to "fix" that. iTunes, Amazon digital, Steam, and Netflix are proof that most people will pay to license content if the terms and technology are not intrusive enough, and they're not being exploited at the "convenience" price point.
Microeconomic models deal with negligible marginal cost products as a matter of routine. I don't mean to be rude, but you've been taking the wrong economics courses.
Another poster identified the issue: decentralized distribution, not low cost of copy, is the sea change. In past times governments responded to low cost of copy by legislating copyright. Now there's no practical way to centralize distribution of convenient copies of data.
Honestly, nerds fantasize about a world where all data is free, but information creators just respond by making their data inconvenient to obtain. Institutions of content creation have a high demand product; economically there's no reason to expect them to roll over and give up on making money.
That might well be - thankfully, nobody pays me for my economics expertise :)
What I meant by my statement is that the marginal cost is near-zero for everybody. I've just learned that a better way to say that is "decentralized distribution". I do appreciate you clarifying this. (I really do. It's rather hard to say "thank you" over the Internet without coming across as the most sarcastic person in existence)
And I don't expect content creators to roll over, but I do expect to see a significant shift in the industry. Because no matter how inconvenient the access to the first copy is, the second one is free. At some point, that'll need to be factored in, because it can't be prevented.
Nerds don't just fantasize about data being free. They fantasize about reducing the cost of manufacturing anything, including new intellectual content to zero. (or at least to some minimal amount of energy expediture)
And no, your Micro-economic models do not deal with that, but that's ok, because it's a fantasy. Right?
> The question is not "can (and should) people be prevented from resharing content", the question is, "what does content creation look like in a world where everything is shared"
DRM is an attempt to force rivalry and excludability onto information, which is inherently not a private good[1].
You can try and use a government fiat to legislate the market to behave a certain way, but at the end of the day, if those are at odds with the fundamental laws of economics and reality (ie, one's ability to copy information "for free"), you're playing a losing game from the start.
"DRM is an attempt to force rivalry and excludability onto information"
And here I thought DRM was trying to make difficult the non-permitted sharing of the results of someone's hard work, for example music an artist created, or books an author wrote, or the years of work a team of actors, cinematographers, move score writers, directors, producers, makeup artists, animators, janitors and all other people that go into making a movie.
The result (the movie) may be easy to reproduce, without these protections, but the artists/etc deserve the money for their trade.
That said, DRM generally gets way the heck too much in the way of everything, and I would much rather a generally honest society where people want to support the artist so that they can continue doing what they love and continue entertaining. I think we live in a society like that in general, and the people that choose not to support the artist's work are just a tragedy of the commons biproduct that we'll never be able to stop -- nor should we try to, because efforts to the contrary just make it harder for paying customers.
But meh. Sorry, my nitpick is with "DRM is an attempt to force [...] onto information." because while technically accurate ('data is just a really big number'!) it's the idea behind the data that gives it worth
> And here I thought DRM was trying to make difficult the non-permitted sharing of the results of someone's hard work, for example music an artist created, or books an author wrote, or the years of work a team of actors, cinematographers, move score writers, directors, producers, makeup artists, animators, janitors and all other people that go into making a movie.
I am willing to believe that's what it originally meant to do, but it has proven wholly ineffective at that goal. If you want a pirated work, you don't interact with a DRM-encumbered disk at all — you just grab it off the Net. The effect of DRM on movie piracy seems to be insanely close to zero.
However, it is much more effective at doing things like forcing honest people to buy multiple copies of a movie to watch in their living room (where they have a Blu-Ray player), in their bedroom (where they have an Apple TV) and in their car (where they have a DVD player).
> You can try and use a government fiat to legislate the market to behave a certain way, but at the end of the day, if those are at odds with the fundamental laws of economics and reality (ie, one's ability to copy information "for free"), you're playing a losing game from the start.
How do you quantify "for free"?
If we mean "at no cost to the taker," then it's equal to theft, which is obviously not much of a position to take. I'm guessing this isn't what you mean.
But if we mean "at no cost to the original holder," then that is not really true. There is no marginal cost for copying information, but he has already incurred a potentially very high fixed cost. Excluding that cost from our analysis of the situation leads to a distorted view of economics and reality.
> How do you quantify "for free"? If we mean "at no cost to the taker," then it's equal to theft, which is obviously not much of a position to take. I'm guessing this isn't what you mean.
This usage of the word "theft" only makes sense when dealing with private goods, as I explained in my original post. We're dealing with a good (information) that is entirely nonrival and fairly non-excludable, putting it somewhere on the spectrum between a common good and a public good.
> Excluding that cost from our analysis of the situation leads to a distorted view of economics and reality.
Applying the economics of private goods to goods that are neither rival nor excludable leads to a distorted view of reality as well.
> This usage of the word "theft" only makes sense when dealing with private goods, as I explained in my original post
If I had indeed used the word "theft" to refer to it, that would be a good point. However, I did not. I said that if you're only considering the cost to the recipient, then the same analysis could apply with equal validity to theft.
> Applying the economics of private goods to goods that are neither rival nor excludable leads to a distorted view of reality as well.
Talent is both rival and excludable. That is my point. The marginal cost of transmitting the information is essentially nonexistent, but the cost of producing it in the first place (which depends on a finite supply of talented time) must be taken into account or we'll come to bad, unrealistic decisions.
> I said that if you're only considering the cost to the recipient, then the same analysis could apply with equal validity to theft.
If I choose to redistribute a piece of software, there is zero opportunity cost to either me, the supplier, or to the receiver.
> Talent is both rival and excludable.
...No, it's really not. "Talent" isn't even a good; it's an attribute - the fact that you're using the word in this way makes me suspect you don't really understand the underlying economic principles.
> The marginal cost of transmitting the information is essentially nonexistent,
As is the cost of producing a copy, which cannot be said for physical goods.
> but the cost of producing it in the first place (which depends on a finite supply of talented time) must be taken into account
I understand that you're trying to draw a comparison to the logic behind drug patents, but when you're dealing with a good for which the redistribution and production of all units beyond the first has zero opportunity cost, artificially imposing (by fiat) a cost on the redistribution and production is neither feasible nor efficient[1]
[1] In the economic sense of the word, not the ways it's often used colloquially.
Books have been around for quite some time. The major change isn't that the marginal cost is now zero. The incentive and techincal ability to use copyrighted works without a license has been present for a long time. The difference is the decentralization. In the past, if you printed a batch of unlicensed books, it was very easy to shut you down or sue you. Now, anyone can make the copy and it's not viable to go after them all.
The problem with DRM is that to the casual observer it looks like something is being done. Whilst in reality the main effects of DRM is generally to make usability , security and privacy worse.
Once people start putting this crap in the systems it becomes entrenched and more difficult to remove.
> We have entered a world where for pretty much the first time, the marginal cost of creating a copy of something is zero, for all intents and purposes. We don't have any economic theories (or business models) that can deal with that yet.
I'm not sure that's true. It seems to me that SaaS is a business model that directly addresses the situation. Take a look at 37signals' apps, the current #1 video game League of Legends, GitHub, etc. None of them require DRM — they just don't give you anything you can meaningfully "steal." It's an extremely resilient business model, and I will bet you any sum of money you like that the industry will continue heading in the direction of services.
That is indeed the most direct analogy from a logistical perspective, but I suspect the actual media analogy in terms of effect is just to put out "safer" content (e.g. Yet Another Blockbuster 3: Bust Blocks Harder), which also offers pirates less incentive to go through the trouble to copy it since it isn't very interesting — except when you're walking by a Redbox thinking "What should I do tonight?"
I'm not so sure that's right. We already have a model that works with content like this: research universities. The media content only has to be discovered a single time then it basically stops being scares and can be easily made available to everyone. It's fanciful to imagine but I could see movie or music "universities" popping up to create this kind of content. I wonder how appropriate funding through grants and the like would be though? I think media is usually a lot more splintered than typical academic research but I could also see something like that providing an opportunity for artist who could not otherwise support themselves off of there work.
If anything though we already have a model for dealing with content that is at least similar to what entertainment media is turning into, but its not so much an area business traditionally deals with.
I accepted a position at Microsoft a few months ago, and I'm feeling pretty happy about it. I've been a merciless critic of MS in the past, but it appears to me now that MS is one of the few large tech companies in a position to make the consumer's privacy interests a competitive advantage in their products.
One of my long-standing criticisms of the whole Trustworthy computing initiative matched what was described in the article: that all this research in computer security and TPM hardware on the motherboard was not being used well in the interest of the consumer. With the very notable exception of Bitlocker, "trustworthy" tended to mean that 3rd party interests could expect the computer to act on their behalf and against the demands of the system's actual owner.
If you are or know someone who can articulate good arguments on behalf of the user and privacy, please show them this job posting.
After all the initial uproar the TPM was designed to not be able to enforce anything. It just sits there passively measuring e.g. your boot loader and BIOS and it only unlocks the secret key to your fully encrypted harddrive if the boot loader is untampered.
Great technology!
But everyone hates the TPM and it is not in every motherboard nowadays, although it would be great for Bitlocker!
But what we got anyway was the Trusted Media path in the Windows kernel, so that only trusted audio drivers could play DRM content.
But now with Windows 8 everything is bad and nobody gives a sh*t, after being brainwashed to accept the Apple appstore:
We now have the worst enforcement technology: Secure UEFI and locked down hardware which can't even run Linux out of the box!
And nobody is protesting against it!
It has nothing good (like the TPM did: TPM could store certificates and other secrets and sign data etc.) and only bad things: It enforces what you run.
And I bet Microsoft wants this to enforce that no sideloading can happen.
So in the future when the Windows desktop is gone a mandatory Windows Defender will delete all your illegal unwanted software and you can only buy through the Windows store and never ever load kernel drives which patch away stupid restrictions in your software.
"I'm now finding that for some kinds of content, the illegal is clearly outperforming legal," Biddle said. "That blows me away. I pay for premium cable. It's easier to use BitTorrent to watch Game of Thrones. HBO Go is trying very hard to do a good job," he said, but the user experience just isn't as good. Because HBO Go is a streaming service, he said, it's more vulnerable to network congestion than simply downloading the entire episode from the darknet."
Fix this and you 'fix' piracy. Oh, and the fix isn't "shut down the darknet" it is provide a better service.
Piracy costs HBO less than "fixing HBO Go" would, since HBO is cross-subsidized by subscriptions to cable.
The fix for piracy is to create compelling content under the "superior" business models piracy advocates have so much faith in. Netflix is starting to do this; over the next 10 years, lots of media/creative/production people are going to get very rich figuring out how to produce and sell content online. In the meantime, people should stop bitching about how hard it is to get Game of Thrones; they sound ridiculous. Why on earth should anyone care how hard it is to see a swords-and-sorcery soap opera?
Wow, unlike you to go ad hominem like that. But setting aside your disdain for their choice of content, what do you base the claim "Piracy costs HBO less than 'fixing HBO Go' would" ? The articles we've seen here and elsewhere suggests there is some unmet demand, if we stipulate that a team to 'fix HBO Go' is relatively small [1] then what is the lifetime value of having that content more widely addressable? My intuition suggests it would be higher than the cost of fixing their distribution strategy.
[1] I'm imagining a team of two lawyers and an manager to negotiate providing their content on other services like NetFlix, Hulu, and paid-Youtube distribution. Maybe $550K over 12 months? A $1M?
Whoah, sorry! I didn't realize my comment came across as critical of you. I do harbor some disdain for Game of Thrones (which I pay for, via my subscription to HBO), but then, the first CD I ever owned was Phil Collins "No Jacket Required", so trust me I'm nobody to talk about taste.
The problem with "fixing" HBO Go isn't logistical; it's that the revenue from distributing GoT directly over the Internet would have to offset the revenue (and operational cost savings) HBO achieves by serving its content over pay TV systems, and by serving as the anchor for comparatively pricey recurring-revenue "premium" pay TV subscriptions, and by serving as a cross-subsidized draw for basic cable subscriptions. And it's just unlikely to do that.
Ok, so if I understand your argument, the additional revenue from off-cable sources would be offset significantly by a reduction in cable subscribers? If so it sounds like the newspaper 'trap' where the costs of the printing presses (sunk cost infrastructure) gets a smaller base to amortize over.
I don't know enough (or much at all) about the pricing structure of cable. I've read about the disputes when TNT is suddenly no longer on Dish Network and instead there is a missive about how TNT is being so unreasonable about costs yada yada. But those events have suggested that there is fixed cost per anum that Dish and the Cable companies pay to carry the premium channel's content, and then the content distributor is left to make that money back by squeezing it out of subscribers.
So assuming there isn't a contractual obligation of exclusivity (and in HBO's case they are on all the other things like Direct, Time-Warner, etc) would it be reasonable to assume that they could add the additional outlets without changing their pay-TV structure at all? And if they could, wouldn't that revenue be all accretive to the bottom line?
I agree that a completely re-whacked HBO would have a totally different cost structure, but offering up their original programming to say NetFlix to stream? That seems pretty straight forward.
Well, first, it's not my argument; it's both the conventional argument for the bundled pay TV model, and HBO's explicit argument for why they won't sell you an online-only subscription to HBO Go.
Secondly, the issue isn't that HBO is contractually unable to offer direct HBO Go subscriptions or release-window a la carte access to Game Of Thrones episodes. The issue is that it would be financially irrational of them to do so, because their subscribers would defect to the online offering; they would, in effect, be offering a fire-sale on their most valuable offering.
I don't know how much a single episode of Game Of Thrones would cost if you factored all this into it. It obviously wouldn't cost $2.99. I'd tentatively suggest that it would cost so much that people would pirate it and rationalize doing so by saying "HBO can't reasonably expect people to pay so much for a single online episode of Game Of Thrones; if they just used more reasonable prices, people would stop pirating".
I think you have a good grasp of how the execs at Time Warner Inc. (not TW Cable) see it. One can read the earnings call transcripts on seekingalpha where they all but spell it out.
But, just to make it clear here for Chuck and others (rather than wasting time reading earnings' transcripts):
1) As soon as HBO offers their content via other dist. channels, the cable and satellite companies claim in their negotiations that the content is now worth less and they deserve to pay lower rates.
2) Lots of people pay for HBO without ever watching it (i.e. my parents), simply because they'd rather just pay for the premium package than figure out which channels to subscribe to. They are like non-customer subscribers. HBO et al would not see a dime from these people otherwise.
Also, HBO collects revenue from real subscribers based on the promise of high-quality content down the road. They satisfy this requirement often enough that a huge portion of all cable subscribers automatically upgrade to HBO. An a la carte model would allow those subscribers to wait-and-see; instead of investing effort to get engaged with a show like Treme, they'd sit back and wait for the show's merit to be validated by other people, and opt in only to the shows that were immediately compelling.
Interesting. I should probably clarify that I'm paraphrasing CEO Jeff Bewkes's thoughts given a couple quarters ago; these aren't my own thoughts. It seems like you have found further reasoning on your own which makes sense, and would give greater justifications to the execs to shy away from a la carte offerings. It just makes no business sense with two-tiered distribution and bundling.
Ok, now we're talking. So lets deconstruct this argument a bit (I realize its not "your" argument, it is the offered argument)
"The issue is that it would be financially irrational of them to do so, because their subscribers would defect to the online offering; they would, in effect, be offering a fire-sale on their most valuable offering."
There are three claims embedded in this argument let's break them apart individually.
1] "Users of HBO only subscribe to HBO for the original content."
Let's stipulate that this is a rational market. You've got people who pay for "all" of HBO (which spends most of its air-time showing 'movies' not original content), people who pay for it only for the original content. What is that ratio?
I'll claim that most (aka more than 51% :-) of their subscribers are movie watchers. On Comcast they have 8 channels, HBO, HBO2, HBO Family, HBO Comedy, HBO Signature, HBO Latino, HBO West, and HBO Zone. The bulk of the content is movies. Based on the value proposition "you have to pay for 8 channels at an additional $10/month ($120/year) to get your one original content show." And the fact that boxed sets of the previous year's episodes are offered for $40 - $60. I claim that the majority of HBO's paid subscription is there for the movies, and that they get HBO created content is a 'nice to have' feature.
2] "The number of people who don't subscribe to HBO because they are only interested in one show or perhaps a small number of original shows is quite small."
I don't know that number of course. But one could reason about it if you knew the resale rate of the boxed sets of original content. That is an imperfect indicator since you don't have survey data that says "are you a subscriber to HBO or not?" and you don't know which of their original content shows would continue to hold value past their air date (dramas sure, newsy stuff not so much). If someone knows what the sales rank of those boxed sets are though could get an indication. They are quite popular on bittorrent so clearly there is a demand (I know that isn't really in question)
3] "The original content is the 'most valuable offering' and the revenue generated for that net original content in a two tier model would be significantly less (fire-sale) than their current revenue."
My claim is that the number of people who subscribe to HBO just for the original content is quite low (its not a good value) thus offering the original content through another channel would not change the value proposition to a material number of current subscribers.
But capturing the revenue from people who would subscribe to a service that offered the original content would increase their bottom line.
I am really surprised they haven't A/B tested this much. Put an original series out there and offer it through a third party service as well using a modified release-window model (say a week).
HBO is subsidized by the price of the entire cable bill. There are people who get cable in large part because they want access to HBO; HBO captures a portion of that revenue too.
HBO has stated directly that they would lose money if they offered a la carte access to their content. Recurring revenue is an extremely powerful thing; if you have a business model that works that drives recurring revenue, you stick with it.
HBO's business model works extraordinarily well; they have almost 30 million subscribers.
Ok, I think you've accurately communicated HBO's reasoning for thinking this would be a bad idea. I'm not persuaded by their argument. For the reasons that I enumerated.
I completely accept that they wouldn't be persuaded by mine either if that helps. I firmly believe however that someone will adopt this sort of model and then we'll have an empirical example to talk about.
Your second paragraph here is actually the root of my argument as well! I agree strongly. Content is inevitably going to be product for the direct Internet market, and that model will eventually supplant the pay TV model.
HBO is itself effectively just a middleman (at least for most of the content we care about). Maybe we should stop talking about what HBO should do, and start talking about what companies like Blown Deadline (David Simon's production company) should do. Again, my sense is that many more potential viable productions exist than are greenlit by AMC, FX, HBO, and Showtime.
Why not just say "oh yeah? your FACE is a game of thrones"? It would contain the same amount of content and at least people wouldn't have to wonder whether you were silly enough to think you were making a real argument.
not really. just pointing out you go on silly rants here all the time. You, of all people, accusing other people of 'bitching' struck me as funny (and somewhat hypocritical). Take it for what it is worth.
People just us Game of Thrones as an example because it was popularized by The Oatmeal (and possibly others) for it's status as being easier to pirate than pay for. I think they just use the name as a symbol now because if you mentioned a different piece of content people would wonder why you mentioned that show specifically.
It's also the nerdiest show HBO has made in the last 10 years, so it has special appeal to the demographic least likely to ever pay for HBO to begin with.
Nah, True Blood is fairly mainstream. It's a paranormal romance populated entirely by good-looking people with copious sex and violence and reasonably simple plots. These are all things that mainstream viewers love, and True Blood's numbers reflect that.
Game of Thrones is a gritty medieval fantasy political drama whose viewers actually requested less sex after the first season. Game of Thrones commonly features scenes of (for example) haggard old people sitting at a table talking about whether they'll go over a bridge or whether they should walk through a forest. It is probably the geekiest show I've seen on TV in my lifetime. Maybe ST:TNG beats it, but I'm not sure.
People aren't bitching about "how hard it is to get Game of Thrones", people are bitching because they'd love to pay for it, legitimately, but without subsidizing all the bundled crap .
I have zero interest in ESPN, Disney and "reality" television. I understand fully why HBO is making more money than ever out of the bundlers' desperation, and don't complain that they're "losing" money (which isn't the case) but I would certainly prefer to be given the option to buy the content alone.
"In the meantime, people should stop bitching about how hard it is to get Game of Thrones; they sound ridiculous. Why on earth should anyone care how hard it is to see a swords-and-sorcery soap opera?"
The exact content is as irrelevant as your dislike of it. Dislike for Cable television providers didn't originate with GoT.
In other words, people are bitching because they'd love to pay what they think GoT is worth, and not what GoT is demonstrably actually worth to HBO.
Pay TV will eventually lose in the market as people (again, like Netflix) figure out how to have compelling content created for the direct online audience. But it won't lose until that happens.
Incidentally: I'm not the one who keeps bringing up Game Of Thrones.
> I'm not the one who keeps bringing up Game Of Thrones
People aren't necessarily bringing it up because of the content. More because the logistics of how it's distributed have been talked about before. By bringing up Game of Thrones, the point is to discuss the issues around it, not start a thread on the merits of the content itself.
but without subsidizing all the bundled crap. I have zero interest in ESPN, Disney and "reality" television.
You think that you are subsidizing all those shows, when you only want your shows.
But to another household, your shows are the noise that they are subsidizing to be able to watch their shows.
To a first approximation, if everyone could order exactly the channels they wanted, they would all be paying the exact same, just with fewer channels to flip through, and with more expensive bookkeeping.
This assumes uniform consumption. I suspect (based on watching people's viewing habits) that most people watch a lot more channels than I do, but I have to buy the same package as they do just to get the particular set of channels I want, so I'm not sure this is true. This is what people are getting at: I only watch three channels, but I have to pay for about 400 to get them. Meanwhile, my friends also pay for 400 channels and watch 40 of them. If everyone could order exactly the channels they wanted, it seems unlikely that I would be paying the same price they are.
If you really restrict yourself to only a few, you might be better off. But you would be the rare bird. And if people really had to pay $4 for the History Channel for just 30 minutes of Storage Wars a month(is that the right channel?), they would probably skip it.
There is also the loss of option value. (I can flip to MTV if my friends call me up and tell me there's something I need to watch, even though I really did program both my TV and DVR to remove MTV from its listings.)
Also, you are drawing the line at the "channel" boundary, but even a channel is bundling a whole bunch of shows. Someone who watches 1 hour on three channels each is consuming the same amount of TV as someone who watches 3 hours on 1 channel. Cable companies could do per-unit billing, but customers hate that. The vast majority of customers prefer to pay the all-you-can-eat price so they don't have to worry about cost if they leave the TV on or just want to flip down the dial.
Netflix is the ultimate bundling. There are thousands of things there that I have absolutely no intention of watching ever, but that doesn't mean the "fair" price is the 1/1000th of my monthly fee.
"And if people really had to pay $4 for the History Channel for just 30 minutes of Storage Wars a month(is that the right channel?), they would probably skip it.
There is also the loss of option value. (I can flip to MTV if my friends call me up and tell me there's something I need to watch, even though I really did program both my TV and DVR to remove MTV from its listings.)"
These are your opinions, though, not a persuasive argument for a person who will never regret not having the option to pay for television they will never watch.
"You think that you are subsidizing all those shows, when you only want your shows.
But to another household, your shows are the noise that they are subsidizing to be able to watch their shows."
Good. If they want 500 channels of terrible programming, they can pay more for every one of them.
"In other words, people are bitching because they'd love to pay what they think GoT is worth, and not what GoT is demonstrably actually worth to HBO."
They are bitching because they would like to be given the option to pay for HBO by whatever metric HBO uses to quantify the cost of its content (including subsidization), whatever that may be.
> Piracy costs HBO less than "fixing HBO Go" would … people should stop bitching about how hard it is to get Game of Thrones
If piracy costs less than "fixing HBO Go" would, then people should stop bitching about piracy, shouldn't they? Because this seems to imply that the impact of piracy is literally negligible.
That is a good point, consider however the counter point that wids spread bitching can be 'low cost' from the standpoint of 'keeping piracy in check', which is to say trying to lay a guilt trip on people who are on the fence.
Sure, and to secure those deals the content distributors should have to convince the creators that their channel/network is the best way to monetize their property.
So how does that still make sense in light of the trend towards households in lucrative demographic segments ditching cable TV at a rate comparable to landlines?
Is an exclusive deal with a cable TV premium channnel like Showtime really the best way for the Dexter creators to get paid? If so, I'm amazed.
No they're not. Production companies sell shows to distributors. Nothing prevents them from selling shows to Netflix, except that Netflix won't pay them as much as HBO will.
This depends on how risk averse one is. I personally would be afraid of getting on hit list for the movie association (can't remember the acronym now).
Economic theory says that either a bundling or an a la carte pricing strategy can work on its own for information goods, but if some are doing one and others are doing the other, there will be a ruinous price war. See http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/price.war.pdf for details.
Due to historical circumstance, the content providers are stuck on the bundling strategy. Consumers seem to prefer a la carte. Any startup that tries to deliver what consumers want, given established providers and the economic theory, is going to fail.
That assumes that the cost structure to producing viable content is the same for a la carte providers and bundled providers. But the cost structure isn't the same. A la carte providers can invest in just a few high-quality titles, and the most compelling titles aren't necessarily the most expensive. Bundled pay-TV is also by design stuck with an expensive "spray and pray" model.
But while cable has and needs billions of dollars of revenue they will offer billions for exclusive access to whatever content is deemed compelling (sports, Game of Thrones, HBO generally).
A la carte providers just can't compete in the exclusive bidding war yet and the value of exclusivity is worth more than the incremental revenue of a la carte sales. There will be a point at which cable penetration could be small enough that these effects change but it has a long way to fall before it gets there. In the UK Sky has massive amounts of top class exclusive content on under 50% household penetration and they are still growing and strengthening their position.
Do I have to concede that HBO and new a la carte content producers are in a bidding war? I don't follow this market that closely, but I follow it a bit, and the sense I get is that there's a threshold price at which any producer has a good shot at securing high-quality marketable content: good shows get cancelled, or never picked up at all, all the time.
Quite a lot of what we might regard as good content (with niche rather than mass appeal) could be helped by this but it won't free the big budget mega-hits any time soon.
> Once a popular piece of information—say, a movie, a song, or a software title—"leaks" into the darknet, stopping its spread becomes practically impossible. This, the engineers realized, had an important implication: to prevent piracy, digital rights management had to work not just against average users, but against the most tech-savvy users on the planet. It only takes a single user to find a vulnerability in a DRM scheme, strip the protection from the content, and release the unencrypted version to the darknet. Then millions of other users merely need to know how to use ordinary tools such as BitTorrent to get their own copies.
There are quite a few people out there who still don't understand this, who believe that a "speedbump" will work. They see things like SatTV protection schemes that are intact because people want content and they're not going to take the hard way out until they have to. Like how the PS3 got hacked once there was an incentive to.
I even remember one specific conversation with a security expert here on HN telling me about how good the PS3's security was DRM working. I predicted it would get hacked when necessary. This was not long before the hack. But it's a fundamentally biased prediction: I only needed on lucky break in the security to be right while they had to be perfect for me to be wrong.
That fundamental asymmetry, however, is exactly what makes the part I quoted work.
Loathe as I am to thank Microsoft (as a company) for much of anything, I'm glad to see that rational people actually work for them.
It's awesome to see sane-minded people shed light on the realities of what information ultimately is, and how and why we share it.
You can't keep clamping down on people for whispering secrets in each other's ears. To do so is to deny an individual of their own humanity. This is especially true, with regard to trivial pastimes, like reading works of fiction and experiencing the recording of music, sounds and abstract noise that we create with the hopes that people will actually listen to them.
Hopefully, these aspects of human behavior will be embraced as normal facts of life, rather than rejected as malicious and criminal. People who create content, after all, are really paid thinkers in the Greek sense, and that should be a truth that's understood by all these stubborn rights holders.
I hope the reaction to investigations like this will encourage tolerance of file sharing, rather than harden the resolve to purge it from whatever society we find ourselves living in decades from now.
Thank you, Peter Biddle, Bryan Willman, Paul England and Marcus Peinado!
> Outside Microsoft, critics charged that Biddle's project represented the beginning of the end for the PC as an open platform. They feared that Microsoft would use the technology to exert control over which software could be executed on Windows PCs, freezing out open source operating systems and reducing users' freedom to run the software of their choice.
Nope, it's Apple that got there first with iOS.
I think the thesis on how the darknet would defeat DRM was correct... but only assuming OS's and hardware that actually gave owners control of what software they ran on the devices they own.
In a world where you void your warranty and possibly make it impossible to upgrade your OS (_and_ possibly break the law in the US!), by 'jailbreaking' your device so that you can install software on it without that software having been given a stamp of approval by the device vendor... I'm not so sure. And I suspect DRM was the real motivation for setting up the ecology this way on iOS -- where Apple managed to succeed, both technologically and in the court of public opinion, where Microsoft had previously failed, in doing exactly what people were scared Microsoft was doing -- reducing users' freedom to run the software of their choice.
And that's what looks like the future of consumer computing now, no? The idea that a device owner should have the right to install whatever software they want on their device... is going to seem a quaint relic of a bygone age in 10 years, and not just for 'mobile'.
Everything you say is true, however I have my doubts that Treacherous Computing is the future.
Apple succeeded because (1) they practically created new markets and had no competition initially, (2) people treat these devices as appliances but only because they don't realize what these devices are able to do and (3) initially iOS was not a platform, so developers took it as a gift when it happened.
In the meantime however Android came and quickly surged in popularity. On most Android devices you can get root privileges really easy, by installing an app or something similar. It allows third-party sources for apps, it allows apps in Google Play that are banned in iTunes (e.g. call and sms blockers, battery savers), apps that work without avoiding your warranty, it doesn't need permissions from the careers to do tethering, it gives you access to the APN settings and Firefox is allowed, not to mention that it can be forked, being more open than Windows ever was.
The number one complaint I hear from people that own iPads is that iPads are more limited than PCs. And take for instance calls and sms blockers ... people with iPhones don't bitch about the lack of such functionality because they don't realize it is possible. I also remember fondly the day Apple banned Google Voice because it duplicated existing functionality.
People like to claim that Android is more popular because of the support it gets from careers. That's only half the story. The other half is that Android phones are more capable, simply because iOS is defective by design.
As always, the market will decide the future of computing. But Android versus iOS is like the PC versus Gaming Consoles. And if you remember, PCs won for gaming by a wide margin, pushing consoles like the Playstations into forever small niches.
You should also not underestimate the people's need for piracy. They don't need to pirate stuff on their iPads, because their iPads are treated as dumb devices. But take that capability away from their PCs and you'll see real voting with wallets. After all, the Internet was built for pirating porn ;-)
I thought jailbreaking was legal now? [1] It seems to me that both jailbreaking and pirating iOS apps is a pretty common activity even among non-technical people.
Obviously OS level DRM like iOS makes it harder for people but people still seem very keen on doing it and the incentive to do so isn't going away. Piracy, just like Shrinkage [2] is a fact of doing business.
jailbreaking _phones_ is _possibly temporarily_ legal, as an exception to DMCA by the Librarian of Congress which has to be explicitly renewed every few years.
Jailbreaking tablets is not legal.
Providing or distributing software intended to help you jailbreak is also illegal, even though jailbreaking may be legal.
I don't think so, at least not without the government imposing laws that effectively banned them.
The cost of building a complete computer with an ARM SOC (think raspberry pi etc) is coming down to a level where you don't have to buy your computers from mega corporations.
If restrictions on other devices become more and more severe it will eventually get to a stage where it will start to bite Joe average (It won't let him look at all those pictures of ladies doing things his wife won't, or it deleted them all because he broke some obscure clause on page 63 of the EULA).
At some point Joe runs into his nerdy friend who has a weird looking computer that can do all kinds of things Joe would love for his computer to be able to do. Supply and demand does the rest.
> The cost of building a complete computer with an ARM SOC (think raspberry pi etc) is coming down to a level where you don't have to buy your computers from mega corporations.
The Raspberry Pi is a SoC made by Broadcom, a US$7 billion/year company with 11000 employees. While admittedly this is a bit smaller than Foxconn, Lenovo, Apple, Acer, Asus, IBM, HP, or Dell, it still seems like it qualifies as a "mega corporation" to me. (The Raspberry Pi also has a circuit board and stuff, but the SoC is entirely capable of enforcing DRM on its own.)
I don't see that. Sure - popular "computers" are not fully re-programmable, but to say they will go away entirely is probably not true. There will always need to be someone that "makes the magic" and, IMHO, this cannot be done on a locked down device (nevermind the fact that developers wouldn't put up with a computer they couldn't debug).
As long as there are folks like you and I that wish to have a computer (as traditionally known) there will be vendors catering to our wishes.
I agree: someone "makes the magic". But what if it's like hydroponics and gro-lights were during the worst Federal excesses of the "Drug War"? Anyone buying a real computer (not an appliance) needs some kind of licensing and/or certification. Manufacturing real computers requires certified and licensed manufacturing and a different certification/licensing for design? The pace of progress would slow dramatically. Since fewer and fewer people get into programming, we won't have wild and crazy folks who try new and interesting things all the time. No Moxie Marlinspike. No Jeff Bezos. No Marc Andreesen. IT would become like making airplanes, hidebound, rigorously engineered by crank turning second-raters. It would never ever change, except in terms of marketing, like cigarettes.
This would be ideal for the status quo, and maybe even for a lot of consumers. It would certainly be ideal for the corporate interests, the few that survive.
And yet the airlines move a huge volume of people from point A to point B safely, reliably and inexpensively every day, at speeds and scale which would stagger the airline moguls of the 1930s.
Does that make airplane nerds like me who think the DC-3 is a good approximation of The Perfect Airplane (rugged, reliable, beautiful) sad? Sure it does. But all those passengers aren't sad. A DC-3 trip from New York to California was a bumpy, sixteen-hour flight with multiple stops for refueling. The same trip on a 757 is a smooth ride above the weather that only takes a few hours and has no stops. And it's cheaper too -- that 1930s trip would have cost more than $4,000 in today's dollars. The 757 ride costs around $550.
This is what happens when industries mature: they become safer, cheaper, and boring.
Safe, cheaper and boring may be an artifact of the physics of flight in Earth's atmosphere, combined with an intertwined US defense and aerospace industry. Why should we let corporate and government interests "unring" the general computing bell? Why should we let corporate and government interests stuff the genie of democratic publishing back in the lamp?
General purpose computing hardware got super cheap by way of the mass market, and mass production. General purpose programming got cheap and universally available by way of mass communication. In 1983 a C compiler on VMS cost some thousands of dollars. Today, GCC and Clang and Pcc are free, and they do optimizations that Tartan Labs could only dream about.
That's a hugely different path than the carefully-cultivated air travel industry took. I think you're underestimating the effects of the FAA and the DoD on how air travel looks today.
Have you looked at passengers on airplanes lately? I admit it's been a few years for me, but last I saw, airline passengers were, by and large, miserable. They can't wait to get off the airplane. They may prefer current air travel to not seeing their family or getting paid an order of magnitude less, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't be happier with it if it were better. And it could be a lot better.
Just like the idea of making Raspberry Pi for as many children as possible to spur a generation of engineers, the idea that the most popular computers will be closed, will have the exact opposite effect. You don't need open computers to just be available in a tiny corner of the world, and expect big innovations from it. You need them to be available to as many people as possible.
Agreed. But in the DRM conversation, anyone having one means they can use their digital freedom to bypass DRM, the product of which could be consumed even on the hypothetical majority's closed devices.
I worked on the Palladium/NGSCB team from 2002 to 2005 - ultimately the team shipped BitLocker in Vista, but approx half of the team were siphoned off in (IIRC) 2004 to work on Hypervisor so the engineering effort ended up contributing to two pretty important OS features.
It was pretty stunningly apparent at the time that the Internet was very good for information sharing, that crushing Napster hadn't exactly stopped people from sharing digital media, and that trying to make media exceedingly secure and hard to use was not a winning strategy.
If you want a customer to pay for your product, you have to offer value - if it's both more expensive and harder to use, you've made adoption pretty unlikely. In '03, MP3 players were entirely prevalent, mostly didn't support useful DRM, and the music industry mostly sold little silver discs which came with no restrictions.
So it wasn't that the threat model to make music readily redistributable for free was "the smartest black hats out there figure out how to crack your crypto and DRM", it was "an average user rips a CD into MP3s and shares it".
As you might expect, it was frustrating to try to deal with the competing demands from Hollywood at the time. People mostly didn't bother attacking the DRM - they just went and created or file-shared to get the more usable files without the protection layer. But there was still a great deal of insistence that whatever content protection layer was put in could be a vault to keep media safe forever, rather than a speedbump to piracy. (Meanwhile, of course, CDs were raw bitstreams of high fidelity audio data...)