DRM and advertising tech have a similar problem of bad execution. Sure, there exists a way to do each of these that many may consider "reasonable" but in practice industries have shown that they would rather be obnoxious and make everything annoying or just much more difficult than necessary. This means they can't be trusted to do it well, and the solution must be to avoid it completely (DRM-free content and ad blocker).
I don't get this - why is DRM is friggning' NECESSARY? What makes it this forced law of nature?
The current multi-billion media conglomerates grew at times when being able to copy a piece of content from TV was encoded in the LAW. Content providers earned billions of dollars at times when you could press REC on your VCR and ("THE HORROR" now every content provider shill screams) rewatch the show many times and (GASP) give the tape to your friends to watch too!
What exactly was so horrible at being able to rewatch, store and borrow a movie to a friend that now seems to completely incomprehensible to people here on HN and outside? What kind of irreversible damage is done by existence of torrents when WB, Netflix and other content providers earn record profits?
Why are we even debating DRM as something that has a right to exist and helps anyone?
EDIT: Ergh, sorry for the tone, by DRM is something that really touches my nerves a bit.
some people used to record the chart show off Radio 1 and share the cassettes with their friends. It didn't stop me buying music, I couldn't afford to buy music and would have done without it. In fact it turned me into a music fan, and once older I bought a lot more music because of it.
Where the official sources beat the torrents is on convenience. Spotify and Apple whatever are easy to use and busy people will pay.
A similar effect is possible with TV shows and films. I have Amazon prime, and Netflix. Prime costs me £79 a year, Netflix costs me £7.99 a month I think. Now I have a Youview box. I can watch Netflix on it but not Prime. For prime I have to buy another device or use my laptop. I wanted to see what the 'Game of Thrones' fuss was about, neither has it (amazon charges per episode actually). NowTV from Sky does, so I got a trial subscription, but the NowTV app on the Youview box only works for films, not TV shows (!), and the NowTV pc app doesn't work on Linux.
So I pay for three services and still can't watch due to petty rights issues. I could watch them all on Kodi for free of course, but that would be wrong (even though I have paid for them elsewhere).
In summary, if they refuse to get with the 21st Century they will sell less shows. If they allowed easier access to the shows they would beat piracy with convenience. DRM just makes it harder. Don't get me started on HDMI DRM
Well, to be fair, the VCR didn't have a distribution system attached that allows sharing worldwide.
I still agree with you, though; times change, and nobody "deserves" business-model protection. The legacy copyright industries already get massive state subsidies through the legal enforcement of artificial monopolies - degrading everyone's computing to prop them up further is insane.
>I still agree with you, though; times change, and nobody "deserves" business-model protection.
Is that true though?
Because laws against theft (physical theft of actual products I mean, let's not get into whether "copying" is theft here) are a business-model protection too.
As are most business laws (e.g. contract law).
Why pay at a restaurant when you can just walk out and run for it? Isn't making it illegal a "business model protection"?
So what makes some business models (selling physical stuff) more protectable?
You're making false comparison here. DRM is extremely invasive - it's akin to being forced to wear handcuffs inside a store to prevent theft, or perhaps being strip searched every time you walk past a store. Both of those actions can also be sold as "business protection against theft", but our legal framework currently says that we're ready to tolerate some amount of shoplifting and we're not going to allow stores to strip people naked at the exit to check for stolen goods. The profit fallout of shoplifting is just too small to allow for such egregious attacks on legitimate customers.
Same story with DRM - yes, piracy IS illegal. But DRM as a response is hugely disproportionate to damage done, causes huge issues to LEGITIMATE buyers. What DRM proponents defend is attacking paying customers with restrictions, lockdowns and costs to hunt a rather small profit loss (the relative smallness of lost sales due to piracy have been repeatedly demonstrated in these last years).
At least for the US, I think you are overestimating the restrictions on private establishments.
Stores don't do invasive things because it doesn't make business sense, not because the legal system particularly enjoins them.
Like if I opened a candy shop that required agreeing to an NDA for entry, what law do you think would make me let people in without signing the NDA? It might not be enforced, but there isn't anything that would stop me from requiring the signature for entry (other than it being silly).
The risk to a shoplifter is unfathomably larger than the risk to a pirate, and the leakage is infinitely less.
Analogies generally don't serve this debate well. Saying DRM is like physically invasive security to your person is just as ridiculous as Studios' claims that piracy is the same as theft. Both attempt to communicate real issues, but are ridiculously inaccurate.
> So what makes some business models (selling physical stuff) more protectable?
Food is a scarce[1] resource. Concepts like "property" and "theft" relate specifically to managing scarcity. Taking food deprives the owner of their meal, because we cannot make perfect copies of baryonic matter. After Shannon introduced the idea of "digital communication" that allowed information to be copied indefinitely without errors, the bit was no longer scarce.
Note: I didn't say anything about how the information was created in the first place. The creation of data - which requires work/energy - should not be conflated with copying existing data. The method used by the restaurant to create or acquire a recipe doesn't create the scarcity that is inherent to the food that implements that recipe.
Laws against theft, contract enforcement, etc. are general laws for the benefit of everyone. (They also derive from common law, which dates back over a thousand years, as opposed to statutory laws that are routinely bought by lobbying, but let's put that aside.) They are a sort of 'legal primitive' - don't cheat, don't steal - that attempt to provide a baseline of trust in society.
Mandates that computers must respect special rules based on legal definitions are laws that tell me how my machines must operate and how you must build machines. They are arbitrary restrictions the degrade capabilities (make the machines less valuable) solely for the purpose of enabling a few industries to be lazy and not figure out how to be relevant in a changing world.
If you want to go down that path, you're going to be "picking winners and losers" - something I hear we are supposed to dislike. Which business models "deserve" protections?
- Do long-haul truckers "deserve" to keep working in the face of self-driving trucks?
- Do corner groceries "deserve" protection from Whole Foods/Amazon or Walmart's logistics innovations?
> So what makes some business models [...] more protectable?
As a descriptive matter, it appears that that's closely related to one's investment in lobbying.
>If you want to go down that path, you're going to be "picking winners and losers" - something I hear we are supposed to dislike. Which business models "deserve" protections?
I'd say that should not be up to the availability of the relevant technology to decide, but up to society.
Just because we can obliterate or replace something doesn't automatically mean we should, or that it would be better for us if we did.
So I'm perfectly OK with society picking winners and losers, and not OK with a jungle race where "invisible hands" and market forces (including the one's people forget, like lobbies, monopolies and under the table deals) decide.
> So I'm perfectly OK with society picking winners and losers, and not OK with a jungle race where "invisible hands" and market forces (including the one's people forget, like lobbies, monopolies and under the table deals) decide.
Uh, I specifically called out lobbies and monopolies.
And in theory I agree with you. In practice, "society" doesn't serve that role. The "invisible hands" are exactly the actors doing the picking.
Don't get me wrong - I love me some theory, it is so much cleaner than the real world. But we don't get to live there.
Business model protection is if some particular model gets legal privileges that give it an advantage over competing business models without a justification based on the common good. So, none of the examples that you cite are cases of business model protection.
Just because a business model (e.g. retail sales) is so prevalent as to be invisible as such, and laws that enable it seem like natural laws or obvious for the common good, doesn't mean it's not a business model like any other. Just that some are unable to see it as such.
There has been criticism of the prevalent model too (e.g. from the "property is theft" type to money-less sharing communities etc).
Contract laws and laws forbidding theft (and establishing the private ownership of physical objects) are literally cornerstones of almost all human societies that ever existed. Protecting retail is incidental.
Consider this thought experiment: we invented Star Trek replicators and made them as expensive as computers or microwave ovens. Retail business would, and IMO rightfully should, literally stop existing that very moment. Trying to restrict replicating everyday object would be wrong, and would go against the very nature of replicator-enabled reality.
This is to show that laws should align with the reality they exist in, instead of making lives of the many worse to make lives of the few a bit easier.
>Consider this thought experiment: we invented Star Trek replicators and made them as expensive as computers or microwave ovens. Retail business would, and IMO rightfully should, literally stop existing that very moment. Trying to restrict replicating everyday object would be wrong, and would go against the very nature of replicator-enabled reality.
I don't see why it would be inherently "wrong". Wrong is for humans to decide.
Consider this alternate though experiment: we invented a device giving people the ability to murder anyone in the world without anybody having proof of who did it. Would it be wrong trying to restrict that machine's sales and use, and would it go against the very nature of killing-without-evidence-machine-enabled reality?
In your example, it wouldn't be wrong, because this machine enables severe violation of one of the fundamental things people agree on - the wish of individuals to live, and live without fear of getting killed. On one level up, for humans as social animals, there are pretty universal concepts of fairness, that seem to include personal property rights (communism tried to do away with that, and it created a disaster) and the desire for reward for one's work. Societies tend to enshrine those desires in laws. We also have desires for sharing and social expectations that it's good for people with surplus to share with people who have less than they need. Moreover, the concept of helping those in need is also pretty fundamental as humans go.
I bring it up because your example with murder-machine deals with a different set of concepts than the replication machine.
The replicator example was meant to show that retail business model doesn't make sense when there's zero marginal cost of producing and distributing a good past the very first item - retail stops bringing any value to customers. Trying to artificially limit replicators to save retail would be wrong, both by going against the fundamental concepts of society and by making something trivial and good much more difficult to perform.
By the same line of thinking, it's worth considering whether DRM and IP laws aren't protecting some business models that don't make sense anymore, and by this causing damage to society.
Because it prevents people from creating wealth for themselves in order to make sure that other people can profit from selling to them, thus creating a privilege that hurts the common good. Aka "protection of a business model".
That does not make it business model protection. Please try to actually understand what people write, it doesn't help discussions if you simply ignore the other's point.
True, but they still kept earning billions through peak global torrents distribution and Netflix happily made people pay for them because they were accessible. And now they run after the DRM train like everyone else.
>True, but they still kept earning billions through peak global torrents distribution
Isn't that kind of irrelevant though?
Whether a business still makes money is not an argument as to whether torrenting their stuff would be OK.
A physical business (e.g. clothes store) might make millions even though people steal stuff, but we wouldn't consider that as making stealing OK.
(And I don't care for the "copying is not stealing" argument. It might or it might not be, but I'm making an analogy here, and the core of it is: whether a business is still coming out on top, making money, etc, doesn't mean another practice against them is OK).
It's extremely relevant when we're debating how far we're letting companies go at restricting your freedoms and where do we curb them.
A similar example: warranties. In EU at least, we demand that companies invest money to make their hardware work at least 24 months without issues. Even though this costs corporations money and they'd probably prefer your TV to die in 24 hours because that would increase their revenue flow. It benefits the society at large and makes life better for everyone at the expense of some cash flow of businesses.
I see DRM as the same kind of issue - it actively ruins cultural experience of society at large, forces locked down devices on people, demands that culture must not be experienced repeatedly and forces people to become renters of content. I'd prefer businesses to lose some profits due to piracy instead of having to tolerate all the horse shit DRM pushes on us.
And my talk about profits is all about that - even though piracy exists, businesses still can generate huge profits. As such I argue that thus DRM isn't necessary at all considering all horrible consequences it brings.
> Whether a business still makes money is not an argument as to whether torrenting their stuff would be OK.
But it should be in whether or not we spend lots of resources in helping them to increase their profits further.
> A physical business (e.g. clothes store) might make millions even though people steal stuff, but we wouldn't consider that as making stealing OK.
But at the same time we also don't attempt to prevent all theft, right? I mean, we absolutely could take tax money and have police officers strip you naked whenever you leave some store to make sure that thefts don't happen. We don't. Why not?
Playing devil's advocate, is a lot of tax money spent on protecting copyright? Aren't most infringers "caught" by private companies hired by the industry, who then send DMCA takedowns, letters to ISPs and file civil lawsuit?
Tax money is not the only way that society spends resources on enforcing rules.
Those DMCA takedowns, for example, need to be processed by hosting platforms and ISPs, so they have to pay people for doing so, and that's then necessarily part of the price that you pay for ISP service, or that, I dunno, youtube video makers get less revenue from their videos.
Just because the state doesn't spend tax money on it, doesn't mean it doesn't consume public resources.
And much more insidious are the opportunity costs, because they are more or less invisible: For example, the DMCA makes it a criminal offense to circumvent any technology that was intended to "protect copyright" or something to that effect. Now, there might be the opportunity for who knows what kind of technical innovation if that wasn't illegal. People could possibly build all kinds of nifty devices that allow you to use media in new ways or circumstances that would be perfectly legal as far as copyright is concerned--but people don't because that would be criminal. How much value for society is thus not created as a side effect of this ban? That value is also part of what we spend on enforcing copyright.
Or how about security holes in DRM software? As it's illegal to reverse-engineer DRM software, security researchers don't touch DRM software. But essentially all software that security researchers have ever looked at does have vulnerabilities. So, who knows how many people have been hacked via vulnerabilities in DRM software? How many people's data was stolen that way? Maybe people were the victim of identity theft due to vulnerabilities in DRM software? All of that also would be part of the resources that we spend on this.
Or what about when John Deere holds the data hostage that the tractors that they supposedly sold to farmers collects? And people aren't even allowed to swap out the tractor's software for their own due to DRM and the above criminalization of circumventing it?
You have to consider all the negative consequences that the existence of those rules has, because that all comes out of our collective wealth in order to prop up their business model.
>The current multi-billion media conglomerates grew at times when being able to copy a piece of content from TV was encoded in the LAW. Content providers earned billions of dollars at times when you could press REC on your VCR and ("THE HORROR" now every content provider shill screams) rewatch the show many times and (GASP) give the tape to your friends to watch too!
Yes, but you couldn't give the content to everybody in the world. And you had to waste 1 hour or so in real-time to make a copy (which was degraded anyway).
> And you had to waste 1 hour or so in real-time to make a copy (which was degraded anyway).
No, you didn't. You either watched while recording, or just started recording, went to do something else and came back in an hour. Either way, the time wasn't wasted.
Why constrain your response to the arguments above? Why not try to answer by covering the whole spectrum and the gist of what I tried to convey?
The gist of my argument was about the scalability of today's piracy vs the old time VHS piracy. And that doesn't change just because you could "watch the show you copied" too so "that time wasn't wasted".
The "watched while recording" part only makes sense for a show you already wanted to watch. And you just got one copy out of it. And the "do something else" part still takes a few minutes.
On top of those you still needed the physical giving of the tape to the other person, PLUS to cover the non-insignificant cost of the tape. And lets not even get about how much selection you could produce or store at your home.
In contrast, today you can download and share 10,000s of shows without having watched any of them and without wanting to watch them in the fist place, in just the time it takes to make an upload or share a link. And not just to one person, but to the WHOLE internet.
Only the original pirate needs to do any real-time capture (and that's only for some special cases, like camera captures of movies or VCRed shows -- more often than not, they can just rip something in a few minutes).
And even them, after the capture can immediately share the digital copy with BILLIONS of people, instead of the just one person you got in the VHS days.
In Germany for example there is a specific amount of money you have to pay on devices or storage capacity regarding devices or mediums which reproduce or store data.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauschalabgabe
If you buy a external drive with less than 1TB you pay 7€ extra taxes.
> The current multi-billion media conglomerates grew at times when being able to copy a piece of content from TV was encoded in the LAW. Content providers earned billions of dollars at times when you could press REC on your VCR and ("THE HORROR" now every content provider shill screams) rewatch the show many times and (GASP) give the tape to your friends to watch too!
TV and Movie industry spent considerable effort tackling exactly that type of home taping. You might want to have a look at Disney, who wanted to have "single use" video tapes that would need to be sent back to a factory to be rewound, or special DVDs that were sent in sealed packs and would oxidise to uselessness within 24 hours of being opened.
They did, they failed and they still earned billions at that time. Why are we entertaining their sociopathic ideas now?
It's not that they're trying to stop mass distribution, they're trying to prevent you from rewatching content later (shows regularly disappear from Netflix and similar services), prevent you from showing them or sharing to their friends (does any service let you share a show from an ipad to another ipad?) or even let you watch anything when you're offline (how many services let you download their full catalog for later watching?).
Music downloads are largely DRM-free these days, but piracy is still as low as ever. It really is just powerful media companies abusing their power to make a little more money.
press REC on your VCR and… make a worse copy of the already pretty bad copy you received over the air. Subsequent generation copies would be really bad. Sharing your copy with a friend involved physically transferring it and possibly not getting it back.
It really isn't comparable to a directly copyable digital form.
If you like the 1970s way, prop your phone up on a table and use the camera to record a movie off of Netflix. You will have a much better result than we did with VHS tape in the 1970s. You can probably find a filter to crap up the video to look like VHS.
VCR's where generally better recordings than the 'cam' footage of the latest blockbuster leaked on the internet. People sometimes are watching films before the special effects are done.
The core issue is if a company can make 501 million instead of 500 million they have zero incentives to make less money. Which is why cable companies scrimp on backhaul even when it's a rounding error on their costs. And why companies are so focused on DRM etc.
You can say that, but I don't think the price levels of current media (particularly digital media) are set to maximize profit. I think they're set to embed an idea of high value, and I'm uncertain of the purpose. It could be for legal reasons, prestige, accounting, I'm not sure.
I recently got an Amazon Fire stick, attached to a projector, after many years without any kind of television. Naturally, a projector hitting a 100+ inch screen magnifies any flaws in compression or image quality, so you want to play back good quality media. Amazon generally serves up just about acceptable image quality (I'd say they're about 1 standard deviation worse than Netflix in encode quality), but the prices are just ridiculously high - they're about 10 times more than I'd be willing to pay. As a result, I don't watch anything that isn't available via Netflix or Prime, and haven't bought or rented any other content. I'd spend low thousands GBP on media - I have in other form factors - but not if it nets me only 200 hours or so of content. The prices are just ridiculously high.
IMO, this is mostly around the pain of spending money not the actual cost of content.
Cable runs around 1k/year or more and has advertising, which used to be a fairly normal thing upper middle class people bought. Split that into into individual purchases and your likely spending far less. You just happen to notice that your spending money where subscriptions are a background thing.
Also, don't forget Netflix DVD is still an option.
I'm not in the US. The idea of paying 100 GBP per month for cable is alien to me, never mind 200. It's just not worth that much.
Physical media is considerably less expensive than digital media, and has a secondary market. I wouldn't bother with renting physical media ever again.
Imo there's a price corrective missing for digital media.
Just TV. Bundle savings vs just internet = basic package + DVR + Movie channels + fees & taxes. Actual bill over 120/mo.
1k/y or 83$/month is on the low side for just TV. A 200$ a month cable bill was actually fairly common a few years ago once you have multiple DVR's and premium channels etc.
Note this is really deceptive and even then it quickly hit's over 83$/month before getting HBO, or equipment, or fees, or taxes. https://www.verizon.com/home/fiostv/
But that "worse quality" was still, for many people, "good enough"
Aside from that, I think you're arguing that it's a matter of scale, parent argues that it's the same thing.
A similar, modern example might be a slow, error prone cellular connection where a user copies 1 movie a day to their friends at tremendous cost to their cell bill.
DRM and other anti-piracy measures are all about making piracy harder, not impossible. It's not an all or nothing venture.
Every little bit you make copying harder results in fewer people copying.
Cntrl C Cntrl V makes it so my mom can pirate. And she did during the Napster days. But she can't figure out BitTorrent on her own. Well, she could, but there is a learning curve, and most people aren't interested in it.
They don't have to make it impossible. They just have to make it annoying.
Easy piracy destroyed the music industry. The other media industries are rightfully suspicious.
The DRM approach to piracy is an all or nothing thing. Once one person cracks a DRM setup they can distribute any movie protected by that setup to as many people as they want in whatever medium they want.
I think propagandizing piracy has had a lot more to do with its decline than ease of use. Try using popcorn time. It is incredibly easy.
I don't even know that this is true. In my personal experience (so completely anecdotal), pirated content is always much easier to ingest than paid, DRM'd content. There hasn't ever been a single DRM system that actually made piracy more difficult. If anything, it just made usage for legitimate users difficult. The only exception that I can think of were the DRM systems for video games that existed (and some still do) where it takes them a week or 2 to crack the DRM. Even then, the people that weren't going to pay for those games just wait until the DRM is cracked. It didn't actually make pirating the games harder, it just made it inconvenient for a little while longer but that's never been shown to equate to more paying customers.
While not exactly false, this statement bears too much of a negative connotation. I'd rephrased it as "Easy sharing of digitized content forced the restructuring of content-distribution industries" or something like that.
There's a huge difference between lending your friend a VHS and uploading a torrent. And the idea of owning a license to a piece of intellectual property shouldn't be a hard thing to wrap one's head around if you work in software.
I can wrap my mind around idea of licensing just fine. That in no way means I agree with current one-sided state of affairs in copyright law.
I also don't see why did you bring torrenting into the debate - do you consider me sharing am movie to my friend from my iPad to his a crime? Is that the same as torrenting? Or why am I prevented from doing that due to DRM?
Strictly speaking, you don't have the right to do that under the licensing agreement for digital media. You're perfectly within your rights to lend your friend a DVD.
Indeed. Why is that acceptable state of affairs? Remember, we have a law that essentially tells everyone that lending / selling your DVD is legal. Why isn't there such a law for digital content? Why can I sell a Die Hard DVD but not a Die Hard movie file?
> What exactly was so horrible at being able to rewatch, store and borrow a movie to a friend that now seems to completely incomprehensible to people here on HN and outside?
You're forgetting that VCRs and other analog tape-based media had generational losses; every copy made degraded the quality noticeably and put wear on the tape which, from the studios' perspective, kept copying under control. That isn't so for digital recordings.
Beyond that, one can't be against DRM and for GPL enforcement at the same time and remain logically consistent. Both hinge on the owners being able to enforce certain rights granted by law on intellectual property. (Note that I'm not defending DRM here, just pointing out the facts.)
> Beyond that, one can't be against DRM and for GPL enforcement at the same time and remain logically consistent.
One can absolutely do that. Technical restraints and legal remedies are not the same thing, and it's completely consistent to say that DRM should be unavailable to both proprietary and free works while legal remedies should be available to both.
> Technical restraints and legal remedies are not the same thing, and it's completely consistent to say that DRM should be unavailable to both proprietary and free works while legal remedies should be available to both.
"legal remedies should be available to both" was tried for media; that was the era where the studios were suing individuals for copyright violations. Needless to say, that proved to be impractical for a variety of reasons.
Unless your intent is to draft laws that specifically don't work for causes you don't like and works only for causes you do, i.e. negotiating in bad faith, you're going to have to admit that the existence of IP rights implies that that other IP rightsholders are permitted to build some mechanism that works to enforce their rights.
And, again, note I'm not defending DRM. I find it just as annoying and inconvenient as everyone else.
Your argument only works if technical restraints are (a) necessary and (b) effective. If they’re not necessary, i.e. rightsholders can profit without needing to “enforce their rights” either legally or technically, then the limited effectiveness of lawsuits against individuals is not the end of the world. (This doesn’t contradict a belief that legal relief should be available in principle, and in any case, it is available in practice against large-scale or commercial operations.) On the other hand, if technical restraints aren’t effective, then rightsholders gain little by imposing them, and lose little by removing them. Thus, even under the assumption that piracy is a huge cost and can’t be solved without technical restraints, it wouldn’t be inconsistent to advocate banning them, because piracy couldn’t be solved with them either!
In fact, there’s a good argument that DRM is neither necessary nor effective: the former as demonstrated by the music industry, the latter as demonstrated by the movie industry (where the availability of new releases on torrent sites is a matter of course, as it has been for many years). True, it’s more complicated than that, as both technical and market factors greatly affect the utility of DRM in any specific situation. But as a general principle…
First of all, you're moving the goalposts from a policy position being logically consistent to policy being practically equivalent.
Anyway, in practical terms, GPL and BSD license terms are violated all the time, and only a handful of the most egregious examples ever see a courtroom. I don't see how that's categorically different from the situation of works with other licenses.
> you're going to have to admit that the existence of IP rights implies that that other IP rightsholders are permitted to build some mechanism that works to enforce their rights.
Yes. And not one bit more. Show me a DRM system that would never overstep the legal boundaries of their legally enforcable rights, and your argument maybe makes some sense.
> Beyond that, one can't be against DRM and for GPL enforcement at the same time
So, one can only be for the enforcement of laws against homicide if one is in favor of capital punishment? Is that roughly the point that you are making?
They also have a problem of delivering more than was traditionally available, normalizing greater intrusiveness. Ad tech allows a staggering amount of control and analysis that never existed with traditional media advertising. DRM lets you not only prevent user copying like old-school "copy protection", it lets you enforce any arbitrary scheme of "rights" that you can code into the DRM system (e.g. you could make viewing video on high-end displays exclusive to a "premium" option). Advertisers and publishers are now accustomed to these and will fight any attempt to take them away.
As others have mentioned, music is almost copyright free. Book publishers like springer will sell you watermarked ebooks, and you can find almost any game actually worth your time on gog.com.
If producers and consumers wanted, the same could happen for movies. If creators and consumers wanted, copyright and patents could be reformed to stop the gouging of culture, creativity, and entrepreneurship for short-term profit.
While I agree with the rest of your post, I think that comparing these two is not quite accurate. DRM-free content should, I think, be compared to ad-free content; and blocking ads should probably be compared to stripping DRM. (For the record, I'm not making any moral judgement here; I do the first two as much as possible, and the last two all the time.) My point is that the consumption of DRM-free content shows the seller that you approve of it, and encourages the production of more; whereas the use of an ad blocker doesn't (or at least doesn't seem to, in any direct way) discourage the use of ads.
