> Can't wait for the time when i wont be allowed to access a website because I have unsigned drivers running...
If that happens, it will create a market opportunity for websites without DRM or such checks. If you fuck with the ergonomics, you necessarily always create a market opportunity for competitors IMO. That being said, I also would rather use open computing platforms where I can easily install whatever OS, drivers, hardware or userland software I please.
Will it though? From what I see anecdotally, people will just accept it as the new normal sooner or later.
Just like when Android rolled out a feature that enables apps to prevent you screenshotting them. At first it was annoying but now nobody cares.
I tend to agree. This ended up longer than expected, sorry.
There's the theory of how incentives should work in free markets, and then there's the practice of exactly how savvy consumers can really be, and whether non-consumer interests can organize themselves in a way that easily overpowers the consumers.
I've thought about this recently regarding hardware DRM in Android phones. Google has Widevine which has different levels of support, and Netflix, for example, will only send high definition streams if your device supports L1 Widevine which means it will only be decrypted in "secure" sections of hardware and the user cannot access these areas. This is intended to stop user access to the unencrypted media.
This hardware is widely available in Android devices already, so why would Netflix* do otherwise? And if you want to stream HD from Netflix then you'll get a device that supports it because Netflix require it. However, how did our devices end up with this technology to begin with? If consumers acted in their own best interest, why would they pay to have this extra technology in their devices that protects somebody else's interest? If this technology wasn't on our devices already, do we think that Netflix wouldn't be offering HD streams anyway? Basically, if consumers could organize as effectively as corporate interest, would this technology have made it to our devices at all?
It's possible that it would have. Perhaps overall people would deem it worthwhile to acknowledge and protect corporate rights holders so that they can continue to produce the media they want to consume and stop people consuming it for free. Personally, I would not have accepted this bargain and I would have left it up to the media companies to manage their own risks and rewards, and I strongly suspect that they would have found profitable ways of doing so that would include non-DRM HD streaming. I think it's tough to say what an educated consumer would think on average because so few consumers think about these things and those that do may have a strong bias that led them to research it in the first place.
* I'm saying Netflix here because it's easier, but in reality I'm sure a lot of the content they licence will require DRM so it's not entirely up to them
The widevine situation puzzles me even more because music and film rights holders will be at a perpetual disadvantage as long as you can point a camera at the screen and plug your drm device into the line in slot on your motherboard.
If that happens, it will create a market opportunity for websites without DRM or such checks. If you fuck with the ergonomics, you necessarily always create a market opportunity for competitors IMO. That being said, I also would rather use open computing platforms where I can easily install whatever OS, drivers, hardware or userland software I please.