> why pay and be limited in the way you can watch the thing you paid for when unlimited access exists for free?
Oh I dunno... have you tried asking one of Netflix's 140M subscribers? Or the 26M people who use Amazon prime video?
The point of DRM isn't to make it impossible to pirate things -- it's to make it difficult enough to get pirated content that most people would prefer to pay a few bucks a month to watch things via a channel where rights holders are compensated. And by that measure, it seems to be working pretty well.
I'm not sure for how much longer it will keep working though. With the increased fragmentation of streaming services (and geoblocking), pirating content is starting to feel more convenient yet again.
When it comes to music, I can most of the time listen to it legally via Spotify or Google Play Music/YouTube Music. When it comes to movies (and especially for older movies), the rights holders give me no choice but to pirate because they simply don't make it available for me to obtain in a legal way.
As an extreme example: I was looking up an old childhood movie "Hugo: Djungeldjuret". The rights holder have stopped distributing the movie and they no longer sell it, but they do issue copyright claims and take-down requests towards anyone who hosts it. How am I supposed to watch a movie like that in a legal way when the only distributor has stopped distributing it?
Oh I dunno... have you tried asking one of Netflix's 140M subscribers? Or the 26M people who use Amazon prime video?
The point of DRM isn't to make it impossible to pirate things -- it's to make it difficult enough to get pirated content that most people would prefer to pay a few bucks a month to watch things via a channel where rights holders are compensated. And by that measure, it seems to be working pretty well.