> There just isn't enough user demand for freedom to overcome the loss to businesses of losing control of their content.

DRM doesn't prevent businesses losing control of their content. Orange is the New Black has, AFAIK, only ever been distributed through EME, but it's all over the Pirate Bay, every single episode.

> maybe it means coming up with alternate ways to monetize

We have alternate ways to monetize. The simplest being doing exactly what they are doing except not DRM-ing their content, which demonstrably has worked for multiple content distributors. There are others.

DRM isn't about controlling content or monetize that content. It's about maintaining an outdated business model because business executives don't understand the internet. Which would be fine, except that it's hurting the open web.

Maybe that’s a bad example. But I’ll put out this challenge: find me a reasonably popular TV show that’s supposedly completely covered by DRM, and I’ll find you a torrent for it. My point is that DRM does nothing to prevent piracy.

I'm not saying they can't be stubborn. But I have a trouble believing that as outsiders we can really see all of the factors involved in these business decisions. Maybe there are different levels of sophistication from this camp, but I also remember people saying that piracy would actually help CD sales because it spread the word about artists. How many platinum records have there been in the last 5 years? I'm inclined to think there's something at play here, something that really hits their bottom line, that we're not considering. "Business people are stupid", while possible, is a hard line to swallow, they didn't get rich by being stupid.

I’m not saying they’re stupid. I’m not even saying that the insistence on DRM is stupid, I’m just saying it’s wrong. It’s an understandable mistake—it’s hard to understand the capabilities of the internet.

> Maybe there are different levels of sophistication from this camp, but I also remember people saying that piracy would actually help CD sales because it spread the word about artists. How many platinum records have there been in the last 5 years?

This is a completely irrelevant point. Of course piracy hurts sales. But DRM doesn’t solve this problem, and I see no purpose pretending that it does.

I’ll be happy to revise my opinion if a DRM scheme emerges which actually works.

> I'm inclined to think there's something at play here, something that really hits their bottom line, that we're not considering.

Well, yes. There’s something else at play here, which is that having closed-source access is useful to corporations for reasons that have nothing to do with DRM. For example, having more closed-source access to users’ machines means that they can collect more data on their users without their users knowing.

Yes, there are things we don't know, but it's a pretty big leap to assume that these unknowns are good reasons to concede on an open web. If there are unknown reasons that companies want closed internet, there is nothing stopping them from presenting those reasons in the court of public opinion. I suspect the reason they are fighting the DRM issue is that it comes across as defending artists' rights, and the real reasons companies want to run untrusted, unaudited code on our machines are things you'd feel less sympathetic about.

It wouldn't just be a mistake, it'd be a mistake followed by an industry-wide refusal to admit to the mistake, over and over again. I suppose iTunes could be a counterexample, but (from a brief search) the DRM-free stuff is for music. I think movies still have it.

> This is a completely irrelevant point. Of course piracy hurts sales.

Sorry, sometimes I gloss over things and my point doesn't get across properly. I know this is irrelevant to the current point. What I'm bringing up here is another claim I remember hearing from a camp that claims to know better than the music industry executives. Perhaps it's unfair to lump you all together, it's just part of why I'm skeptical to hear this stuff now.

> Yes, there are things we don't know, but it's a pretty big leap to assume that these unknowns are good reasons to concede on an open web.

Probably me being unclear again. I didn't say we should concede on an open web. When I talk about "good reasons", I'm talking from the executives' point of view. It sounds like you're talking about some sort of universal good. I'm saying that there's what we want, which is an open web, which we shouldn't give up on, and there's what they want. All I'm talking about is understanding our opponents' incentives, and not assuming too quickly that it's just based on them making a mistake.

Okay, it sounds like we're vehemently agreeing with each other.

The thing is, these executives have done a very good job of controlling the discourse and making this a conversation about content ownership. But the fact is, there are only two possibilities here: 1. They are actually so stupid that they don't know DRM doesn't protect content ownership (which, I agree, is unlikely) or 2. They know that DRM doesn't work, but they don't want their real reasons for gutting the open web to be publicly known.

What I want to do is make the conversation not about DRM any more, because it's clearly that DRM doesn't work. Given that, we should look at the possibilities for why companies might want EME on our computers. And you don't have to look very far into those possibilities to see that they're really scary, which underscores the need for a truly completely open web.

In short, the DRM conversation makes companies who want to run their untrusted code on our machines as harmless idiots who just think that DRM will help their sales. But they aren't idiots, and they aren't harmless.

The idea that any sort of rental arrangement for video content is "outdated" reflects your own wishes, not the facts on the ground. The technology exists to provide good enough guarantees for the content providers, and it remains a popular choice with consumers. You're right that pirates have figured out how to break the DRM on Orange Is The New Black and distribute copies of it. What they haven't figured out is a new business model where consumers buy the majority of their content a la carte rather than getting much of it from subscriptions (Netflix/Hulu/Amazon type subscriptions or cable/satellite subscriptions) and rentals and theatrical exhibition.

[citation needed]

> Is any sort of video rental or subscription model outdated?

I’m not sure why you’re asking me that, I never said that.

> And why is it outdated?

Because DRM does exactly nothing to prevent piracy, and hurts users.

> DRM may not be able to provide 100% ironclad copy protection, but it provides roughly the same level of copy protection that video rental has before, probably better if you're comparing to VHS or DVD.

And how much copy protection is that?

Here’s a fun experiment: go on The Pirate Bay and search for Orange is the New Black, then tell me how effective you think DRM is.

Piracy is far easier now than it was in the VHS or DVD eras. In the VHS or DVD eras you at least had to have some access to a controlled version of the content in order to copy it. Now you can go on a torrent site and search for something you’ve never heard of and people you’ll never meet will serve it to you for free.

So no, DRM does not provide roughly the same level of copy protection as video rental.