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In a perfect world:
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Game publisher release Game with DRM
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DRM gets cracked by pirates
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Game publisher acknowledges the DRM has been cracked and compiles a new binary without DRM and redistributes it to customers.
in the perfect world we still need to crack the drm?
In a perfect world no one would pirate video games. So I guess this is more of a realistic compromise.
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This topic always reminds me of one of my co-op jobs where I was working with a piece of software to develop an importer for its file format. Getting the software running properly with its licensing system took a couple of weeks. We had the license all along, but it used a license server that needed to be set up on my machine, plus a dongle that it used.
Once it was up and running, I did like the software and one day decided to also use it to produce files for a personal project I was doing for fun at home. Downloaded a pirated version and had it running by that evening no issue.
The DRM just made for a crappy experience for the paying customer and wasn’t even noticed by those it was meant to prevent using their software.
Though I now wonder if that was deliberate because they’d still catch that in corporate audits (I think? Not really sure how those work tbh), so allowing individual users to easily bypass the DRM could help them build market share that they get paid for by businesses buying licenses when users say it’s their preferred platform.
The DRM is there so the managers at the software developer can say to their bosses they did everything possible to prevent someone stealing the software. And the same arguments goes on case of legal issues. Although some use it as a way to force substitutions these days.
It’s a lot like locks on a house.
Picking a lock is not prohibitively difficult. It’s just there to provide a form of friction to make clear that you should not expect to burgle homes.
However, a world that puts every single item of any value behind bulletproof glass and deadbolts because of pervasive thieves is oppressive. And yet, that’s what we aim for when everyone decides to take whatever they feasibly can. A good world would mostly rely on honor policy.
This is kind of a shit metaphor because if we extend it to how piracy actually works it highlights how stupid DRM is in the first place. A lock on your house has to be picked by each individual robber, unless they all show up on the same day. A cracked game would be like if only one person has to pick the lock on your house, but they don’t actually take anything they just make a perfect copy of your house without the draconian 12 step lock you installed and gives copies to whoever wants one. If you never noticed all the people sharing magical copies of your house with each other you would never know you lost anything, because you didn’t. Only your blind greed was injured by the thought that those people might have been willing to pay to use your house if only it had been locked down against those damn house copiers. On your next house you make the locks even more invasive and complex, to the point they block half the driveway or make the oven and bathroom unusable. Then that same one person spends an extra half day to pick it and makes a copy but without the crazy lock so they actually get a better house than you’re selling. Whether people like it or not, digital media has always been on the honor system, and always will be. DRM just punishes people for doing the honorable thing and paying.
Yarr harr
Why would pirates cut into our revenue!
Perfect example for this is read dead redemtion 2, if they do it with gta 6 too I’m going to crack it
Whack
I’ve just come back to piracy after such a long time, and things are still the same, it’s like meeting an old trusty friend again.
I was gonna say “trusty?” But in all honesty I’d much rather trust digital pirates than corporations.
Pirates actually have consequences for pushing malware, companies don’t.
Jellyfin has changed my life.
To their credit, Denuvo has been very effective for the past year. Now instead of playing some games I wouldn’t have bought anyway, I just don’t play them.
Every goddamn time. Do I need to pull out the gaben.jpg?
is that the mosaic of genitals used to construct his portrait
Buy Blu-rays. Highly underrated.
- The sound and video quality is the best you’ll get anywhere.
- It selectively supports the movies and artists you like.
- You get amazing extras and documentaries about the movie.
- Nobody can take the movie away from you.
- You can rip the disc with MakeMKV to view digitally with Jellyfin.
Turns out some things the damn Gen Z guys were using are actually bussin fr no cap
It’s a shame that in the age of the internet, we still sometimes have to buy physical in order to actually own things. I like buying CD’s for music that I really really like, but most of the time I just get a digital copy from Bandcamp. It’s cheaper and doesn’t clutter up my house. It’s a shame that there’s nothing like bandcamp for movies (at least as far as I know).
Some people probably sell torrents of their movies, but I haven’t seen it yet
I’ve seen some niche bands release (free) official torrents of their music on a certain piracy website. It’s kind of surreal. Just goes to show that piracy is and always has been about sharing culture
I completely understand the sentiment here, but I have to respectfully disagree with part of your argument.
The internet itself is this fundamentally ephemeral, thing. Our relationship to it, as a medium, has persisted for decades at this point and may continue to do so for a long time. At the same time, it lives and dies by the whims of corporations and millions of other users, and so it’s trajectory is largely beyond the control of any one individual. It’s like this by design: properties like distributed control, flexible routing, easy duplication/destruction of data, give it resilience but also make it temporary. This also makes it a volatile place to keep things permanently, which is a real problem for a lot of different mediums.
With that in mind, there exists a lot of media today that has no non-digital equivalent. So, having a local data cache you control - DVD, BluRay, forvever moving data between online services, even a personal NAS - is the only hedge you can get for the net’s volatility. And even then, that medium has a service life.
So I don’t think it’s a shame, per se, that things are like this now. Rather, it always has been. It’s never been easier to consume (and pirate) media online, but the underlying rules have not changed.
It’s true what you say about volatility. It’s not just the internet, it’s everything digital, even offline storage.
A few months ago I was about to sell/give away a bunch of old childrens books that I had, my reasoning being that I will never want to read them again, and even if did want to for whatever reason, I could always find ebook versions of them.
Ultimately I decided to keep the books – what if, sometime in the future, I wanted to share these books with my (potential) children? Would all of these books have been preserved in digital form? Would I rather be giving my children a physical copy that I owned and read personally, or emailing a PDF? Physical media holds real value.
Thing is, nobody owns a Blu-ray player.
I think basically that’s it. I don’t even have a CD player to rip my own CDs
Edit: guess that’s on me, though
Do you have a tower PC? I have a stack of DVD read/write drives +/- that I need to get rid of pretty soon, I won’t have a place to store them after the next couple of months. I’d offer to ship you one, but I have to put an asterisk in there. The last time I offered to ship a guy some RAM it turned out there was a lot of international barriers and it was going to cost me about 10 times what the RAM was worth to ship it to him, with no guarantee he’d actually receive it. So… ?
How high res is bluray?
1080 for most disks, with 4K when marked ultra hd. It’s worth noting disk video is usually uncompressed, so it may very well look better than a stream of the same resolution.
Different compression, not “no-compression”.
A dual-player Blu-ray disc can hold about 4 minutes of uncompressed 24fps 4k video.
Up to 100MBit/s video. Audio bitrate is usually lossless and has a higher bitrate than the entire video + audio stream of most streaming services.
Usually 4k.
The 4K UHD Blu-Rays are in 4K HDR. But the average Blu-Ray is 1080p.
