Re: I strongly urge all supporters to reconsider the EME proposal. It is not in your best interests!

> You are assuming that the entire rationale for rental/subscription model for
> VHS/DVD was that there was a scarce resource (the physical object) that
> needed to be shared.
>
Yes, that's the main point. If copies would be done at no cost and
with the same quality (wait, that's what happen with digital files!
:-D ) then the VHS/DVD rental/subscription model would work in other
way or probably didn't existed.


> Actually, the physical resource - especially when it came to DVDs - was not
> very expensive. It's not the physical resource that you were mostly paying
> for when you rented a DVD. This is illustrated by the fact that a
> subscription model for DVDs, where you keep the DVD for as long as you like,
> was and remains profitable.
>
Once a time I read that the move from vinyl to CDs was not the
promised "higher quality" but instead that the benefict margin of
discographies dropped almost zero on latest '80s and that was the
reason to choose a new cheaper container that would increase them
back, and also making the consumers to buy their music collection
again... I think is the same thing that happened with VHS, DVDs and
BlueRay...


> Just as with rental/subscription streaming, what you're mainly paying for is
> limited use of the content. The delivery mechanism - the physical DVD -
> provided a convenient way to restrict usage to that purchased - or at least
> place some barriers there.

I agree.


> I'm sure people used to rent DVDs and rip them.
>
Don't doubt it :-)


> The reasons why it's useful to be able to sell limited rights have little to
> do with the means of distribution or the involvement of the physical object.
> It's useful to do that because a limited right - to view the content for a
> period of time, for example, or only whilst remaining a subscriber - can be
> sold at a lower price than "ownership" rights that fewer people will
> purchase only once. Lower price means more people can afford it, which, yes,
> also means more revenue. Further, in the case of video, it aligns more
> closely with what people actually want. Most people want to watch a film or
> TV episode once. Few people want to own it forever. And those who want to
> watch it once generally prefer a model where they do not have to pay the
> "forever" price.
>
Not really. Maybe it's a cultural issue, but here on Spain,
traditionally movies and music albums are bough to be owned, although
only viewed one time, and sometimes also after view it downloaded from
Internet. Reason is, the "added value" of have an original copy on the
wall. I only started to see the concept of use-once-and-drop in the
last years in the same USA style for downloaded movies and series and
mainly because two reasons: we consume a lot more movies and series so
we don't have time to see it again, and we run off hard disk space to
download new ones. That's the same thing that happens with houses and
flats: we don't almost rent, be buy them. Maybe this point of the
discussion comes from the fact that we live in two diferent
socioeconomic models and that the mayor promotors of DRM and EME are
on your side of the world, but as you would know, here at Europe we
take seriously this kind of issues.


>> You can add some inherent Intelectual Property agreements to the
>> content, like don't share the file with your friends or on P2P, I
>> agree on that (although I don't share that opinion, but that's a
>> diferent discussion), but regarding to the container (the file), I
>> should have control over ALL that's on my computer RAM of harddisk,
>> and do whatever i feel is the better for me, also make so much backup
>> copies I want in local or on any number of computers, and view it in
>> any player, also ones I've coded myself if I want, without asking
>> permissions to anybody because it's some data that's in MY computer.
>
>
> If that's what you want, that's fine. But you can't then download content
> that comes which restrictions that go against any of those things.
>
That's the reason why in Spain we don't have any successful streaming
platform, just because they doesn't want to play with our rules. No
distributors, no content. Alternatives? BitTorrent & Mega. Later, they
cry saying Spain is the top one western country on piracy...
obviously, we don't have alternative just because we don't fit on
their "perfect" business model!


> Remember, you agree to the terms of a product offer *before* you pay for and
> get the product. I know you would like these products to be available on
> different terms from those that are offered.

I agree, but as they told you before, I don't want anybody to think
for me if It's good or not to break that terms of use if I believe
they are abusive by my ideology or my country laws, that's something
that only a judge should tell me just after I the things on my own,
not before. Or now the W3C has became the PreCrime unit and I wasn't
aware of it?


> I can't fix that for you.
>
You can't fix it just as an intermediary, but you can help to fix it
telling them when they are starting to put their foots outside their
pots (and they have done it already too much times, by the way) and
it's not your responsability to fix the issues that in fact are not of
their competence.


> Actually, I do not think we could just say no to DRM at this time. The
> content available to us would drop dramatically, causing subscribers to
> leave. The studios would happily sell it to Amazon or others who would
> quickly jump to fill in the void. Our share price would plummet and we would
> probably all be sued by our shareholders for breach of fiduciary duty, or
> whatever it would be called, for making such a decision.
>
I didn't say only Netflix should say no to DRM, to be effective should
be a movement of all intermediaries (Amazon too). If it worked for
Flash, why not for DRM and EME? (and no, make W3C to work on the issue
the same way it did for HTML5 is not the correct answer).


> If DRM requirements are ever dropped by the studios it will be because they
> decide to drop them not because they are pushed into it. I expect they would
> only ever do that after it has been demonstrated that the sky will not fall
> in, but I am not them, so I'm just guessing.
>
It has been demostrated that, in fact, they are making the the sky to
fall themselves...


>> > The reason all users (web and app users too) have to bear these costs is
>> > because the producers of the content require them to, in exchange for
>> > viewing the content. The producers of the content have their own reasons
>> > for
>> > that, which you could debate with them. What I have a problem with is
>> > the
>> > idea that they are not entitled to attach (perfectly legal) conditions
>> > of
>> > their choosing to their product offer. Noone has to accept that offer.
>> >
>> Netflix is not forced to do it, too ;-)
>
>
> Noone is forced to watch streaming video, but if we did not stream video we
> would not be Netflix. I guess we could abandon the whole streaming video
> thing and just run the DVD-by-mail service, but again our shareholders would
> not thank us. So yes, we *are* forced by our duty to our shareholders not to
> recklessly endanger the business.

I was talking about release DRM-free streaming files, not come back to
DVD-by-mail service...


>> > Often
>> > it is argued that the technical restrictions are wrong because the legal
>> > restrictions they enforce are also wrong in some way.
>> >
>> You've condensed the problem in just one phrase, thank you :-)
>
>
> So yours is a rather different position than Hugo's then. That its wrong for
> people to sell products on perfectly legal terms of their choosing is hardly
> compatible with basic freedoms. Neither party in any potential transaction
> gets to dictate terms to the other. You either find something mutually
> agreeable or walk away from the deal.
>
This is just what's doing all the people, just walking away from the
deal and start downloading it from BitTorrent, because it offer a fair
deal, but that's not the discussion, it's that using DRM you are
forcing to the people to agree with some conditions that in fact are
ilegal on their countries, or forcing no-sense distribution models
(I've seen spanish dubbed movies on DVD-rip months ago they were
showed on theaters here at Spain...), or forcing people to use
external methods to get them by himself that, by the way, also it's
being tried to make them ilegal, only leaving on their ideal world to
see what they want, when they want and paying all the time to access
to it, and this definitely is NOT fair.


--
"Si quieres viajar alrededor del mundo y ser invitado a hablar en un
monton de sitios diferentes, simplemente escribe un sistema operativo
Unix."
– Linus Tordvals, creador del sistema operativo Linux

Received on Saturday, 18 May 2013 01:08:25 UTC