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That makes absolutely no sense. You need to pay to access Netflix. What then does DRM on Netflix achieve in making the "customer accept the copy protection"? The customer already fricking paid!

Everything that is on Netflix you can already get on TPB (since the DRM is ineffective to those with technical skills), so how could the existence of DRM possibly have influenced the customers decision to pay vs. pirate?



The Pirate Bay is a much higher technical bar for general non-technical users than the average Hacker News poster seems to understand.

There are lots of people who can right click save as who will never, ever, ever torrent.


That argument is flawed. To prevent the plebs from right click-saving, it's enough to add some Javascript. If they have the skills to work around that, they have the skills to torrent.

So what does DRM solve again?


Side-stepping a little bit of javascript is something that can be taught trivially, avoiding malicious sources is not.


Considering torrenting is the preferred method to view online content at least here in Bulgaria, and I assume in most of the rest of the non-western world, I would advise against underestimating the technical abilities of most internet users.


You’ve never had to answer tech support tickets for a SME SAAS product, clearly.

“How to I reset my password?”

“Click ‘Forgot Password’”


This isn't an answer why DRM is making these customers choose Netflix over piracy. These people don't even know what DRM is.


> Considering torrenting is the preferred method to view online content at least here in Bulgaria

You're really getting "my own peer bubble" and "the general population" mixed up.


Next door in Romania, I agree with what he says. Using torrenting or other pirate source is standard practice for anyone under the age of 35-40. It is by no means limited to a niche demographic of tech anoraks. A decade ago in my city, before the big ISP mergers, when you signed up for broadband internet our local ISP would actually give you the username and password for an eMule server where you could quickly share films and music with other people in the city.




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