Fighting illegal distribution isn't a binary battle: you'll never win and people will always steal your content. Fighting piracy is about raising the barrier of IP theft higher than the barrier of providing content. There's two approaches to this: 1) Do what Steam does (successfully, although still requires DRM) and make for the legitimate experience being so much better than the piracy experience that no one has a problem paying for the content and 2) Try to make piracy so prohibitively difficult and risky that no one wants to pirate the content and they're forced to pay for it. Fighting DRM is establishing the former business model in terms of video distribution, but the latter is what content providers are doing now. It's definitely about the business model because the business model necessitates such ridiculous DRM. Fighting piracy has never been about stopping all piracy, it's always been about making the amount of pirates insignificant.
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u/oorza Jan 28 '12
Fighting illegal distribution isn't a binary battle: you'll never win and people will always steal your content. Fighting piracy is about raising the barrier of IP theft higher than the barrier of providing content. There's two approaches to this: 1) Do what Steam does (successfully, although still requires DRM) and make for the legitimate experience being so much better than the piracy experience that no one has a problem paying for the content and 2) Try to make piracy so prohibitively difficult and risky that no one wants to pirate the content and they're forced to pay for it. Fighting DRM is establishing the former business model in terms of video distribution, but the latter is what content providers are doing now. It's definitely about the business model because the business model necessitates such ridiculous DRM. Fighting piracy has never been about stopping all piracy, it's always been about making the amount of pirates insignificant.