- Purchasers of media are often treated worse than pirates, and may be viewed as second-class citizens or criminals.
I'm sorry, what? How?
this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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Louis Rossmann
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Treated worse than pirates: things like blu-ray media only being playable on the newest blu-ray players. If your old player has no update available, you're essentially forced to purchase a new one
Viewed as second class citizens/criminals: IMO DRM is a big one here. Why install a rootkit on someone's computer just to identify if they're a real customer or not? I can somewhat understand if its an online game that needs to also take advantage of anticheat to detect cheaters (still crappy though) but assuming such a level of control over someone's equipment in the off-chance that they're a pirate seems a bit iffy. Especially when it does nothing to prevent piracy anyway.
On that last point - even worse when its online-only DRM for a single player game that you purchased for $50 or more. Even worse worse when it's linked to an online account that can get banned erroneously, or service revoked in that region due to local law changes. Non-starter, I'll just ๐ดโโ ๏ธ at that point if I really wanted the game.
Personally steam is the only exception for me: my games launch locally without an internet connection regardless of offline mode or not, and in-game bans don't revoke access to your entire library. Steam also operates in a metric crap ton of regions, and to date I'm not aware of them pulling service (except in a certain country that apparently banned them recently)
I can somewhat understand if it's an online game
Absolutely not. Experts in the field of anticheat are normally very skeptical of the efficacy of these methods, and in exchange the user has heavily compromised security.
There's nothing stopping a determined cheater from running the anticheat rootkit inside a hypervisor. Even if the cheater doesn't want to go through all that hassle, the latest stuff is cheating hardware. Mice that send legitimate-looking signals to the computer based on camera information for shooters, that kind of thing.
The only realistic methods to tackle cheaters are server-side heuristics, sending as little information as possible to the client, reviewing suspicious matches manually, and keeping tabs on the latest cheat developers by infiltrating their communities as customers.
Unfortunately for legitimate players, the best way of removing cheaters is in waves so that they have as little information as possible on how exactly they were detected. You don't want cheat developers to be able to test anticheat evasion in real time. This means there's always going to be known cheaters in games until the next wave goes through.
Thank you for your detailed response. There will probably be some "reasons" that corpo apologists will try to counter with, but you can't beat piracy being a service problem.
If I understand correctly it's like banks chaining pens to the counter. Treating you like you're going to steal it. Meanwhile, the roles are actually reversed.
Purchasers are affected by DRM more than pirates. Examples in the video include
- Reason revoking their perpetual license
- purchased Kindle ebooks being unavailable while abroad
- Sony removing purchased titles from the playstation store so they're no longer available for download
etc general erosion of consumer protections over time, under the auspices of that there isn't a legal basis for the content to be accessed and therefore that the present attempt to access it would be illegal.
Pirates don't really have to deal with any of that.
And what makes the purchaser being viewed like a criminal?
When the content purchaser encounters arbitration of access to the content they purchased, the implication is that they didn't genuinely purchase it. It can't really be separated that the material effect of the DRM mechanism being encountered is to inform purchasers that they are attempting to commit a crime.
I've not resorted to piracy (yet..), but I can already tell you they have a superior experience.
How can I tell you that?
Pirates didnt lose access to hundreds of games when Direct2Drive went under in a series of acquisitions, unlike me.
Just an example of my own personal experience.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/f1DvOF-giJQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.