JasonGalterio posted at 8:31AM Sat, 31 October 2015 - #4236140

You want to protect your work? Then don't sell it. That is the only DRM that works.

You want to make money from your work? Then someone else is going to want to take that money from you.

You want to sell your work? Then someone else is going to want it for free.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management

Saying doing nothing is not an answer is rubbish and has been proven wrong: In January 2007, EMI stopped publishing audio CDs with DRM, stating that "the costs of DRM do not measure up to the results." Following EMI, Sony BMG was the last publisher to abolish DRM completely, and audio CDs containing DRM are no longer released by the four largest commercial record label companies.

Saying DRM will protect anything is also rubbish: As widely repeated, Blu Ray DRM was supposed to provide ten years of protection. It was broken in less than a few months.

Saying that users won't be prevented from using their legitimate purchases is rubbish: Many DRM systems require authentication with an online server. Whenever the server goes down, or a region or country experiences an Internet outage, it effectively locks out people from registering or using the material. This is especially true for a product that requires a persistent online authentication, where, for example, a successful DDoS attack on the server would essentially make all copies of the material unusable.

I am not going to bother copying any other text, but there is all section of that article dedicated to why DRM actually results in the inverse of what is being attempted.

I will believe that this will work when you tell me that DAZ has invested more money into this scheme than those who have tried and failed already. The truth of the matter is most companies are moving away from DRM. The ones that are still using it (Steam for example) have their hiccups but are significantly bigger than DAZ with more resources to reassure customers.

"So there needs to be some middle ground so it's not so easy for someone to just drop it on a site without any repercussion."

Bingo. And so far, that isn't what this is. "Minimal protection" means its still going to be pretty easy to break. There is still no repercussions as you, yourself, stated that your efforts to remove items with DCMA complaints have failed.

So now try to look at it from the point of a customer:

DAZ invests resources in instituting DRM. DAZ says DRM will protect their assets (proven not to be true). Customer then mentally does the math. Investment occurred, it's not buying what the seller says, so what is the seller not saying? What is the investment actually meant to purchase? Then the speculation feeds on itself.

Unfortunately the world doesn't work like that. Things will continue to be sold, and there will need to be ways to protect assets regardless of what some people feel. So if you don't want to buy protected assets and programs you are free to make your own. But considering every software company has some type of protection in place, your argument really doesn't make sense.

And as I said before, I am also a customer that has more assets than most people people complaining. So I do understand from both sides, since I do both: assets need to be easy to use, but also some type of protection needs to be in place to reduce theft, hence the middle ground. I keep my software licenses current for the work I do, and I also buy assets for my work, and I also see the impact of them having absolutely no protection so people can just upload them and share them with no regard for license. Also it's also increasingly hard to remove copyrighted works when you submit a claim, they get ignored by many sites now. Unfortunately this isn't something that no one else in digital world does, and this is where it's heading. The goal is to make it where transparent to the user where you are doing the same things legally that you've been doing with your content. Since no one has any encrypted content yet, it's pointless to speculate that it's some evil draconian scheme like some of the other products some have bought that really gave DRM a bad name.