DRM is such an utter and absolute waste of effort and money. Think of the millions of man-hours that have so far been misallocated on trying to "secure" digital content. It's just sad.
Eh, I think DRM has been pretty effective for Apple so far, still is, even with this. Pirating iOS apps is very uncomfortable, uncomfortable enough that those who can (i.e. those who have a credit card and are not completely broke) will in general buy, not pirate.
I mean, even their gift card distribution is now so effective (you can buy them everywhere you go) that even without a credit card, the app store is pretty damn comfortable – so even kids are not necessarily forced to pirate.
I think 80% of folks I know who have iPhones have them jailbroken, most of these people are pretty non technical as well. It's been a long time since I've used an iPhone for anything other than development, but I don't remember it being very difficult to jailbreak, and pirating apps isn't a difficult step from there.
iPhone 5 & iOS 6 Untethered Jailbreak: Where Art Thou?
15 mins ago by Rick Berke
It has been a few months since the rollout of iOS 6. In that time we have yet to see a successful iOS 6 untethered jailbreak for the two main smartphones in waiting – the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5.
This has left iPhone 4S users on iOS 5 and iPhone 5 users left with no option but to remain locked down. So where is the iOS 6 untethered jailbreak? Let’s take a look at the progress so far.
Starting off in September, we saw the first evidence of an iOS 6 jailbreak from chpwn, who gave us a glimpse of an iPhone 5 jailbroken and running Cydia.
Then in October came news from @planetbeing of a tethered iOS 6 jailbreak under development, and the solution was usable but needed a developer account.
Then it November @planetbeing returned and said that he was even closer to a public release but “missing critical pieces.” At the time he showed IntelliscreenX running on an iPhone 5.
Then in December we were met with a number of hoaxes including a very convincing one from Dream JB. Lastly in the last days of the year, famed iOS hacker pod2g in an interview with iDownloadBlog said that he was, “very confident about the next 6 months” when it came to an iPhone 5 compatible iOS 6 untethered jailbreak.
And that’s where the music has stopped. If so, it may be deep into the summer before the iPhone 5 will be jailbroken. We sure hope this isn’t the case.
FWIW, this is all a recent development; the iPhone 4, for example, was entirely defeated: Apple can't fix it with software updates, they have to go back to their manufacturing process and start using new low-level bootloaders. There are definitely jailbreaks for the iPhone 4 for iOS 6, and there will continue to be when Apple releases iOS 7.
Given that Apple then continues to sell the iPhone 4, and they continue to sell very well, you have to defend the argument that "DRM is working well for Apple" against "jailbreaking many devices are easy" even if not "jailbreaking all devices are easy". This is especially true given that these old devices not just sell, but sell well.
Being heavily ingrained in that side of things, would you call a tethered jailbreak 'entirely defeated'?
I understand that the base exploit is there, but for me at least, the thought of being tethered and not being able to count on my phone when it runs out of battery is tough.
There's nearly half a million devices that have been jailbroken on iOS 6 (over 470k). To the extent to which that number is low because of the lack of a tethered jailbreak, the lack of a jailbreak on recent devices, or simply the lack of interest in iOS 6 (as the main feature seems to be "Maps no longer works well"), I am not certain.
However, for purposes of "DRM has won against piracy", you have to first look at the demographics of piracy: the average person on Hacker News is a technically proficient user who is out a lot and relies on their cell phone for everything in their lives, from driving directions to business calls to reading websites like Hacker News.
Your average pirate is from a fundamentally different set of demographics: one of the most common is a middle-school or high-school student that shares an iPod touch (not an iPhone) with their sibling; the device probably doesn't leave the house much, and was a hand-me-down from the father (who probably doesn't have much time for games anyway).
I thereby take a lot of issue with people who attempt to frame conversations about anything involving normal people--whether it be the benefits of closed ecosystems, how users spend their money, or really anything--by aiming the spotlight on people who have enough money to own an iPhone 5, or even an iPhone 4S: the iPhone 4 is still selling, and it is still selling like hotcakes, because it costs $200 less up-front. I would even argue that it would be selling better than it is if it weren't perpetually sold out ;P.
In all honestly, I am not even certain why anyone would spend $200 to get an iPhone 5 instead of the iPhone 4, and I actually understand many of the various subtle technical differences... to the normal user, though, the only things they really are able to make decisions about are how the iPhone 4S supports Siri (which, of course, the iPhone 4 could easily handle, as demonstrated by the numerous jailbroken users who actually have installed it on that device--but then this device would have nothing at all which differentiates it to the normal consumer ;P), and that the iPhone 5 is slightly taller (which might even be a turn-off) and has a metallic back (which many will perceive as making the phone more sturdy to drops, but AppleCare+ protects against accidental damage--including drops--and costs only $100).
The result is that if you want to discuss what people who feel even slightly money-constrained are doing, you have to do so in the context of the iPhone 4. Yes: there are people who own recent iPhones and pirate, but at least the few I know (grrr) are in a very weird demographic (super-highly technical people who believe it is a moral sin to purchase information bits and will go to insane lengths to never spend a dollar on, say, iTunes).
I think looking at the technical side of things as an attraction for 'normal' consumers, is the wrong way of going about it, especially with consumer electronics. It's pretty evident by now that people want the latest (and perceived best) device, even if the technical differences aren't that massive. It's enough to be able to say to friends, "I got the iPhone 5".
I'd also assume the iPhone 4 being perpetually sold out is either a determined move by Apple to force sales on upper models, or is just a result of having production lines focused on the upper models. I don't doubt they'd sell either though.
Admittedly I used to be that person, as a teenager. Once I got full time employment, I definitely starting buying more things I would pirate, both for the reason that it was a pain getting updates to apps (Apple does well in this regard), and also because there was no financial reason for me not to if I had the money.
I would imagine, even if most users can't do it themselves, other family members or friends will do it for them, in the same way they've been installing Chrome on their computers before. This can quickly (a few years) lead to a large portion of the users using jailkbroken devices, and getting used to having their device jailbroken.
If you are willing to help lots of nontechnical people jailbreak their phones you better have a lot of time for the thousands of support questions they flood you with.
I'm pretty tech savvy, I work with very tech savvy people. Many of them write firmware, network routing systems, and spend hours a day JTAGing various spins of our NICs.
I don't know how to jailbreak my phone, nor have my dozen or so google searches yielded anything useful, nor do any of my colleagues have jailbroken phones - despite being precisely the type of people who want to.
Jail breaking used to be straightforward a couple years ago, but for anyone with a recent phone (I have an iPhone 5, colleagues have iPhone 4S's) - it's become pretty difficult.
I doubt that most of the people who pirate have a recent phone: they probably have hand-me-downs from their parents or purchased the device second-hand off of eBay.
In fact, if you consider piracy a feature, you probably purposely purchase an older phone: Apple still sells the iPhone 4, which continues to be trivial to jailbreak.
I don't know a single person with a jail broken phone. My wife, parents, and most kd my friends couldn't even articulate the concept. Then again my circle has a log fewer engineers these days than it used to.
Oh good, I didn't realize it was not hard to jailbreak. Can you tell me where to find a jailbreak for my 4S running the latest iOS? I haven't been able to find one.
Just because it is hard for people who have the latest-greatest device, does not mean that it is generally hard: many users (I would argue especially the demographics that pirate) either still have or are newly acquiring older devices.
A 4S is hardly "latest-greatest", and having to specifically buy a different (and inferior) device in order to jailbreak definitely qualifies as "hard" in my book.
Read: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4995559 (this was posted by me in response to someone else 7 hours before your comment, but it directly addresses your argument: concentrating on anything but iPhone 4 is a very "I have a lot of both money and knowledge about technology"-focussed way of approaching this problem that loses touch with the actual demographics that are being discussed when you look at piracy...)
The DRM makes pirating less comfortable. If you could just go to some website and download the app and drag it into iTunes to get it on your device (that’s what dropping DRM entails) pirating on iOS would be very comfortable, probably on a level with using the App Store.
It's pretty hard to argue that DRM doesn't reduce piracy. The overwhelming evidence from the last several decades (everything from the piracy rate on Commodore Amigas vs DRM'd consoles to modern ebook DRM) is that DRM has a significant impact on reducing the amount of piracy that occurs.
Most of the arguments against DRM aren't about it's ineffectiveness in reducing piracy, but rather its implication for privacy and ownership rights.
The trouble is that piracy reduction is the wrong end of the stick. What content creators benefit from is increased purchases, which does not necessarily follow from reduced piracy. I would agree that it's fairly clear that DRM reduces piracy, but it's not at all clear that this then results in increased sales.
PDF's convert to epub pretty well these days. You can even use good Text-To-Speech engines to read the converted epub aloud to you afterwards, so you get the benefit of having the equivalent of an audiobook, too.
