Why is this getting downvoted? It seems to me that a lot of the media-focused anti-piracy tooling is essentially a performance of toughness to make rightsholder execs comfortable. Everybody accepts you can't stop piracy entirely, and nobody's willing to say, "Fuck it, we'll compete on convenience and strong consumer relationships," so we all put up with this weird middle ground of performative DRM and the like. With only the rare occasional bit of honesty, as from Weird Al: https://sfba.social/@williampietri/110906012997848549
This is correct. Imagine in the days of yore, some two decades and change ago, when I was charged with implementing putting some music reserves "online" for streaming ...
[Harp music, progressive diagonal wave distortions through the viewport ...]
We had two layers of passwords (one to get to the webpage for the class, one when actually streaming via the client, which was RealPlayer) as well as an IP range restriction to campus (you live off campus? So sorry) because our lawyers were worried about what the RIAA's lawyers would find sufficient in the wake of a bunch of Napster-baited lawsuits launched at universities. The material itself was largely limited to snippets.
I wanted to say, "Calm down, have a martini or something. College students are just not going to go wild to download 128 kbps segments of old classical music," but alas I was not in charge.
