Well, isn’t that special!
Personally, I like rather like seeing what the costume designer and the cinematographer can do.
Alas, 4K and HDR are a tad dear at this point.
2 Likes
I can only find articles where he points out the ways that DRM is bad. I cannot find any articles where he proposes a business model for feature-length video in a DRM-free world.
The paper claimed that support for Divx meant the buyer wanted future-proofing and support for “new technologies”. This seems like an assumption - they didn’t report that they talked to any actual buyers of these devices. I could make a different assumption - that some (many? most?) people who buy a DVD player with Divx support buy them to watch downloaded (pirated?) content on a large screen with a handy remote control. That seems like a very rational economic decision - spend more on the playback unit and less on the content.
1 Like
Guess what? I’m not. 
I don’t have any issue with your general comments about whether the article itself is valid or not other than to say that I don’t find generalities such as
very helpful (as in to me personally). I’m not a statistician or any great shakes as a mathematician. What is apparently obvious to you as great glaring flaws, is not obvious to me.
I would be interested to learn what these flaws are but if you don’t want to provide more info, you don’t have to. That’s fine.
My only horse in this whole game was to nitpick one tiny point you made about that one example you don’t like me mentioning anymore.
I’ve made my point. You don’t accept it. Fair enough.
1 Like
Well, I hate to keep banging on about actually reading the content that BB links to but it is really important to read the original documents whenever one can rather than relying on either the canned comment in the original post (which is the writer’s editorial opinion) or the intro or conclusion of the linked piece.
You can say it seems like an assumption. Guess what - so did the authors. They also suggested your alternate assumption. And like all good academics, they also included a plug for the need to do another research paper - many research papers!
The most significant variable is the Xvid_compatible playback feature, which is
positively related to price in both the OLS and ATE analyses. We calculate an effect of
$30.20 USD on the new price for DVD players with this feature. This is a meaningful result,
considering the average price of $63.91 USD for all DVD players in the sample at the time
of data collection. It suggests that consumers value compatibility in the forward direction,
that is, with content or file types that might emerge in the future. Since Xvid and other open
file formats are used in online distribution of film content, this finding may indicate that
consumers are interested in accessing unauthorised copies of content (the value of
interoperability as well as the cost-savings from accessing free content). Further research is
required to disentangle the potential value of free content (access to piratical catalogues)
from other aspects of interoperability (‘authorized’ uses).
Seriously, I’m interested in any criticisms of the paper you or anyone here may have, but please - can we at least make sure that:
a) we’re actually talking about the paper that was published: and
b) if there is a criticism to be made, actually make the effort to spell out what the criticism is, why the methods in the report are invalid, whatever?
I don’t mean to bang on at you specifically about this one. It’s something I see a lot here and elsewhere.
It’s easy to do, I know. There’s an article which says something outrageous and it’s far easier to pile in and say something about the article without spending the time and effort to hunt out the actual source of the story and see what that actually said and then critique that.
Some of the authors on BB are better than others about actually linking to the source. They should all do it in my view.
1 Like
I suspect that people who live outside “their” region(immigrants, expats, students abroad, etc.) might be a nontrivial population of interested parties.
The anime fanatics and sophisticated pirates have other methods; generally not involving physical DVDs; but all the Region 4s living in Region 1 who want to watch stuff from home and local stuff without two players? That’s likely to be quite a few people. Fair number of Region 5s in Region 1 as well.
I’m less familiar with migration patterns between Region 5 and Region 2; but would also suspect that there is substantial demand there.
Because of release language, more than region coding, there aren’t as many situations where arbitrage is available if you live ‘in region’(and don’t have a substantial taste for foreign media; or a willingness to watch translated releases to save a few bucks); but I hear that the UK gets stiffed compared to the US on a lot of English language releases; and I assume Australia does; since charging them extra is something of a tradition in media and software sales; so that’s some Region 2s and 4s with an interest in Region 1 capability.
Granted that emigrants and immigrants are another special case, I’m still not sure that there are all that many of them overall. My gut feeling is that the vast majority stick with the simplest possible solution and don’t meander into technically obscure areas like DRM or region cracking.
It’s like with ebooks and the Kindle. Ebook stores and device manufacturers tried for ten years to get anyone interested in reading books electronically, but only ever reached techies, geeks, and early adopters. It took Amazon coming along and making the ebook-buying process dead simple to get that market off the ground with average folks. (And most of them don’t care about DRM either, until and unless it affects them personally–which for the majority it never does.)
2 Likes
i apologize, i can see how that would be.
When people publish pieces where they’ve confused correlation for causation, usually someone just chimes in “correlation isn’t causation” and every scientist, statistician, logician, mathematician, nods their heads and carries on, confident that the piece is bunk because one doesn’t equal the other you have to prove the connection. That is why you see the term “correlation isn’t causation” bandied about, it makes it immediately clear that the piece in question made a fatal logic mistake and should not be taken seriously.
Now if you take an unproven correlation and you start to use that to make further stretches into unproven inferences into areas that do not have an established proven relationship that is one additional fatal flaw called “unsubstantiated inference” and a step further from any sort of valid study/science/statistical analysis, etc. It requires two mistakes that are both worth of scrapping the entire thing as bunk just from the logic alone.
It is more a higher level discussion about general steps in deduction and the leaps and conclusions you can and cannot make. Hopefully that is more clear. If not then i really wouldn’t worry about it, it isn’t important.
I get your point that my parents were circumventing a restriction, and i accept it. I just think the the restriction they circumvented was a contractual market restriction, region locking, not circumventing drm (that is my minor disagreement).
also, sorry i was a bit grumpy the other day…
(i know that can come across unintentionally even if i’m not grumpy about anything to do with anything here. so i just wanted to say cheers mate, 
, i’m sure in person i’d buy you a beer, or whatever, and we’d find common ground more quickly.)
3 Likes
One of the authors of the original paper here:
Several posters have commented how the math is sloppy, and how the paper mistakes correlation with causation and so on. But can someone please explain, what exact problem is there in the maths that you have referred to?
Do you think the conditional independence assumption fails (perhaps you think there are omitted variables somewhere)? Or do you think the sampling strategy is wrong (again, why do you think so)?
If neither of these are issues, then why should a nn-matcing based identification strategy produce “correlation but not causation”?
Of course, I am happy to answer any questions that you may have.
Thanks for reading through our work.
2 Likes
Oh yes. They not only colorize but also chop out scenes that used to be there, add new scenes, inject special effects that weren’t there before, new CGI animations, change the music (sometimes even the theme songs of TV series!), change dialog, and make alternate endings or completely change the endings.
I’m not a Star Wars fan, but there was a huge uproar because they apparently redid the movies and then wouldn’t release the originals that people actually wanted. Fans have literally had to learn video & audio editing and edit the reissued versions to put them back the way they used to be. We now live in a world where the free volunteer-created ‘fan-fiction’ is more canon than the officially available versions.
1 Like
Absolutely. I and others explained this already.
The problems start from the title itself. “Interoperability” has nothing to do with the question at hand and you made a fatal error from the get go connecting region coding with DRM/copy protection. CSS is the encryption of the MPEG2 data but the region coding is header material.
Even if one assumes that region free DVD players are a reasonable proxy for a “DRM free” market, in 2017 its a bit nuts to assume the legacy format has anything to do with this at all.
Oh also:
We hypothesize that consumers derive specific benefit from backwards interoperability which enables playback of legacy disc formats the consumer may already own. We further hypothesize that consumers value forwards interoperability between their device and new and emerging technologies.
“backwards interoperability” could only mean VCD but that format wasn’t even mentioned as part of your selection of DVD players. “forwards interoperability” is also a bit nuts. DVD players won’t play BluRay, it requires a physically different laser pickup head.
You didnt measure or mention piracy or expats. But lots of us have already pointed that out. I did so pretty early in the thread.
Several of us have already mentioned this as well.
Sorry but this wasn’t good work at all.
OK, but Star Wars is a special case. Spielberg changed the movie himself, stating that he did not have the money at the time to make the movie he wanted. The old versions were pulled out everywhere in the world, not only in the USA. As far as I know, the only way to watch them is on old VHS (in crappy quality) or on Laserdisc. I think I still have the original version of the first film on Laserdisc somewhere, but I am not a fan so I can’t be bothered.
For other movies, it is rare to see new edits being issued, I think. Maybe a colorized version (although in Europe even that is rare), but that is the extent of it. One can always watch the colorized version in B&W by turning the color off on the screen, of course.
Thank you for this. It’s nice that @Swagatam_Sinha chimed in, I hope he pops in again to answer your post although I can understand if he doesn’t.
I think I do have to say again that it really helps to read the actual paper.
For example:
The paper, as one would expect, starts by defining its terms.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems provide manufacturers the ability to control the
use of their products after sale, imposing legal and technical restrictions on the functionality
available to consumers. For example, the DRM system used in consumer DVD prevents
players from being interoperable with unauthorised copies and well as authorized content
(films) sold in different regions of the globe.
and
Digital rights management (DRM) systems enable producers to control the
circumstances under which devices may access content, interoperate with other devices or
be modified by their owners. In the media industry, DRM has been applied by both content
creators (for example to limit the unauthorised circulation and copying of goods) as well as
by device manufacturers (for example to prevent unauthorised or ‘bootleg’ content to be
used in conjunction with the device).
[…]
DRM consists of a technological layer, commonly referred to as an access control
(AC) or technological protection measure (TPM), which is applied to the content or device
itself. This is further supported by a legal ‘layer’ which prohibits circumvention of DRM
systems.
They also go into how region protection differs from what you seem to consider to be the only possible definition of DRM:
Read / Playback: The Content Scramble System encrypts the contents of an MPEG-2 DVD
and provides compliant players with set of keys to decrypt the contents for playback. One
key is stored in the header region of a CSS-enabled disc, and was designed to be read only
by authorized types of players. Another key is unique to the MGEG-2 file contained on the
disc. Non-compliant players from manufacturers that have not licensed CSS will be unable
to play back the content of discs containing encrypted content Further, this method of
encryption prevents consumers from being able to make copies of discs, since a new burned
DVD would not ordinarily contain the second key contained in the header area of the disc
(Bloom et al, 1999).
Region: The data contained on a DVD disc is not encoded specifically for NTSC or PAL
display standards, so could conceivably be a global standard, which was not the case for
content recorded on older analog VHS tapes. However, the region-control mechanism
developed by the DVD-CCA divides the world into 6 regions and provides manufacturers
the ability to prevent players sold in one region from playing back discs from another. This
would mean that a disc purchased in America could not be played back, say, in France, even
though the aforementioned NTSC/PAL encoding is no longer a technical impediment (see
Doctorow, 2008; Yu, 2012). Technically, the system uses a series of numerical ‘flags’ to
indicate playback rights on discs. Region ‘0’ permits worldwide playback; 1-6 denote
different territorial groupings (e.g. region 1 refers to Canada and the USA, while Mexico is
in region 4 with Latin America and Australia). Region 7 is used to flag media PR and other
special copies, while Region 8 is reserved for airlines and other leisure markets (Yu,
2012).10 Technically, the system relies on matching flags encoded in the firmware of a DVD
player device at the factory with flags contained in a header file on DVD discs. As of 2010,
many DVD players were shipped without region locks in their firmware, or with the ability
to play back DVDs from all regions. Additionally, some users have found ways to ‘unlock’
players or change their encoded region by inputting codes into the device.
I think it’s pretty clear that the authors are aware of the distinctions. They just don’t share your narrow definition of DRM.
You also said:
The paper says:
DVD Player Features – Treatment
VCD_compatible The player features ability to play back Video
CD disc format
page 13 in case you want to check.
And:
First, we record information about interoperability features related to legacy
disc playback. In the context of DVD players, we use the variable is_VCD_compatible to
identify players capable of reading the non-DRM protected Video CD format, a legacy
medium.
Oh, and it appears again in Table 2 on page 19.
And here:
The treatment VCD_compatible is found to have a negative impact on price
difference (indicating that the used and new price approach one another), significant at the
10% level.
Oh look, there it is again in Table 3 on page 22.
Is that enough mentions? I think it is. There are a few more in the paper though.
I think this one does need to go in here though:
The variables VCD_compatible and multi_region
playback are not highly significant in either the regression analysis or ATE analyses. The
negative direction of the coefficient for VCD_compatible in both lowest_new_price and
lowest_combined_offer analyses suggests that the significant effect in price_diff may be
attributable to presence of lower-priced new offers, rather than used products retaining their
value over time (which was our prior supposition). This is consistent with VCD playback
being a legacy technology at the time of the data collection period. We interpret this to
suggest that these features are not important to consumers in the American Amazon
marketplace.
(for example to prevent unauthorised or ‘bootleg’ content to be
used in conjunction with the device).
The appeal of
DRM for producers may be amplified in digital markets characterized by rapid circulation
of content and copying of goods
In the context of the market for DVD players, the adoption by some
manufacturers of the Xvid standard and other open file formats constitutes a pledge of
forward compatibility as it enables consumers to access films obtained via other means
(including unlawful downloading).
For
example, Xvid is an open source video encoding library which builds upon the MPEG-4
video standard. This file format has been commonly used to rip and compress films and
other content for circulation across the Internet (including unauthorised copying).
And of course I’ve already quoted this bit before:
Since Xvid and other open
file formats are used in online distribution of film content, this finding may indicate that
consumers are interested in accessing unauthorised copies of content (the value of
interoperability as well as the cost-savings from accessing free content). Further research is
required to disentangle the potential value of free content (access to piratical catalogues)
from other aspects of interoperability (‘authorized’ uses).
I think that’s quite enough mentions of pirates really.
This might be more interesting but really - what is wrong with the sampling strategy?
If something specific has been said so far, I’ve missed it. Can you point me at the right post?
2 Likes
Regarding the definition of DRM, you caught me out on one point but I’m not prepared to concede when the authors are defining it to match their conclusion.
Regarding VCD, halfway fair cop. I did read the paper and believe it or not since it had been a few days between reading it and when I wrote that comment I did a find VCD on the PDF but somehow missed it. Fair cop, my bad. There hasn’t been a market for VCDs really since a bit before DVD players came out at the general consumer price level, the format died on the vine outside of a few countries in Asia, largely because it was so easy to pirate. LaserDisc actually lived longer than VCD as a sales platform oddly enough.
Really the issue was whether “backwards interoperability” was relevant at all since they examined prices in the US and there really was never a VCD market there.
As for piracy thats a wink and a nod at best. Full images of DVDs with or without the original region coding have been available for a long time. DVD ripping/imaging software which resets the region to zero as well. If they’d cross correlated pricing of DVD burners & blank media over the long period they covered for DVD players, maybe I’d think they covered this aspect as well.
Thanks a lot to both L0ki and Israel_B for your comments.
I wanted to clarify something- I am particularly interested in the comments above which state that the math is sloppy. So can we please go back to that?
In particular, we have clarified in our paper that the conditional independence assumption here = the assertion that DVD players are priced based on the features advertised on the Amazon.com website (which econometricians sometime refer to as “selection on observables”).
If you think it fails, it basically means that you think DVD prices are based on factors which are nowhere mentioned in the Amazon website. Why do you think so?
Also, I am yet to see any clear criticism regarding the sampling strategy (note that we have picked up all DVD prices, and have not left out any entries in the Amazon.com website). Nor has anybody commented on why NN matching based strategy is inappropriate for our study.
Please note that, if any of my above points are not clear, I am happy to clarify again . Also, if you think we sampled the Amazon.com website sufficiently well, and all variables that affect prices are indeed listed on Amazon.com (and was thus picked up by our study), then there is sufficient statistical theory that states that NN matching based identification strategy in fact produces causal results, not simply correlation.
One final point, we are looking forward to expand our work to encompass blue ray players as well as non US markets. Your points regarding these issues are very appreciated, but we are working on these already.
I request you to comment on how we can improve the maths in the study that has already been completed.
Thanks again for going through our work.
1 Like
One tricky factor(likely to get worse in the future) is that demand for “DRM-free”, outside of a small but vocal ideological base, likely depends substantially on how visibly inconvenient the DRM is. ‘Content Scramble System?’ blank stare from most people who have never hung around on Doom9. “Y’know those unskippable trailers they put on DVDs?” Frothing hate even from people who can barely get the DVD into the player right way up.
Somewhat similar thing in console software vs. PC software: console DRM is much time tighter(since it has generally been ‘default deny’, only blessed software will run; but it has also historically been “insert blessed disk, play game.” rather than “You can run anything you want; which is why you’ll catch StarForce or the like if you aren’t careful”.
The troubling bit is that, while people make buying decisions based on present and past knowledge of how annoying DRM restrictions are or aren’t; today’s internet connected ones are virtually ideal for “I am altering the deal; pray I don’t alter it any further.” stunts, which are generally allowed by the EULA and now architecturally trivial with internet updates. Sometimes it isn’t malice (entity goes out of business, activation servers for dark); other times it is.
It’s a real problem for someone trying to sell “DRM free”, though, because it makes it more or less impossible to know exactly how heavy a given DRM scheme will end up weighing on your use; and allows phased introductions of potentially unpopular schemes(eg. Enforcement of the ‘image constraint token’ in Blu-ray).
With largely static DRM(a DVD, say, can’t be modified after distribution; and most players are close to fixed function hardware with little or no provision for behavior modification in the field); you know what you are and aren’t getting. Once the vendor can push mandatory updates, you don’t (hello PS3 ‘otherOS’, we were just talking about you…)
4 Likes
Your “selection on observables” is cherry picking a particular observable which fits your predetermined conclusion. Your observable here doesn’t signal the intent of the purchaser because you can’t know the intent based on price signals alone. That plus the technical reality that an all region player is in no way DRM free, it is simply programmed to ignore the region code header data and otherwise treats the CSS encryption as any other DVD player would.
I do not have the depth of understanding on statistical methods so I’ll tag @redesigned back into the discussion since he brought it up.
1 Like
On reading the last comment by Israel_B, I think I should clarify another point.
When I said “selection on observables” I was referring to the covariates mentioned in our paper. These covariates are 1080p playback capacity, age of the player etc, which affect dvd player prices, aside from DRM lock.
These covariates are my “observables”.
Hence, “selection on observables” simply requires that a consumer-, who looks at all the listed features+ DRM control features- decides to buy/not buy at the listed price based on these data alone.
Do you think the above statement is a reasonable assumption?
If not, could you please explain why?
Please note that we picked up ALL the features that Amazon lists on its website, we didn’t leave out anything at all.
You could say that we haven’t looked at factors not listed in Amazon, but if there is something a consumer values, I don’t understand why Amazon will not list it on their website.
I am looking forward to others commenting on the maths too!
1 Like
Not so much. When one even gets to upscaling (no DVD is or can be 1080p natively) and other “fancy” features on a DVD player, you are already in cheap BluRay player land which already plays back DVDs (dual laser pickups have been standard for years) and since its 2017 not 2007, as I previously stated I don’t see the point of doing this work at all w/o considering the current generation of players. Unless of course your goal was from the beginning to tailor results to a predetermined conclusion to support a particular agenda.
Also what you call DRM lock is not correct as has been pointed out by myself and others repeatedly even including your own definition of DRM.
BTW, if you want to get someone’s attention put the @ in front of their name otherwise they don’t get a system notice. Most folks here do the same even when just referencing another participant.
I’ll shut up now. I’ve said enough.
Apologies. I somehow managed to see the “forward compatibility” mentions and miss the “unauthorised copies” mentions. Sigh.
1 Like
