Elegy for the Video Screenshot
It was around this time when streaming platforms like Netflix, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and the Criterion Channel imposed a quiet embargo on the screenshot. At first, there were workarounds: users could continue to screenshot by using the browser Brave or by downloading extensions or third-party tools like Fireshot. But gradually, the digital-rights-management tech adapted and became more sophisticated. Today, it is nearly impossible to take a screenshot from the most popular streaming services, at least not on a Macintosh computer.
The shift occurred without remark or notice to subscribers, and there’s no clear explanation as to why or what spurred the change. When asked to comment for this article, HBO claimed never to have supported the taking of screenshots and denied there had been a recent shift, while Criterion declined to comment entirely. This obfuscation raises many questions. On the one hand, if we were never entitled to screenshot, why did we have tacit permission for so long? And what do the consequences of such a policy shift look like legally, culturally, and emotionally?
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The ability to reappropriate an image (and then distribute it) has long been a topic of fervent debate in the art world, surfacing again and again as a question of controversy and litigation. One such case, Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith, recently made its way to the Supreme Court. The photographer Lynn Goldsmith sued the Warhol Foundation for reappropriating an image she’d taken of the musician Prince in 1981. The Warhol Foundation argued that the resulting image was transformative rather than derivative, ill-defined terms in the fair-use doctrine that compels judges to rule subjectively on what can and should be considered art and what can’t and shouldn’t be. In the course of this case, the very definition of fair use was reconsidered. Last week, the Supreme Court concluded the case with a 7-2 decision in favor of Goldsmith, ruling that Warhol’s prints were in fact an infringement of the photographer’s copyright. Justice Elena Kagen, a member of the minority, voiced her dissent: “It will stifle creativity of every sort. It will impede new art and music and literature. It will thwart the expression of new ideas and the attainment of new knowledge. It will make our world poorer.”
But, reappropriation aside, we’ve also lost the ability to take screenshots and not distribute them. Surely that’s fair use. And, anyway, it shouldn’t be for the platform vendor to determine. This is the equivalent of preventing you from selecting potentially copyrighted text and copying it to the clipboard, which works pretty much everywhere except in the Mac App Store.
Via John Gruber (Hacker News):
I’m not entirely sure what the technical answer to this is, but on MacOS, it seemingly involves the GPU and video decoding hardware. These DRM blackouts happen at such a low level that no high-level software — any sort of utility you might install — can route around them. I think Windows still offers easy screenshotting of frames from DRM video not because the streaming services somehow don’t care about what Windows users do (which, when you think about it, would be a weird thing not to care about, given Windows’s market share), but because Windows uses a less sophisticated imaging pipeline. Or perhaps rather than less sophisticated, it’s more accurate to say less integrated. These DRM blackouts on Apple devices (you can’t capture screenshots from DRM video on iPhones or iPads either) are enabled through the deep integration between the OS and the hardware, thus enabling the blackouts to be imposed at the hardware level. And I don’t think the streaming services opt into this screenshot prohibition other than by “protecting” their video with DRM in the first place. If a video is DRM-protected, you can’t screenshot it; if it’s not, you can.
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What I don’t understand is why Apple bothered supporting this in the first place for hardware-accelerated video (which is all video on iOS platforms — there is no workaround like using Chrome with hardware acceleration disabled on iPhone or iPad). No one is going to create bootleg copies of DRM-protected video one screenshotted still frame at a time — and even if they tried, they’d be capturing only the images, not the sound. And it’s not like this “feature” in MacOS and iOS has put an end to bootlegging DRM-protected video content. This “feature” accomplishes nothing of value for anyone, including the streaming services, but imposes a massive (and for most people, confusing and frustrating) hindrance on honest people[…]
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"This is the equivalent of preventing you from selecting potentially copyrighted text and copying it to the clipboard"
In fact, Preview can opt in to this behavior for PDFs with special permissions set. It's pretty stupid because you can just "print to PDF" and select/copy the text in the output PDF just fine.
This fundamental lack of control over the computer is one of the reasons I don't want to use Macs any longer.
@alexei nailed it but posting my reply anyway
"This is the equivalent of preventing you from selecting potentially copyrighted text and copying it to the clipboard, which works pretty much everywhere except in the Mac App Store."
Yeah don't worry they've thought about that one. It's coming one day. I used to think it wouldn't but now I'm not so sure.
@Bri yes exactly. Stallman warned us about this years ago. And they managed to unperson him by association, apparently. Coincidence I'm sure.
I wonder what the odds are all these companies have some sort of AI model they are training off of data from users/artists/writers/creators who did not opt in? It was like OpenAI complaining that DeepSeek used their dataset for training; it felt rich and hypocritical (especially given the ongoing lawsuit from NYT!)
Technology aside, I don't understand the purpose of this. How is taking a screenshot of a video harming the streaming platform? In fact, in the past, there were multiple instances where I wanted to share a screenshot of a show to tell somebody about how cool it was, but could not take the screenshot, and then didn't tell them about the show.
How does preventing people from advertising their shows to each other help Netflix?
Is this just a side-effect of an attempt to prevent people from recording whole shows?
Anyway, I've fixed the problem (and the problem of fragmentation and the high cost of maintaining multiple different subscriptions) by no longer using any streaming services. Plex, Emby, or Jellyfin offer a much better experience.
Yes, people are going to create bootlegs by screenshotting each frame. However, at the moment they are just downloading the encoded files directly from Netflix/Prime/Whatever, so they have no need for screenshots, and the protection is quite useless.
"This is the equivalent of preventing you from selecting potentially copyrighted text and copying it to the clipboard, which works pretty much everywhere except in the Mac App Store."
And the Books app - the workaround is to search for the text in the book, then copy it from the search text. Or screenshot the book, and use iOS automatic text recognition on the image.
This is an extremely silly restriction, which just makes it annoying to quote (and promote) books I like.
I've never seen it in any other app.
Yes, DRM is evil. Always has been, always will be. Ask me how I know. And yes, DRM for text on the web is only a matter of time—just as soon as the browser vendors find a strategic opening for it, it's going to happen just as EME enabled Netflix.
And I know I shouldn't take the bait, but Gruber's apologia here is a thing of beauty: Windows sucks cos poor video pipeline, it's all the content provider's fault for using DRM anyway, and … I wonder why Apple allows this? It's all such a mystery!
Another thought: I hope someone figures out how to "jailbreak" macOS. It's a shame such a thing is needed. But in theory we can patch out all of this garbage, like was done on iOS before. And at least for now, we can still reduce firmware security, turn off SIP and turn off the signed system volume.
