Free Software Foundation Challenges Tim Berners-Lee On DRM (defectivebydesign.org) 207
Slashdot reader Atticus Rex writes: On Monday, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) director Tim Berners-Lee released a post defending his decision to allow Netflix, Microsoft, Apple and Google to enshrine DRM in Web standards, arguing that blocking it would be pointless. Zak Rogoff, FSF campaigns manager, writes in the response:
"As Director of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), Berners-Lee has the ability to block [the DRM proposal] from ratification as an official Web standard... Of course, a refusal to ratify could not immediately stop the use of DRM, but it could meaningfully weaken the position of DRM in the court of public opinion, and put EME proponents Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, and Google on notice that a very prominent figure was willing to stand up to them on behalf of users. Changes in society's technological infrastructure require political movements, not just technological arguments, and political movements benefit greatly from the support of prominent figures."
Berners-Lee takes the position that "The web has to be universal, to function at all. It has to be capable of holding crazy ideas of the moment, but also the well polished ideas of the century. It must be able to handle any language and culture. It must be able to include information of all types, and media of many genres. Included in that universality is that it must be able to support free stuff and for-pay stuff, as they are all part of this world.
"This means that it is good for the web to be able to include movies, and so for that, it is better for HTML5 to have EME than to not have it."
"As Director of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), Berners-Lee has the ability to block [the DRM proposal] from ratification as an official Web standard... Of course, a refusal to ratify could not immediately stop the use of DRM, but it could meaningfully weaken the position of DRM in the court of public opinion, and put EME proponents Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, and Google on notice that a very prominent figure was willing to stand up to them on behalf of users. Changes in society's technological infrastructure require political movements, not just technological arguments, and political movements benefit greatly from the support of prominent figures."
Berners-Lee takes the position that "The web has to be universal, to function at all. It has to be capable of holding crazy ideas of the moment, but also the well polished ideas of the century. It must be able to handle any language and culture. It must be able to include information of all types, and media of many genres. Included in that universality is that it must be able to support free stuff and for-pay stuff, as they are all part of this world.
"This means that it is good for the web to be able to include movies, and so for that, it is better for HTML5 to have EME than to not have it."
"universal" (Score:5, Insightful)
"The web has to be universal, to function at all. "
As soon as you introduce selective DRM for selected platforms and devices, it's not universal anymore.
"but also the well polished ideas of the century."
Something with DRM is always never an idea of the century cause it will never last a century before it's not possible to consume that idea anymore: it is locked away with DRM, illegal to decrypt.
Re:"universal" (Score:5, Insightful)
As soon as you introduce selective DRM for selected platforms and devices, it's not universal anymore.
Which is rather the point. By including DRM in the standard, you allow everyone to implement the exact same thing, and make it universally available on all devices.
By not including DRM, you would cause all the companies that wanted it to go away and implement it in some weird, proprietary way, that only works on the biggest platforms.
You get support for more devices by putting it in the standard, not fewer.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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By not including DRM, you would cause all the companies that wanted it to go away and implement it in some weird, proprietary way, that only works on the biggest platforms.
We're already at that point. Web developers only care about the biggest platforms.
Most of the small, alternative browsers support the latest W3C standards just fine. Alas, web sites only support brand names. I regularly come across web sites that work fine in Firefox, but don't work at all in Pale Moon, despite the two browsers being based on the same rendering engine. The reason why is that the web sites are designed to detect your browser by the UA header or some stupid JS hack. When a site doesn't s
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By including DRM in the standard, you allow everyone to implement the exact same thing, and make it universally available on all devices.
Except that's not possible. DRM relies on secrets, not simply for keys, but in the implementation. You cannot have an open source implementation of DRM, because anyone can simply modify the code to remove the encryption and make the unencrypted stream available. You can standardise a mechanism for plugging proprietary DRM modules into the web, but you're still reliant on the vendors to provide them for your platform of choice. If you're a minority platform, then you're still screwed.
DRM on music was k
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Which is rather the point. By including DRM in the standard, you allow everyone to implement the exact same thing, and make it universally available on all devices.
But the DRM system that is described in the standard does not even come close to accomplishing this. The DRM plugins are still proprietary and platform-specific. All the standard does is describe the plugin mechanism itself.
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You can't win a trade war like this when you're just a consumer and someone else is producing the content. The value is all generated on their side, and they have plenty of alternative ways to supply their content and plenty of other consumers who will pay for it if you limit the Web so it won't meet their requirements.
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I admire your passion, but the world of media doesn't work that way. If the content distributors (Netflix, Amazon, HBO GO/NOW and the also-rans) weren't able to use standardized DRM, they would use... and standardize... on a non-standard platform. One that, being non-standard, would probably be very closed-source and proprietary. And consumers would flock to it Resulting in a huge, unverified surface for exploits and attacks.
This has happened before. Remember Flash?
Channel George Santayana.
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We've done this song and dance with music, and DRM-free mp3s won despite all of the exact same arguments being made.
But as I pointed out in another post [slashdot.org], music is basically the only creative sector where that has happened widely, and there are reasonable economic arguments for why that is.
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We've had broadband fast enough to stream HD movies or TV shows in real time for several years in many countries, but the same has yet to happen. I don't think your bandwidth argument holds up under scrutiny.
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They don't just think they have a "right" steal, they are outraged that anyone would try to prevent them from stealing.
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Information wants to be free, remember?
No, it doesn't. This is one of those nonsense sayings that gets trotted out every time, but it makes no sense economically. A lot of creative content wants to be paid for, because otherwise there's no commercial incentive to create and distribute it. How that payment works is open to debate, but millions of creative professionals still need to pay the rent, and if creating won't do that, they're going to have to do something else instead.
If piracy/DRM-free is the most universal platform, we win.
Only if there's still stuff to pirate, and only if you don't suffer re
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Information wants to be free in the "libre" sense, so economics doesn't come into play. Similar to how nature abhors a vacuum, the net (and largely, information in general) interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. DRM is censorship from that perspective.
Re:"universal" (Score:5, Insightful)
Similar to how nature abhors a vacuum, the net (and largely, information in general) interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
Seriously, is this the cliche of the month club and I missed the memo?
No, the Internet does not interpret censorship as anything. The Internet is not alive, and the actions taken to distribute works illegally are ultimately taken by people.
Also, comparing measures to prevent infringement of copyright, which is merely against laws that are widely applicable throughout the world, with the sometimes very real problems of actual censorship is just a propaganda move designed to attract an emotional response that is not otherwise justified.
You're just repeating industry shill "the sky is falling" garbage.
Someone who has a different point of view to you is not necessarily a shill. And if there really isn't a problem if we stop creating and distributing new works, why is the vast majority of piracy ripping those new works, instead of just sharing the "orders of magnitude more media than any human could possibly watch" that we already have? Apparently most pirates disagree with you about which work is more valuable.
There is no money to be made in trying to scare pirates straight. There IS money in providing a convenient service, and DRM never adds convenience.
It would be lovely if that were true, but I have been following this issue for a long time, and the evidence so far seems to say otherwise. How would you run a service like Netflix, which obviously a great many people find more convenient than other models for watching movies and TV shows, without DRM or some other system with a similar effect? You're trying to separate DRM from what makes a useful service and treat the two separately, but they aren't independent issues.
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And nature can't actually abhor anything, since it's an abstract concept. But the anthropomorphic metaphor is a succinct way of describing a phenomena, so welcome to 8th grade English class. Any DRM of static media will be broken, given sufficient time and attention, and once broken, the static media can be distributed throughout the inter
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But the anthropomorphic metaphor is a succinct way of describing a phenomena
It might be a succinct way of describing something, but obviously I don't think it's a particularly accurate metaphor in this case.
Any DRM of static media will be broken, given sufficient time and attention, and once broken, the static media can be distributed throughout the internet unimpeded.
Maybe, though rather like car theft, it's become difficult enough to break the security systems directly that most people are working around them, in this case by finding a different source for the material.
In any case, during the time-and-attention stage, the DRM is inhibiting illegal distribution, and even after it's been cracked it's still inhibiting illegal distribution for
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Almost everything is cracked immediately these days. Might get a honeymoon of a few months when a new format drops, but in the long run, almost everything is cracked unless it's too obscure to be worth cracking.
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Almost everything is cracked immediately these days.
You keep saying things like that, but it's just not true. If anyone does have a crack for several of the major online DRM schemes, other than crude things based on the analog hole or the like, they're keeping it extremely close to their chest.
As I said elsewhere, the pirate content is typically coming from other sources now, such as the Blu-ray rips you mentioned.
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Far fewer works were created, and they were far less widely distributed, in that time. Perhaps more significantly, many of those that were were funded through the patronage of wealthy individuals.
The whole point of introducing intellectual property is to apply Smith-style free market economics, and in particular the incentives to provide supply to meet demand, to creative industries, thus promoting the creation and distribution of new works without relying on a small group of very wealthy benefactors to fun
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Yeah, and that's TOTALLY because of copyright and has NOTHING to do with hundreds of millions of connected super-presses in people's homes, or that the population is more educated, with a far smaller portion of the people engaged in primary food production or strenuous manual labor.
Smith was anti-monopoly, so calling legal mon
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Given that copyright-supported creative industries employ millions of people, I think it's safe to assume that at least some of the benefit is because everyone isn't just free to let those people do all the work and then leech off the results.
And copyright is more analogous to respecting private property rather than communal ownership than to having a monopoly in the usual economic sense of the term. If only one organisation could produce any works subject copyright, then it would be more like a normal mono
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Anybody that wants to pirate can pirate today. So, in practice, every is just free to let those people do all the work and then leech off the results. But that is beside the point, because your argument is just bad application of statistics. If you don't think that
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WE DO NOT NEED THE CONTENT.
The content is something we will find with or without them.
Then why do pirates keep ripping the latest Hollywood blockbuster, Game of Thrones season or Adele single, instead of all the other stuff that was around before?
You might not need the content, but apparently plenty of pirates want it, and certainly plenty of people will pay to get it in other ways that maybe aren't so amenable to ripping it off.
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Because they've already ripped the other things, and in many cases, much of the older stuff has exceeded a lot of its relevance. And of course, if it's legal, its not considered pirating, and thus you are simply an archivist.
That has nothing to do with the asymmetry in the struggle here. Movie studios are trying to make copying machines not copy so they can share media that can't be shared. They have to give the keys to the user, but can't let the user have the key. By contrast, the pirates want to co
We have "selected platforms" without standards (Score:5, Insightful)
> As soon as you introduce selective DRM for selected platforms and devices, it's not universal anymore.
"Selected platforms and devices" is what we get without a standard. We know that because we've tried that for 25 years. How many years could Linux users not access Netflix. When I first got involved with the IETF (web standards group), ActiveX was the popular way to implement DRM. Meaning you could only see the content using Internet Explorer on Windows. Talk about "selected platforms"! Later DRM on the web commonly used Java for a few years, then Flash. Flash-based DRM lasted for many years, and there are still many sites that require the security nightmare known as Flash because that's how they do their DRM.
Note in the above paragraph I never used the word "should". This isn't about what publishers "should" do, or what we'd like them to do. It's about what they actually do. What they actually do is require Flash in the best case DRM, and implement the Sony rootkit in other cases. Of course there are almost as many different ways of doing DRM as there are publishers using it - there is no standard.
On the other hand, we've long had standards for video and images such as mpeg and jpeg. Are those limited to "selected platforms and devices"? No, the entire point of standardization is that a standard can be implemented on any platform and device.
I've personally made the case against DRM to probably 100 of my customers (qho arw publishers) yet so many of them decide to go ahead and use DRM. About half choose a DRM solution that means I can't see their content on my device. Would a rather they each come up with their own incompatible, annoying DRM that doesn't let me view the content, or would I rather they use a compatible, cross-platform standard that anyone can view, developed with input from users? Given the options we actually have, I'd rather be involved in developing a usable standard than have another generation of Flash-based sites and Sony rootkits.
Re:We have "selected platforms" without standards (Score:4, Interesting)
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It crops up all over the place. Can citizens in a democracy vote to cease being a democracy? Does freedom of speech protect the speech of people who want to withdraw or limit the freedom of speech? And more relevant to this case, the BSD license vs the GNU license. Generalizing, the BSD license
BSD and GPL have history of successes (Score:2)
> And more relevant to this case, the BSD license vs the GNU license. Generalizing, the BSD license lets you do whatever you want with open source. OTOH if you use GNU-licensed open source to create something, you are required to release what you do as GNU-licensed open source itself.
>
> Honestly I don't know for certain which is actually better, or if one is better in some situations, the other better in other situations.
It seems to me that each fits different needs slightly better. Certainly, the
As Much About Advertising as Copyright (Score:5, Informative)
EME proponents Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, and Google
Hey look, all the major browser makers, except one. Users still have a choice in Firefox.
Except that Youtube-owner Google spent hundreds of millions to obtain considerable financial influence [slashdot.org] over the browser maker thought most likely to resist (Mozilla). And then (what a coincidence!) Mozilla gave in on DRM [slashdot.org], and seems perpetually bent on making dozens of other perplexing decisions that users can't stand, and seem outright designed to cost it market share.
Be assured that the other big (if not the main) reason they want DRM is to thwart adblock for videos. If they can compromise your browser/vidplayer to the degree that they've prevented you from even reading the content stream, then they've necessarily also prevented you from altering it.
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Something with DRM is always never an idea of the century cause it will never last a century before it's not possible to consume that idea anymore: it is locked away with DRM, illegal to decrypt.
Most of us just want to watch Netflix rather than worrying about whether people a century from now can still watch Bojack Horseman.
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What exactly is the root of TBL's qualifications to render such a judgement regarding the WWW? He came up with the first implementation of an httpd for his computer at CERN and so now he 'owns' the WWW and can curate it as he sees fit?
That is a ludicrous notion. The inventor of the transistor has not been allowed complete control of how transistors are used in the world.
Did the guy lose his job at CERN and this directorship gig is a consolation position? Give him a small staff to direct and keep him out
Re: "universal" (Score:2, Funny)
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we should all be such screwups
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DRM protected digital content should be considered as rented or licensed for a short period anyway, not bought like a book or a record is. It's the video rental or amusement park model and the prices should reflect that, which they don't always do.
That is all fair. The other side, though, is that if someone is essentially offering some sort of rental model, maybe with access to a large library of content for a specific period at a price far lower than buying a permanent copy of each of the relevant works accessed during that period, then there needs to be some system so customers can't just blatantly take advantage.
It seems doubtful that the likes of Netflix and Spotify would get deals to provide mainstream content to their subscribers if they were t
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if someone is essentially offering some sort of rental model, maybe with access to a large library of content for a specific period at a price far lower than buying a permanent copy of each of the relevant works accessed during that period, then there needs to be some system so customers can't just blatantly take advantage.
So limit downloads. I'd happily pay a subscription fee that limited me to, say, 30 hours a week of video downloads. Even with an unlimited download ability for DRM'd content, I'd still have an incentive to keep up the subscription, because a lot of the value I get is from access to new content. If I sign up and download everything in their catalog then cancel my subscription, I'll have enough to watch for the rest of my life, but I won't be able to watch films and TV shows produced the following year, an
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How does including DRM prevent people from providing DRM-free content?
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DRM and Netflix (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone seriously think Netflix could ever operate without DRM? No DRM, no Netflix or services like it.
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Why does Netflix have to play inside a freakin' Web browser?
You can use Netflix on smartphones, tablets, set-top boxes, various generations of game consoles from all three major companies, via dedicated apps. Netflix has so many players on so many platforms they can't just turn around and say they can't release a player for Windows, macOS and Linux.
It's because of Hollywood (Score:5, Informative)
The second type of approval is for software players. If you want to stream to a software player running on a general purpose computing device, Hollywood has much more stringent requirements. Their fear is that you'll run another program along-side the streaming video that peeks into the memory containing the decrypted stream, and save stream to disk thus giving you a DRM-free digital copy of the movie. Their "solution" is that the DRM and video decode process has to happen inside an encrypted virtual machine, which then sends each frame directly to the display device. They don't want a native Windows or OS X or Liinux binary which does this because someone could theoretically modify the binary before running to weaken or pierce the encrypted VM. That's why the players are coded in Flash or Silverlight (theoretically you could modify those as well, but it's a lot harder since a new copy of the player is sent when you begin streaming the movie).
This insanity is also why playing streamed movies on PC requires much heftier hardware than mobile devices. Because the entire decode process has to happen inside the encrypted VM, you can't take advantage of dedicated video decode hardware built into every GPU since the late 1990s. The entire thing has to be done in software (moreover, software running in a VM). It's extremely CPU-intensive. That's why until recently you needed an i3 or better (Pentium or Atom wasn't enough) to stream 1080p movies from Netflix, Hulu, etc, while your phone with a low-end ARM processor could stream the same 1080p movie with no problems. Because the phone was approved as a hardware device, it's allowed to use dedicated video decoding hardware.
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Fascinating post. I was wondering if you had any links or reference material that describe such an "encrypted VM" -- I would love to learn more about it!
Thanks for such a great post. I really found it incredibly fascinating!
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The question isn't "Do we want Netflix and services like it?"
The question is "Do we want Netflix and services like it in our web browsers?"
Re:DRM and Netflix (Score:5, Insightful)
The answer is "yes". Just ask anyone who's not an obsessed nerd.
Since Netflix is obviously going to happen in browsers, whatever obsessed nerds think about that, better to have some sort of standard for that, some hope of getting Netflix on Linux, than not.
I know some people actually believe that somehow, if we didn't have DRM standards, streaming content would magically be DRM-free. Those people have a lot to learn about the world we live in.
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Anyone who's not a nerd watches Netflix on their smartphone, tablet, set-top box or game console.
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When you swing around the term 'obsessed nerd' like it's a cat you are holding by the tail, it makes you seem like a fucking suit. With that low slashdot UID, what the fuck are you doing here on Slashdot? Did you have your secretary buy that account with petty cash?
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When you swing around the term 'obsessed nerd' like it's a cat ...
Who else knows what DRM is and also thinks they should fight against it for ... some reason?
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My UID is low enough to remember when Slashdot was "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters".
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better to have some sort of standard for that, some hope of getting Netflix on Linux, than not.
Actually, Netflix is transitioning their content to Microsoft's PlayReady 3.0, so you will NEVER get a Linux version that isn't part of a "smart" TV.
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Since Netflix is obviously going to happen in browsers...
Says who? The obvious thing that's happening is not browsers, but "apps".
Mobile devices won't even let you watch videos in a "browser". They force you to use the app. I remember regularly using the web browser on my PS3 to watch YouTube, when one day, the site blacklisted the PS3 entirely, forcing you to use the app instead. That pissed me off, since the YouTube app on the PS3/PS4 sucks balls. But, hey, it's the only way to watch videos on that platform. I stopped watching YouTube on my TV after that,
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Some think think that somehow, if we didn't live in segregated neighborhoods, racial prejudice would magically disappear.
That's a beautiful thought. Yet, despite a bunch of laws, most people still live in segregated neighborhoods. And there's still a bunch of racial prejudice. Some things can't be changed by a central authority.
Also, a standards body isn't even a central authority in the first place. I've worked on an international standards committee. They have no real world power at all - they just write wish lists, and hope for the best. Large companies only follow a standard because you write down what they were goi
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The question is "Do we want Netflix and services like it in our web browsers?"
Yes
If you personally do not want Netflix and their DRM, that is perfectly fine, just simply stop going there and using them.
But please stop trying your hardest to take Netflix away from me.
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People said this about music stores. Now you buy music as mp3, because they had no success with their drm.
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And music is so far the only major exception to the rule, possibly because bundling up lots of tracks into an album and charging a higher price for it was always an artificial restriction. Much more music is bought as singles today, and mass-market singles can be economically sold at sub-dollar price points that are an impulse purchase for anyone who can afford an Internet connection and a device to use it. Unfortunately, the same economics don't necessarily work for creative sectors where the normal full p
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it's all about the convenience. DRM did what the EFF and FSF tell you: It stopped people from using their music. In the age of mp3 players a format, which requires you to renew the licence file on the player every few days? No way.
The same does apply to netflix. The (even 4k) rips of netflix movies started, because people wanted to see netflix on settop boxes / sticks, which do not support netflix. People do not have a problem to pay $10 per month. People have a problem, if watching the movies is FUBAR. AN
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DRM did what the EFF and FSF tell you: It stopped people from using their music.
And yet it is also the foundation for arguably the most successful innovation in the music industry in decades: Spotify.
The (even 4k) rips of netflix movies started, because people wanted to see netflix on settop boxes / sticks, which do not support netflix.
Who do you think is ripping 4K movies from Netflix?
People do not have a problem to pay $10 per month.
As someone who has actually run businesses in this market, I can promise you that many people do have a problem with paying $10/month. The number of people today who think everything should just be available for free, or that any new content should be a $1.99 download from some App Store regardless of economics, would blow your mind.
So you may only delay it by a few weeks, if you're lucky. Is that a reason to make watching movies a PITA for all honest custumers?
Ideall
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Complete nonsense. Everything they offer, you can download for free somewhere. They are turning a profit because they are not too greedy and they are convenient.
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So you are seriously saying Netflix could operate without DRM? Why doesn't someone operate a service like Netflix with no DRM then?
Re:DRM and Netflix (Score:4, Insightful)
So you are seriously saying Netflix could operate without DRM?
Yes. Netflix DRM does absolutely nothing to decrease piracy. If Netflix provided plain .mp4 downloads (perhaps rate limited to prevent people from trying to download their entire catalogue) then their service would still work. I'd actually subscribe to them (I don't now), because I'd be able to watch their content on the FreeBSD media centre box connected to my projector.
Why doesn't someone operate a service like Netflix with no DRM then?
Because the studios won't license their content to Netflix without DRM (they also wouldn't let iPlayer stream films without at least a token attempt at DRM, even though it was trivial to break). They have failed to learn the lesson of the music industry and are still buying the argument that it decreases piracy as a cover for allowing companies like Netflix to control their channel. Netflix licenses their DRM to a load of set-top-box makers and so on, meaning that there are a huge number of devices that can watch Netflix content. That's a big barrier to entry for a new startup to overcome. If the studios would license their content for DRM-free download, you'd see a load of Netflix competitors spring into being.
Freedom is better than DRM, Netflix, etc. (Score:2)
Your framing, as with anyone who says DRM is somehow necessary, is giving into those who would take away the freedom the web was built on. I'd rather have a free web than a web DRM-based business owners feel more comfortable with because I value my freedom.
Even in the narrow terms defended by DRM quislings DRM doesn't work to exclude those who share copies of DRM'd works; virtually everything Netflix publishes is available gratis online anyhow. So what we end up is the very divided web DRM proponents claim
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I think a lot of people would rather have Netflix. Does the existence of Netflix preclude anything anyone else wants to do? Because not having DRM available precludes Netflix, and a lot of people seem to value Netflix.
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Yes, they could do so... partially and maybe fully, eventually. The reason that they could is that they own some content, the "Netflix Originals" which could be DRM free. It may take years but if people appreciate the DRM free component enough that they only use Netflix, it will force the hand of other content providers and it's a domino effect really.
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Does anyone seriously think Netflix could ever operate without DRM? No DRM, no Netflix or services like it.
Does anyone seriously think DVDs could ever operate without DRM? No DRM, no DVDs or other medias like it.
Unpopular here, but I'm with Berners-Lee. DRM exis (Score:5, Insightful)
I know this opinion will probably be unpopular here on Slashdot, but 20 years of developing web standards and web technologies tells me Berners-Lee is right on this one, from a standards perspective. Our choice, realistically, for some content is between standardized, compatible, cross-platform DRM, or non-standard, incompatible DRM that requires Internet Explorer on Windows with Java or Flash. This isn't about what we think people *should* do, it's about what they *actually* do.
From the 1990s through to today, some publishers have found a need for DRM of one form or another, and over and over again they've asked me to help deploy it. I explain that DRM generally doesn't work and can't work. They then buy some DRM solution based on ActiveX, or Flash, or Java, or whatever is popular at the moment, and I can't see their content on my Linux desktop. The story repeats over and over. How many years could Linux users not access Netflix?
The fact is, companies will implement DRM. Lacking a standard way to do it, most require Flash (which is a security nightmare), Sony installs a rootkit on customers' computers. Most companies *shouldn't* use DRM, perhaps, but they do. A few companies have a strong case of why DRM actually makes sense for their content.
There is no debate about this point - we KNOW companies will deploy DRM without a standard, because the DO. Lack of a standard for web DRM has never stopped them from hacking together really annoying DRM.
Do we prefer a standardized, cross-platform approach developed with input from users or do we prefer the Sony rootkit approach? Those are the realistic options we can actually choose from. The standards bodies can't prevent DRM, they can only offer a reasonable way of doing it or leave publishers to implement it in all kinds of unreasonable ways.
Re:Unpopular here, but I'm with Berners-Lee. DRM e (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. If we want more Flashes and more Silverlights, by all means, fight against DRM in the browser. I, for one, do not. I will choose the lesser evil. We're going to need it until we "fix" copyright law, which could take literally forever.
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But what if I want Flashes and Silverlights to only be installed on other people's equipment who choose to install it?
What if I don't want a Flash and a Silverlight embedded into each and every browser that it's possible for me to use?
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What if I don't want a Flash and a Silverlight embedded into each and every browser that it's possible for me to use?
It's usually possible to take such things out, or at least block them. What's the problem?
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Exactly. If we want more Flashes and more Silverlights, by all means, fight against DRM in the browser. I, for one, do not. I will choose the lesser evil. We're going to need it until we "fix" copyright law, which could take literally forever.
One political revolution will end it pretty quickly. For some reason the US thinks they are immune to such a change, even when they see it happening all around them.
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One political revolution will end it pretty quickly. For some reason the US thinks they are immune to such a change, even when they see it happening all around them.
If we do have a revolution, I doubt we'll even get around to fixing copyright. It'll just be a new gang of assholes in business soon enough.
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If we don't want Flash and Silverlight we should be for having something comparable right inside the browser?
We already effectively do have all the parts of flash right in the browser already except for the DRM. But then since we need to add something else to get the DRM, we end up getting all of those things all over again in some other form and adding a lot of unnecessary attack surface.
It's not like you won't be able to get an OSS build which doesn't have the DRM.
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What '20 years of dictating web standards' tells me is that TBL has had his shot at it, and it's time for somebody else to get a chance.
The web is such a failure, nobody ever used it (Score:2)
Yeah the web has been a complete failure under W3C and IETF. I'd never use the web, and I'm sure you wouldn't either.
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>Do we prefer a standardized, cross-platform approach developed with input from users or do we prefer the Sony rootkit approach? Those are the realistic options we can actually choose from. The standards bodies can't prevent DRM, they can only offer a reasonable way of doing it or leave publishers to implement it in all kinds of unreasonable ways.
EME is neither a viable standard nor is it in any way cross-platform and there was zero input from users. The input came from Adobe, Microsoft, Google, etc.
EME is basically something like NPAPI. it has a few API/html statements and is otherwise a proprietary blackbox for only very specific OSes, browsers, etc.
In this it works exactly 100% the same as Flash did: both have the same propeties.
EME is one of the unreasonable ways.
Re:Unpopular here, but I'm with Berners-Lee. DRM e (Score:4, Interesting)
I would happily support DRM that actually cared about customers' rights. I want the guarantee that, like physical media, DRM-protected content will be available in the far future. Blu-ray already fails this test, and I only purchase Blu-rays to strip the DRM and save a long-term format. I want the ability to gift, loan, or sell any media that I possess the rights to. I don't want to possess merely a ticket which grants me admittance to content for a limited time, under limited conditions, subject to the dissolution of whatever producer, licencor, or operator manages the DRM scheme.
Because piracy has absolutely no effect on 99% of customers I am fairly certain that what content producers/licencors truly fear is "casual piracy" and fair use like loans and libraries where market forces drive the resale cost of digital media down to its natural price in the free market.
It's perfectly natural to resist inferior DRM schemes by refusing to make them standard. If you want me to support an open DRM standard then it needs to be capability based with normal customers like you or me represented as first class owners of those capabilities and implement a durable scheme for transfer of those capabilities into the indefinite future.
For example, consider a ownership-based scheme where producers issue N digitally-signed capabilities to a particular copyrighted work and sell them to customers on an electronic marketplace. Bitcoin has proven that it's possible to maintain a globally consistent transaction ledger of ownership of individual tokens, and a much cheaper implementation could maintain ownership and facilitate programmatic transfer of capabilities to digital works (to support sales, gifts, and even temporary loans) because the marginal value of acquiring more than one capability to the same work is zero and so there will be little need to spend gigawatts of electricity maintaining the blockchain against adversaries. The copyrighted work doesn't even have to be encrypted. Just make standards-compliant devices/software require current ownership of a capability to use the work. Yes, this is an easily defeated scheme for pirates, but so is every other DRM scheme. At least this respects individual property rights, the first sale doctrine, fair use, and libraries for the vast majority of users.
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Indeed. It's worth nothing that both Chrome and (soon) Firefox will banish plugins, ensuring that whatever DRM exists out there will have to be built into the browser through political clout and sponsorships. That means if you don't like the DRM, you have no ability to uninstall it, or possibly even disable it.
At the very least, we need a standard mechanism for managing DRM, which hopefully means being able to turn it off.
Factually mistaken. Needs only Javascript & AE (Score:2)
> Nobody has a EME implementation for ARM, MIPS ...
It will mean the beginning of the Intel-only web.
That is factually incorrect. See Chromium for one open source example. EME can call any CDM, only one is required, called Clear Key. Clear Key is basically "the video is encrypted with AES, prompt the user to copy-paste the key". Clear Key (and therefore EME) can be implemented in nothing more than (clever) Javascript, so any platform that can run Javascript can run EME.
Of course it isn't *normally* i
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Protected by AES key, not cleverness of JavaScript (Score:2)
> if the only protection is clever javascript
The protection isn't in the Javascript. The protection is that the content is encrypted with AES. Only a user with the key can decrypt the content. The Javascript is "clever" only in that it manipulates html tags that the browser doesn't natively understand, etc.
> there will be a script to rip the content in -3 seconds,
Absolutely. EME doesn't provide any protection whatsoever against an authorized user ripping the content. That's outside the scope of EME. T
You are predicting the past (and wrongly) (Score:2)
> Clear Key will not work on ANY site, so its existence is irrelevant.
It *is* working, and has been working.
It always amuses me when people predict the *past* and still manage to get it wrong.
Has something worked well in Oklahoma? (Score:2)
Quite clever. Let's be a tad more clear. Is there something you saw tried regarding death penalty policy that has worked so well in Oklahoma that you want to apply the same approach more broadly?
Or are you pointing that the approach you favor for all issues has utterly and completely failed when applied to the death penatly debate?
Some services need DRM (Score:2)
Re:Some services need DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
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Compared to creating content at the level of a blockbuster movie, implementing terrible DRM is basically free. Sure, you're forcing everyone who wants to watch it to do some stupid crap like downloading a random Windows executable, but the incremental cost to the creator rounds to zero. The incremental inconvenience to the consumers rounds up to infinity, but it turns out that they want to watch it anyway and generally don't care so they'll just do the thing.
To most people, giving them the choice of being
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By making DRM harder and more inconvenient, you make it less profitable,
Slightly, but the cost of a reasonably effective DRM scheme relative to the scale of deals that the likes of Netflix and major movie studios are making is probably pretty small.
which puts non-DRM media at an advantage.
That only follows if you assume the DRM doesn't have a beneficial effect that justifies its cost. If that were true, the executives running Big Media businesses would have switched tactics long ago.
It might not be a popular sentiment around here, but the reality is that a lot of copyright infringement is done casually and often by pe
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There is no reasonably effective DRM stream. Any movie or TV is on TPB basically as soon as a legit copy or stream is available.
That on
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That's why no one buys computer games on Steam.
So and so (Score:2)
and put EME proponents Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, and Google on notice that a very prominent figure was willing to stand up to them on behalf of users
I question whether this position is truly "standing up on behalf of users".
Most users have governments which pass copyright laws predicated on the value of securing, for authors for limited times, exclusive right to profit from their works as a means of encouraging the creation of said works, the volume of which as a benefit for The People.
One standard to break (Score:2)
Better to only have to work around one DRM implementation than a bunch of different ones, cause you know they are going to happen regardless.
CSS anyone?
Lets get pragmitic for a moment (Score:2)
I hate DRM as much as anyone but lets face it, if he did not ratify it into the standard, DRM isn't then just gonna magically go away.
The only effect not ratifying it would actually have is to ensure the continued existence of a fragmented mess of multiple different actual implementations across different sites.
There is a way to make it right/thwart it. (Score:2)
The W3C Encrypted Media Extensions only defines a way to use Content Decryption Modules (DRM) but there is no definition for the the modules themselves. If their interface and format were 100% defined then that would be ok. However, they have specifically gone out of their way to avoid defining CDMs because they want to make CDMs platform specific and be able to reach deep into your operating system to "verify the environment". Just say they can have the EME if they completely define the CDMs and suddenl
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I believe the standard effectively just describes the nature of the interaction, and people can still use any DRM algorithm they want under the covers, so its still not a one-hack-cracks-all situation.
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Still not half as bad as the stupid American date convention of
Month-Day-Year.
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I would really love to see someone enlighten me on why it's downvoted to -1 for any reasons other than that.