Better solution: repeal the DMCA.
Save Firefox
141–150 of 266 posts
Re: Save Firefox
#142> [The W3C] needs to hear from you now. Please share this post, and spread the word. Help the W3C be the organization it is meant to be. This isn't about the W3C. This is about EME, and about the companies that created it and promoted it: Google, Microsoft and Netflix (as you can see on the spec, for example https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/ ). Telling the W3C not to do DRM is not going to be effective. The only…
Your last sentence is exactly right. Sure DRM is bad, but you can't tell people not to build things a priori like that, and DRM will be built because the content studios demand it, and the studios hold the content which everyone wants. The EFF greatly overestimates the amount of influence browser makers have. No amount of technical pressure will make an ounce of difference, because browser makers have literally no le…
>Fighting EME not only is ineffectual, it harms open web standards by giving legs to completely proprietary solutions like Flash and Silverlight. The bottom line is that EME is a cleaner solution which compromises in a way that will make open standards more relevant going forward rather than taking an ideological position that will undermine the utility of open standards in the marketplace.
Counterpoint: Flash and Silverlight, being "unclean solutions", are fundamentally hampered - the market split, and "HTML5" won (for now). The mere existence of a widely-accepted "clean solution" could easily do more harm than good.
Re: Save Firefox
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no valid use of DRM. It's always invalid. It's based on its unethical nature (overreaching preemptive policing).
Out of curiosity, what's your proposal for enforcing rental contract business rules on a viewer's device? Content providers see DRM as an implementation of a movie ticket system. You know, walls, doors and a doorman that kick you out after the movie is over. Also far from honour system.
See below. In reality, this DRM has nothing to do with rental, because you can't buy same content DRM-free anyway.
And nothing should be "enforced" on user's device. It's user's, not anyone's else. Your analogy with the movie theater is invalid, because there you visit, and leave when it's finished. Here it's your private [digital] space, and no DRM junk should have any business violating your privacy for any kind of enforcement purposes.
Re: Save Firefox
#144> [The W3C] needs to hear from you now. Please share this post, and spread the word. Help the W3C be the organization it is meant to be. This isn't about the W3C. This is about EME, and about the companies that created it and promoted it: Google, Microsoft and Netflix (as you can see on the spec, for example https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/ ). Telling the W3C not to do DRM is not going to be effective. The only…
Your last sentence is exactly right. Sure DRM is bad, but you can't tell people not to build things a priori like that, and DRM will be built because the content studios demand it, and the studios hold the content which everyone wants. The EFF greatly overestimates the amount of influence browser makers have. No amount of technical pressure will make an ounce of difference, because browser makers have literally no le…
>DRM will be built because the content studios demand it, and the studios hold the content which everyone wants
Why do you believe the copyright holders (or the browser makers) are the ones who potentially hold absolute power in this scenario, rather than the users? Any DRM is an unsustainable system, EME is not going to change this. I also have strong doubts that EME will do anything to push the so-called "content industry" towards better sustainability as you suggest it will. There is still zero incentive for any knowledgeable user to buy into it. If anything it will just make the system more complicated because of the proliferation of even more competing, incompatible DRM systems that only work on certain devices with very specific configuration requirements.
I agree that some of the ridiculousness in the DMCA is part of the problem, but this isn't going to be solved by building more walled gardens, it's going to be solved by thinking about how it can actually benefit the user in the long run.
Re: Save Firefox
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
That assumption may indeed be false. See here[0] in the FAQ "What does this mean for downstream users of the Firefox code base?" >>> The solution consists of three parts: the browser, the CDM host and the CDM. >>> However, the CDM will refuse to work if it finds itself in a host that isn’t identical to the Mozilla-shipped CDM host executable. At first, I interpreted this to mean Mozilla, not Adobe, had implemented th…
...and this - I guess - is where the DMCA issue that the EFF raises comes in. Because sure, you could build a browser that loads Adobe's CRM and fools it into thinking it's been loaded into Firefox - but if you did that, you could well be construed as defeating a technological copyright protection method.
So then, the only way CDMs are acceptable IMO is if they're never given enough information to know where they're running.
This should be a critical part of the standard and I'm surprised I haven't heard the EFF pushing for this, specifically. If the CDM has enough information to discriminate, your choice of browser for watching DRMed video is entirely in the publisher's hands.
The fact that you may get in trouble for fooling the CDM to run on another browser is almost beside the point. Why should we trust a black box with ANY information outside of the DRM-specific?
A website can refuse to load based on my user-agent, for example. However, I have full control over what the website knows about my browser including my user-agent. Because of this fact, I am always free from browser-discrimination on the Web.
But I have zero control over what the CDM knows about my browser. Therefore, the CDM has complete and unavoidable ability to prevent me from accessing parts of the public Web based solely on my choice of browser. AFAIK this is unprecedented. It means that users are no longer free from browser-discrimination, perhaps for the first time in the history of the Web.
Re: Save Firefox
#146> [The W3C] needs to hear from you now. Please share this post, and spread the word. Help the W3C be the organization it is meant to be. This isn't about the W3C. This is about EME, and about the companies that created it and promoted it: Google, Microsoft and Netflix (as you can see on the spec, for example https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/ ). Telling the W3C not to do DRM is not going to be effective. The only…
I would guess I'm in a small minority but I don't want my browser to play media. I want to use separate applications for that. The browser can know what I want to launch, and offer to do it, but I don't ever want media to play within a web page.
Re: Save Firefox
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your last sentence is exactly right. Sure DRM is bad, but you can't tell people not to build things a priori like that, and DRM will be built because the content studios demand it, and the studios hold the content which everyone wants. The EFF greatly overestimates the amount of influence browser makers have. No amount of technical pressure will make an ounce of difference, because browser makers have literally no le…
>DRM will be built because the content studios demand it, and the studios hold the content which everyone wants Why do you believe the copyright holders (or the browser makers) are the ones who potentially hold absolute power in this scenario, rather than the users? Any DRM is an unsustainable system, EME is not going to change this. I also have strong doubts that EME will do anything to push the so-called "content i…
> Any DRM is an unsustainable system
Agreed. Every implementation of DRM has been or will be broken eventually, and can keep people out of something that wasn't intended to be always locked.
Putting DRM on software and music is like building shitty locks into every book in the library or single in the record store. It doesn't make sense.
Re: Save Firefox
#148> [The W3C] needs to hear from you now. Please share this post, and spread the word. Help the W3C be the organization it is meant to be. This isn't about the W3C. This is about EME, and about the companies that created it and promoted it: Google, Microsoft and Netflix (as you can see on the spec, for example https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/ ). Telling the W3C not to do DRM is not going to be effective. The only…
I would guess I'm in a small minority but I don't want my browser to play media. I want to use separate applications for that. The browser can know what I want to launch, and offer to do it, but I don't ever want media to play within a web page.
You are not alone. Even ignoring the problems of Flash, most web players are so bad I much prefer to just pass URLs to mpv but ... I don't want them to be better, I want it to be easier to use external programs of my preference.
Re: Save Firefox
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because everything else happening on the page is still regular web stuff, not encapsulated in a proprietary plugin like Flash. Essentially much smaller surface area of proprietary stuff, and because each browser only implements one CDM and they are responsible for the integration it doesn't break as much the way that Flash increasingly did over time.
If I go to a page with a video on it that uses flash, the rest of the page works just fine if I don't have the flash plugin installed. This is identical behavior to not having the CDM. If the rest of the page also uses flash, that's entirely separate. It is even possible that the rest of the page could be flash, while playing a video with either the native tag or through a CDM. Integration between the video and the r…
If you don't want DRM, don't watch media that requires DRM. Nobody is making you use it. It's something you use because want to use Netflix, etc.
Re: Save Firefox
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I go to a page with a video on it that uses flash, the rest of the page works just fine if I don't have the flash plugin installed. This is identical behavior to not having the CDM. If the rest of the page also uses flash, that's entirely separate. It is even possible that the rest of the page could be flash, while playing a video with either the native tag or through a CDM. Integration between the video and the r…
If you don't want DRM, don't watch media that requires DRM. Nobody is making you use it. It's something you use because want to use Netflix, etc.
And that would be why I don't use Netflix.