I have given money to the FSF for years and will continue to do so as a member. However, I do not support them in this fight. Berners-Lee is doing the right thing here.
Can you elaborate on that? Why do you believe this?
Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
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Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chrome has been using EME with Netflix since early 2013. This fight was lost years ago.
The point of web standards isn't to stop browsers from implementing anything else. Such a viewpoint is naive, that's not what W3C is. Back when IExplorer had a 90% market share, you could have argued that ActiveX needs to be a web standard. But it wasn't considered a standard even if it was a de facto one and now ActiveX is gone. I must be getting old if I'm talking with people that don't remember the browser wars or…
I've been around since the browser wars, and disagree with your characterization here. Standards don't serve marketshare, they are about interoperability and documentation.
A single user-agent technology shouldn't be standardized because that user agent has large marketshare. A tech should be standardized because multiple user agents want to use it, and be interoperable. The ActiveX comparison doesn't make much sense to me.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
#43I don't understand the point of WebDRM. You can't simultaneously give us the content and not give us the content. WebDRM is broken by default and pushing it is just absolutely retarded.
As dumb and broken as it is, the state of the world is such that you can't deliver most video without something like it. So the options are: 1. Stick to your guns and keep it out of the standard, free browsers will be unable to play Netflix, Hulu, HBOGo, BBC, etc... Propriety plugins that only work on one browser and/or one platform will exist and be annoying and buggy. 2. Give in and allow this braindamage in the st…
Option 1 is the best because playing DRM content should be Netflix's problem.
Why in the world would you want to subsidize Netflix's development?
So what if Netflix's DRM plugin would be proprietary and buggy? Heck, that's a window of opportunity for DRM-free competition.
By making it a standard it means that we'll never, ever get rid of it. Even if DRM is fundamentally flawed.
#2 is in fact the worst solution.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
#44Everything that I have read suggests that this is standardizing what has already happened with video, which is a great deal better than the bad old days when companies relied upon Macromedia/Adobe for video streaming. (Or worse, a plug-in from an obscure company with an unknown track record). As much as I would like to avoid DRM, relatively few producers are going to budge on the issue. The only options are standardi…
> This one is likely the best of the three.
I don't agree. Ignoring the massive injustice of ramming proprietary extensions into an open standard, standardising DRM has several secondary detriments to the free culture movement. In fact, standardising EME might actually be the worst of the three choices (the best being no DRM of course). Non-standard extensions are better to the movement (though still disastrous) than standardised ones, and here's why.
The most serious one is that it will appear to be far more convenient. One of the man ways that we could appeal to users who didn't particularly care about their software freedom being trampled on by corporations is that the method they used to trample on their freedoms were inelegant. Your monitor would flicker (and software would break) when it went to HDCP mode, Netflix might break every once in a while, Flash websites always were incredibly buggy. Meanwhile, VLC and family always just worked. Now, EME will make this experience "more seamless" which is a huge downside because now users won't even be aware of how many of their freedoms are being taken away.
The second is that now DRM is more appealing than it might've been 5 years ago. DRM isn't some horrible Flash applet that nobody understands the inner workings of, and when it breaks then you just have to deal with it. It's a standardised system around which more cabals will form. It's not something that just the AAC conspiracy operates around, it's far more accessible. If you thought that Blu-Ray was insane, you've seen nothing yet.
Every Flash vulnerability was a reminder that the status quo was not acceptable. Sure, the reminder came about for the wrong reasons (it turns out the pawns behind a conspiracy aren't generally very good at conspiring), but it came nonetheless. Now that EME will presumably be secure enough, all of these secondary issues that acted as entry-points for people to learn about how badly they are being mistreated will no longer be accessible. "Who needs a copy of their data when you can just stream it with a proprietary player that probably tracks you?"
Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
#45This truly is the death of the open web. I hope the appeal is successful. Freedom seems to be losing on all fronts these days.
> This truly is the death of the open web
About as much as music DRM was the death of music players. And as we all know the only way to play a music file today is to buy them in the Microsoft Zune store and squirt them over to your FairPlaysForSure(tm) certified KindlePod.
It's not a good thing; it lets some very big actors hurt themselves and their paying customers by still pretending that people will eventually come around to paying more for inferior service if only they force feed enough "you wouldn't download a car" ads to their dwindling customer base, and it encumbers the browsers to support yet another legacy standard that will be used only by exploit writers in ten years time.
But in the end this is never going to prevent you or anyone born after the sixties from accessing any significant piece of content. It is only going to stop you from going out of your way to pay for it.
I guess if YouTube started putting DRM on everything, that would reach the level of 'annoying'. Is there any indication they would do that?
Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
#46W3C takes advantage of the ambiguity of what the EME spec and "standard" DRM is. People unfamiliar with the spec may think it's the end of plug-ins and a spec for a DRM that is somehow open, implementable and cross-browser.
It's nothing like it. It's a small JS API that launches the same old, fully closed, proprietary DRM solutions. The NPAPI has been replaced with DMCA-protected interface, and previously separate DRM plug-ins are now called "modules" and shipped with the browser.
It's as if Chrome, which ships with Flash bundled-in, created a "HTML Multimedia Extensions" spec with just `navigator.launch("com.adobe.flash")` for launching "Multimedia Modules" (details of which are out of scope of the spec), and hailed it as the end of the non-standard Flash and plug-ins.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well this doesn't actually change much in practice. Web browsers have allowed black-box extensions for DRM'd content since the dawn of flash. Personally I am disgusted that this standard is being promoted by the W3C and Tim Berners-Fucking-Lee. The browser vendors are perfectly capable of building (and even standardizing) this tech by themselves. The open web is as available today as it ever was, and even more so wit…
> Personally I am disgusted that this standard is being promoted by the W3C and Tim Berners-Fucking-Lee. The browser vendors are perfectly capable of building (and even standardizing) this tech by themselves. I don't understand these two sentences in conjunction, which is most of why I don't understand all the complaining about this issue. If, as almost everyone admits, the browser vendors are going to ship DRM-enabl…
As I understand, EME is the only w3c recommendation that forces web browsers to run proprietary black-box code. I am a proponent of the open web, so I view this standard as a big step in the wrong direction.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point of web standards isn't to stop browsers from implementing anything else. Such a viewpoint is naive, that's not what W3C is. Back when IExplorer had a 90% market share, you could have argued that ActiveX needs to be a web standard. But it wasn't considered a standard even if it was a de facto one and now ActiveX is gone. I must be getting old if I'm talking with people that don't remember the browser wars or…
I've been around since the browser wars, and disagree with your characterization here. Standards don't serve marketshare, they are about interoperability and documentation. A single user-agent technology shouldn't be standardized because that user agent has large marketshare. A tech should be standardized because multiple user agents want to use it, and be interoperable. The ActiveX comparison doesn't make much sense…
"User agents" serve the market. The market wanted ActiveX. There were many companies and government institutions requiring ActiveX for their interfaces.
Mozilla could have implemented ActiveX btw, but they took a stand against it.
So by your definition, what does "many" mean? Is it more than one? More than two perhaps? Should it be all of them?
What if I create a browser and announce that it will not support DRM. If market share isn't important, shouldn't this proposal be dropped?
Yes, web standards are about interoperability, but the problem is that DRM being fundamentally broken it means that open source browsers running on open platforms won't be able to "interoperate", which in my book means that this can't be a standard.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chrome has been using EME with Netflix since early 2013. This fight was lost years ago.
The point of web standards isn't to stop browsers from implementing anything else. Such a viewpoint is naive, that's not what W3C is. Back when IExplorer had a 90% market share, you could have argued that ActiveX needs to be a web standard. But it wasn't considered a standard even if it was a de facto one and now ActiveX is gone. I must be getting old if I'm talking with people that don't remember the browser wars or…
Recall that one of the reasons Web SQL was rejected was lack of variation in implementations - pretty much every browser implementation was based on SQLite.
Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chrome has been using EME with Netflix since early 2013. This fight was lost years ago.
The point of web standards isn't to stop browsers from implementing anything else. Such a viewpoint is naive, that's not what W3C is. Back when IExplorer had a 90% market share, you could have argued that ActiveX needs to be a web standard. But it wasn't considered a standard even if it was a de facto one and now ActiveX is gone. I must be getting old if I'm talking with people that don't remember the browser wars or…
> you could have argued that ActiveX needs to be a web standard.
Yep, it is called WebAssembly.