Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal

defectivebydesign.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 222 posts

Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal

#71

Post by metajack »

cyphar wrote: post #44
II2II wrote: post #17

Everything 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…

It's a bit tough to argue we should keep computers insecure and hope people get annoyed and change their minds. Keeping people's computers safe is a primary goal of browser vendors, and this improves that state of affairs. Sure, DRM sucks, but at least the vendors can't root your machine and install keyloggers now.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal

#72

Post by garaetjjte »

marksomnian wrote: post #54
bad_user wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Put yourself in the shoes of a browser dev faced with a torrent of angry users asking why you "broke Netflix". They won't listen to what seems like a wishy-washy response about the principles of "the open Internet", all they will care about is that they had Netflix and now they don't and it's your fault. Devil's advocate, I'm no fan of DRM, but from the end user's point of view, it's a necessity.

It boils down to what is more important for user: will they change browser to play DRMed videos or switch video provider to one without DRM. Not supporting EME in browser with falling usage (Firefox) is likely suicide, but W3C doesn't make browsers and can take any ideological position without consequences.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal

#73

Post by agumonkey »

izacus wrote: post #62
tveita wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 com…

Right now DRM is the death of you being able to preserve the TV shows you love (they'll just disappear from Netflix after some time and you're not allowed to download them even if you paid for them), the death of being able to watch things on planes and the death of being able to watch things if one of your increasingly unreliable ISPs drops a connection.

What if it was legally bound that a securing tech (enforcing users not to abuse content) HAS to be opened in case of future demise of the author company ?

If Apple and iTunes suddenly crash, they have to make a tiny effort into releasing a conversion/stripping tool and/or open source the system so that ex-customers can at least attempt to help themselves.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal

#74

Post by metajack »

__jal wrote: post #26
II2II wrote: post #17

Everything 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…

I disagree. "Doing without" seems the most sensible to me. There is no rule that industries whose business is built on copyright need to be able to live in the browser. Netflix demonstrated that quite nicely. Just because the want it doesn't mean they should get it. I personally cripple EME on my browsers, and if your content won't display for me, I'll happily go elsewhere. (Haven't had the problem yet, but fully exp…

For doing without to work, all browsers must agree to do without. As soon as one browser ships it and people prefer browsers that can stream Netflix, everyone else must follow suit or wallow in obscurity.

Microsoft and Google make CDMs; no one else had a chance in this fight.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal

#75

Post by zamalek »

bad_user wrote: post #43
jandrese wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Option 1 is the best because playing DRM content should be Netflix's problem.

By not making it a standard we'll make sure that Neflix never, ever comes to Linux. That guarantees that proprietary operating systems, browsers and hardware will always be prevalent.

> By making it a standard it means that we'll never, ever get rid of it.

and were standards. NPAPI was a quasi-standard.

Black-and-white worldviews are often accurate albeit negligently unrealistic.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal

#77

Post by metajack »

evv wrote: post #47
Analemma_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Nothing forces web browsers to run any code except perhaps market pressures. Keeping EME out of the standard would have sent a political message, but since everyone is already shipping it, kind of a useless one.

I am sad too. Perhaps there was a window of time when we could have gotten rid of NPAPI plugins and not added DRM to implementations and forced media companies to come along. That didn't happen though.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal

#78

Post by mmagin »

seltzered_ wrote: post #68

A younger version of myself would be against Web DRM, but these days I wonder if there's a potential for it to help in democratizing distribution among indie content producers. Ideally I'd have some time to piece together an essay, but the major points are: 1) Ted Nelson's vision on how Project Xanadu would have some form of copyright protection / micropayments for authors. 2) Independent content creators that have c…

Has DRM ever actually stopped piracy?

Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal

#79

Post by the8472 »

samsonradu wrote: post #76

Can EME prevent people from doing 30fps screengrabs of their screen and dump all into an mp4 file using FFmpeg or such? As someone else pointed here: > You can't simultaneously give us the content and not give us the content.

The server can send an encrypted blob to your browser which hands it off to the DRM module which can hand it off to the system's ring -2 PAVP/Trustzone/etc. stuff that only runs signed firmware which passes it encrypted over the PCIe bus to the gfx hardware which passes it encrypted via HDCP2 to the monitor.

So in principle fully encrypted paths that can'e be screengrabbed exist. Not all DRM makes use of those components because it excludes users which don't hardware which supports it. But it is there.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee approves Web DRM, but W3C members have two weeks to appeal

#80

Post by metajack »

jandrese wrote: post #35
emilfihlman wrote: post #31

I 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…

Free browsers can't play Netflix anyway, because EME is just a standardized interface to a proprietary CDM, which one must license from a vendor (Microsoft of Google mostly).

What giving in achieved is a reasonable security story around the CDM module as opposed to the free for all of NPAPI plugins. It still totally sucks, but at least hte capabilities of these CDMs are quite limited.

Post reply on HN