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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

#81
post #75

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.

> 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 ofte…

> By not making it a standard we'll make sure that Neflix never, ever comes to Linux.

Isn't the EME a system binary that would be specific to each platform? There's no guarantee tat they'll be a linux one for each provider.

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

#82
post #78

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?

No, but maybe we need to look at it from relative numbers.

Example: DRM music hasn't stopped music piracy, but better models for the content distribution (i.e. DRM music platforms like spotify, etc.) have demotivated more people from bothering to pirate music.

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

#83
post #53
post #20

What's the reason DRM can't be implemented as an open-source solution? Is the closed source just to prevent people from easily accessing the secret key or are there other reasons it needs to be closed source?

Not to be a pedant (who am I kidding), but this is actually one of the examples where distinguishing between "free software" and "open source" is more than a philosophical disagreement. You actually can create an open source DRM solution, because none of the OSI definition[1] makes reference to user freedom or other issues that DRM violates. As far as the OSI is concerned, DRM is can be released under an OSI license.…

CDMs are sandboxed, which is an improvement over the NPAPI plugins. I don't think we have to worry much about Sony rootkit attacks at least.

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

#84

I think all people who think that this will end with media only are naive. Next step is DOM.

Thankfully you can't obscure the DOM, but people certainly obscure JS and CSS plenty already. Mostly in the name of shrinking its size, but not always just that.

Try to learn how a Google web app works by inspecting the source code sometime.

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

#85

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…

As far as I know/talked to Indies/helped some, no.

#1 on most of their lists is getting the music/name out. DRM is counterproductive.

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

#86

I think all people who think that this will end with media only are naive. Next step is DOM.

Let's encrypt the DOM in our open source browser... wait what? EME is pretty great for cracking too - they enable rendering with the browser's own video engine, giving you a nice "hook to dump pre-decoded frame here" point.

Not necessarily, the CDM can offload the rendering to protected hardware pipelines instead of the browser's usual video rendering.

https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/CR-encrypted-media-20160705/#medi...

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

#87
post #79

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 compon…

Thanks for the detailed description.

> .. which passes it encrypted via HDCP2 to the monitor.

And where does the decryption actually takes place?

> EDIT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content...

> In order to make a device that plays HDCP-enabled work, the manufacturer must obtain a license from Intel subsidiary Digital Content Protection LLC, pay an annual fee, and submit to various conditions.[5][6][7] For example, the device cannot be designed to copy; it must "frustrate attempts to defeat the content protection requirements";[7] it must not transmit high definition protected video to non-HDCP receivers; and DVD-Audio works can be played only at CD-audio quality[7] by non-HDCP digital audio outputs (analog audio outputs have no quality limits).

This sounds quite far-fetched though. I'm quite sure we're going to see people literally recording their TV screen with a hand-camera soon.

How about the case where the hardware doesn't support it. Would screen-grabbing be possible then? Where will the decryption take place in that case?

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

#88
post #78

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?

The one example I have ever seen is Denuvo DRM for PC games, in certain games for (very) limited times.

Denuvo has gained widespread adoption among AAA game publishers because it tends to hold for the critical period when a game first goes on sale. The DRM is typically broken within weeks but that is good enough for the publisher, as the release period has generally passed by that point. They made their sales.

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

#89
What many people that are on the periphery of this discussion sometimes fail to realize is that DRM is already here and already employed by many companies. The current DRM solutions are basically roll-your-own and each company has their own custom stuff which may or may not be vulnerable to attacks and steal/fingerprint the user thus affecting their privacy. This is the current state of things.

The EME/DRM spec is a bit different in which we still have DRM and it still sucks, but this DRM is now running on a sandbox environment and is standardized which makes it much easier to audit and a lot safer to use in terms of privacy for the user.

Of course "no DRM" is a better solution than "any DRM", but that is a pointless debate because content distributors are already onboard with DRM and there is no turning them back. The W3C spec is a compromise, a solution that enables those wanting to use DRM to be able to do so while we maintain some method of sandbox, privacy and safety. Running a module in EME/DRM is probably much safer than doing the same thing now with custom browser plugins.

As for the discussion of "browser X should not implement it, traitors!!!! Hate you forever!!! Will switch to $MORE_PROPRIETARY_ALTERNATIVE" is also a shortsighted argument in my opinion. If a browser doesn't implement EME/DRM spec, they shut their users out from being able to use many websites that employ DRM and what will happen is that that browser will loose users. If every single browser said "no to DRM" except for a single one, you'd see everyone installing that browser just to be able to play Netflix.

No browser can afford to loose millions of users by not implementing the spec. Those users matters. In terms of browser vendor political weight in spec discussions, user count matters. The DRM battle is a lost one because the content producers/distributors already decided to use it.

Now, if you're against DRM, instead of complaining about W3C spec'ing it out and browser vendors implementing it. You should stop using DRM content. No one is stopping anyone from preferring non-DRM solutions. For example, I don't like light beer, the existence of light beer sounds wrong for me, so I don't drink it but I don't try to stop others from drinking said watery yellow-ish drink. It is the same thing with DRM, instead of focusing your actions on W3C and browser vendors, focus your effort in content producers/distributors, prefer other solutions, make them ponder if it is worth loosing you.

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

#90
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has DRM ever actually stopped piracy?

No, but maybe we need to look at it from relative numbers. Example: DRM music hasn't stopped music piracy, but better models for the content distribution (i.e. DRM music platforms like spotify, etc.) have demotivated more people from bothering to pirate music.

A big problem with piracy is that piracy tech hasn't advanced in 2 decades, whereas the rest of the world has moved on. There are two major challenges. Due to DMCA, anonymity is a major obstacle for which there isn't a good solution yet. TOR, vpns etc. aren't well suited for content distribution. Second, the bittorrent model itself doesn't work very well for streaming.
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