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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

#171

Post by icebraining »

josteink wrote: post #156
agentdrtran wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i want DRM to be a difficult and cumbersome stack to use. More specifically, i want the end user to go through hassle to obtain the proprietary plugins, so that the end user feels the hurt from DRM. so you want to make stuff like netflix as much of a PITA as possible? why? why be this vindictive?

> you want to make stuff like netflix as much of a PITA as possible? Not op but yes, using DRM in a browser should be hard. Netflix should just make a native app, like everyone else who needs drm do. This clearly scopes what is open and webby and what is closed and DRMy. Nobody has issues installing Spotify to stream music. What makes Netflix special?

Nobody has issues installing Spotify to stream music.

Spotify does have a web player using web DRM (Widevine) and a lot of people use it exclusively.

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

#172

Post by etatoby »

bubblethink wrote: post #91
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…

>democratizing distribution among indie content producers So I have this idea for a video/audio streaming website that operates like an open market. Website operator makes a cut for infrastructure costs. Other than that, the site runs pretty much on its own. No content deals, no drm, no geo restrictions, no ads. Some safeguards to limit abuse. A producer puts up content. Consumers consume content. Revenues are split…

> no drm > no ads > revenues

Does not compute.

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

#173

Post by icebraining »

chii wrote: post #162
Steeeve wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgive me for having a differing opinion, but just to clarify. I would agree with the FSF statement that there will be more DRM on the web. Where I differ is that I believe it would happen regardless. If it's not standard DRM, then it's Apple DRM and Windows DRM... like we already have. > Standardization is explicit support and encouragement. Standardization shouldn't be about good or bad. If enough people want to d…

> If it's not standard DRM, then it's Apple DRM and Windows DRM... like we already have. which is fragmentation, and bad for businesses that want DRM, but don't want to _pay_ the cost of fragmentation. By adding it to an open standard, they no longer need to deal with end fragmentation (which causes end user a bad experience). But the solution was never to standardize on DRM, but to standardize on _non-DRM_ formats!…

This standard doesn't actually define any DRM formats, each EME module supports whatever formats it wants.

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

#174

Post by sametmax »

om2 wrote: post #115
pornel wrote: post #46

W3C 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 DR…

I think that is a bit of an exaggeration. First, for some browsers, the DRM scheme is built in, not any kind of plugin architecture. Second, without EME, the state of the art for DRM video was to run the whole playback path through a plugin. Now, only the DRM bit is generally going to be hidden in binary blob (whether plugin or not.) This has some important advantages: * Web content authors can build video players us…

Plus having a single blob responsible for, and only for, the DRM part means that hackers will have an easier time crack that, instead of a whole player. So we should get workarounds quite quickly.

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

#175

Post by icebraining »

syshum wrote: post #145
soapdog wrote: post #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…

>>but this DRM is now running on a sandbox environment I see this said many times, and it is highly over rated. while Technically speaking yes it calls for a "sandbox" but the need for "Computer Verification" means the CDM has to have full access to the entire system to verify the evil user is not attempting to capture the output. So the sandbox is not really protecting much unless the operating system itself has the…

Regarding the sandbox, that's not correct on all browsers:

[I]n Firefox the sandbox prohibits the CDM from fingerprinting the user’s device. Instead, the CDM asks the sandbox to supply a per-device unique identifier. This sandbox-generated unique identifier allows the CDM to bind content to a single device as the content industry insists on, but it does so without revealing additional information about the user or the user’s device. In addition, we vary this unique identifier per site (each site is presented a different device identifier) to make it more difficult to track users across sites with this identifier.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/reconciling-mozillas-missi...

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

#176

Post by icebraining »

cyphar wrote: post #170
metajack wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I completely agree that it's tough to argue for user freedom in a world where widestream education about software freedom is non-existent. But we don't live in a world where users are aware of the importance of software freedom, so it's necessary to use secondary inconveniences to alert them to the primary injustices. Maybe this comes from a lack of technical literacy. Maybe it comes from the fact that Microsoft and…

Why are we as a community saying that corporations are allowed to piggyback on the hard work of the free software community

What work of the free software community? Except for Firefox, all browsers with any market share are developed by big corporations.

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

#177

Post by icebraining »

acabal wrote: post #61
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…

But the web is the one in the position of power here. Media wants badly to be on the web--it's not the web that badly wants media. Imagine if, back in the 90s, bigcorp still-image licensors like Getty or Bridgeman were able to magically foresee how big the internet was going to be. They campaign hard to include a DRM standard into the 90s web, so that nobody could right click and "save as" images from the web. After…

There's no "web" vs "bigcorp". There's only bigcorp vs a motley bunch of weirdos like us, Mozilla, FSF and so. And they control 80%+ of the browser share.

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

#178

Post by icebraining »

samsonradu wrote: post #167
userbinator wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can screengrab at the interface between the decoder in the monitor and the panel itself, using an LVDS capture card. Not cheap at the moment, and you still have to process the gigabits per second of uncompressed video, but you can expect the Chinese to come up with some inventive and low-cost solutions if they start locking down the other routes... in fact a lot of DRM-stripping hardware already exists for sale,…

But what about literally recording your screen with a hand-camera? That would be quite tech-proof right? It's been done in cinemas for decades.

With a bit more dedication and electro knowledge, I'm sure one could open up a screen and capture the data straight from the output circuit. Few people can do this, but piracy doesn't need more than one source to be distributed over the world.

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

#179

Post by cyphar »

icebraining wrote: post #176
cyphar wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree that it's tough to argue for user freedom in a world where widestream education about software freedom is non-existent. But we don't live in a world where users are aware of the importance of software freedom, so it's necessary to use secondary inconveniences to alert them to the primary injustices. Maybe this comes from a lack of technical literacy. Maybe it comes from the fact that Microsoft and…

Why are we as a community saying that corporations are allowed to piggyback on the hard work of the free software community What work of the free software community? Except for Firefox, all browsers with any market share are developed by big corporations.

I feel like you may have forgotten Firefox's role in history. Firefox unambiguously saved the world from Microsoft taking control of the web.

Not to mention that Chromium is a free sofware project. It doesn't matter that the largest contributor is Google (it does for the top-level discussion of why the hell did Chromium implement this), the project itself is free software and is thus part of the free software community.

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

#180

Post by icebraining »

cyphar wrote: post #58
marksomnian wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If (in an ideal world) Chrome and Firefox had said "no, we aren't implementing it" then it falls back to Netflix to stop harming users. And they need to make business so they'll make a crappy SilverLight client that breaks every other week. It's not the browser developers' fault that a several million dollar company decided to build their business model around the need for DRM. The biggest problem with taking the pri…

In an ideal world nobody would want DRM. In the real world, Chrome and Firefox are not part of the same team, and never were. Google is a media distribution platform like Netflix (YouTube, Play, etc), and like them, they have zero interest in pissing off producers based on lofty ideals.
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