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W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

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Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#561

Post by ehsankia »

y_tho wrote: post #408
5_minutes wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In 2013, EFF was disappointed to learn that the W3C had taken on the project of standardizing “Encrypted Media Extensions,” an API whose sole function was to provide a first-class role for DRM within the Web browser ecosystem" With so much money involved here, it's quite naive to believe the W3C members are virgins here and did this out love for the web and for the consumers. And: "It is clear that the W3C allowing…

> it's quite naive to believe the W3C members are virgins here and did this out love for the web and for the consumers. So, no evidence, only a feeling of evidence.

"There's a lot of money involved, therefore there must be foul play."

I personally would much rather have a secure, optimized and clean implementation, rather than hacky plugins and poorly developed solutions that put me at risk and destroy performance.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#562

Post by xvilka »

objclxt wrote: post #477
civilian wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market share isn't immutable! Market share changes based on capabilities. I dropped IE for FF when I got a basic understanding of computers, I dropped FF when it became clear it was a memory hog, and now I kind of toggle between Chrome and FF. I think that, with killer features like breaking out of DRM, the market share could change.

> I think that, with killer features like breaking out of DRM, the market share could change. That's not a killer feature to the market: I bet 99/100 people don't know what DRM is or what it stands for. They just care that they can watch videos or not. For better or the worse the overwhelming majority of browser users don't know, care, or have any idea about how the internet is standardized, how DRM works, and why it…

Of course for the worse. As usual worst things in the world come with a silent agreement of majority.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#563

Post by majormajor »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #544
majormajor wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native apps on tablets, phones, and set top boxes are the future (present, really) of that, anyway. Linux users could be a bit more screwed if publishers had to move to Windows/Mac apps if interested in desktop/laptop users, but otherwise it wouldn't be a big impact for the big properties. What's the difference to a user of opening a Netflix app vs going there in the browser? Basically nothing. Do we want apps on the…

> Linux users could be a bit more screwed if publishers had to move to Windows/Mac apps if interested in desktop/laptop users There is not any kind of real difference between not having a native app (or whatever WINE patches are needed to run it) and not having some platform-specific EME black box binary. > What's the difference to a user of opening a Netflix app vs going there in the browser? Basically nothing. For…

Linux is a small meaningless edge case for these companies anyway, I just mentioned it because the portability of a plugin is much higher than of a full native app - so if there's any chance it'll be supported, it's in the web-based world.

How many sites will be using this outside of stuff like Netflix/Amazon/PS Vue/Sling and co? Buying someone's DRM solution or building your own only makes sense for high-dollar content?

But again, from my perspective as someone who wants to write code for anything but browsers, anything that moves dev jobs away from the web is good news for me.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#564

Post by kelnos »

jdmichal wrote: post #451
kerkeslager wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, I think the failure of the open web runs deeper than that. When I visit, for example, a cookbook website, when I view a recipe, the problem isn't just that the site can run arbitrary scripts on my computer. It's also that I have no control over how that recipe displays because so much of that display is in HTML. I can't pull it into a useful format and store it with all my other recipes because it's in HT…

I'll repost a comment by mcphage on why this doesn't work, in general. TL;DR is that common ontologies sound great but don't work in reality, because it leaves no room for value-added services from individual providers. (Recipes would probably be OK, because there's just not a lot of value-add you can really provide. Or, alternatively, I'm just completely ignorant about how value could be added.) https://news.ycombin…

Eh, that's not entirely true.

To still allow for competition, you define a base feature set and representation, and then you allow vendor extensions. You need some sort of standards body that can promote vendor extensions to standardized, supported things. And clients can choose to support whatever (or no) vendor extensions that they want to.

However, I agree with you that it's not very practical, but for different reasons: 1) competitors don't necessarily like to cooperate to that level and 2) it will slow down progress a lot, which is a decently good reason for #1. And 3), which I think is the big one:

Companies doing this stuff really don't want standards if they're the first-mover, because standards necessarily enable competition. If I'm an anti-competitive producer (or even just a producer that doesn't mind competition, but wants to maintain a head start long enough to secure a market position), I don't want to start off with a standard: I want to do my own thing, and get people to adopt it, and then I can lock them in, at least temporarily. If someone comes along later and clones my format, that's fine, but they have to do work to figure it out, and I still own the format, so I'm naturally ahead.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#565

Post by xvilka »

sboselli wrote: post #38

Shame, shame, shame. We're losing the internet day by day, if we haven't done so already. I've seen people and posts here and there calling for attention on these issues, but imho it's all too subtle. We should start using harsher terminology for what's actually happening. This is flat out CORRUPTION, and I'm not seeing anyone express it as such. It's probably too late already, and unfortunately, this is merely a ref…

Not exactly a corruption, it is just world doesnt belong to national governments - only to corporations. That wont change any time soon and will only worsen.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#566

Post by brians »

tptacek wrote: post #91
barrkel wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're discounting the opportunity cost here. In a world where browser manufacturers, as a block, refused to implement DRM, it's seems obvious that sooner or later visual media producers would be forced to the table, to gain access to paying consumers. We could be in a DRM-free world, without the inconveniences of elaborate technical restrictions on pass-through and mutual device compatibility, or black box b…

I see how that gets us to a DRM-free world, but not so much why ordinary consumers would care. To a first approximation, no ordinary consumer uses TPB. Unauthorized copies are less convenient (especially since mainstream playback devices won't play them) and frequently of lower quality. The price point for legitimate copies is low enough that the purchase decision isn't that hard. A standards body is a great place to…

The tracker/torrent numbers I see are consistent with more than a quarter of US college-aged people using them, and more than three quarters watching media obtained that way—those are better numbers than HBO. It absolutely has a role in tastemaking.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#567

Post by app4soft »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #4

Basically, unless you are writing a browser with decent marketshare, you defacto have no voice in making the standards. Basically, the only voices that matter are Mozilla (Firefox), Apple (Safari), Google(Chrome), and Microsoft (Edge/Explorer). Despite what any standard says, web developers are going to go by the behavior of the browsers do. The only company on the list of browser makers that really has any desire to…

Pale Moon will be the last outpost in the world of suitable open-source browsers?

https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon/issues/135...

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#568

Post by e40 »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #4

Basically, unless you are writing a browser with decent marketshare, you defacto have no voice in making the standards. Basically, the only voices that matter are Mozilla (Firefox), Apple (Safari), Google(Chrome), and Microsoft (Edge/Explorer). Despite what any standard says, web developers are going to go by the behavior of the browsers do. The only company on the list of browser makers that really has any desire to…

I 100% agree, and I wouldn't have agreed to it had I not been on a standardization committee in a before/after situation. The before was mainly implementers. At least they had a super majority. After was 5% implementers and it was a complete disaster. That 95% was like a kid in a candy store: no regard for implementation difficulty or what it would do to language consistency. Thankfully, the effort died quite quickly, so I never had to make much of the issue.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#569

Post by madez »

tptacek wrote: post #444
icebraining wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could have neither, though.

By what, banning plugins? Now you're asking the anti-DRM people to do exactly what they're angry at the pro-DRM people for doing: preventing people from running a particular kind of program on their computer. It's an incoherent position.

You can have arbitrary exceptions to ensure coherency. There is no reasonable need to have a position without exceptions. Reality isn't that simple.

Re: W3C abandons consensus, standardizes DRM, EFF resigns

#570

Post by ehsankia »

colde wrote: post #458
DCKing wrote: post #241

Can anybody explain to me what will change because of this decision? DRM has been very much part of the internet since 1995 when RealPlayer was released. DRM has been part of content delivery ever since then. It has not ever seem to have decreased in popularity, quite the opposite. The browsers that 99.9% of people use have already implemented this standard for years anyway. It's not obvious to me that this decision…

There will be absolutely no change. All major browsers already implement EME (this includes Edge, IE, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera and a bunch of minor ones). I personally think it is a step forward, as it is much better than Silverlight. Now all the client behaviour is out in the open, and only the DRM piece is proprietary. There is no way that removing EME will make things better, that would just require all stre…

People were naively thinking/hoping that once Flash and plugins die, DRM would magically disappear and media companies would start putting all their content on the open web, for anyone to access.

I'm with you, I'd much rather have a clean, secure and well implemented option, rather than each company trying to hack together a solution that will be buggy, insecure and inefficient.

The option of there being no DRM was realistically never on the table, as much as people would've liked it to be.

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