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EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5

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Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5

#51

Post by alipang »

duncan_bayne wrote: post #47
alipang wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DRM allows you to volontarily give up whatever control of your machine you're talking about. As painful as it is, one part of living in a capitalist society is to exercise your right/power as a consumer. Don't like it? Don't use it. To me, DRM is not something that infringes on your freedom, though I'm very glad we have the EFF when they spend their time combatting things like surveillance, that are not opt-in.

> As painful as it is, one part of living in a capitalist > society is to exercise your right/power as a consumer. > Don't like it? Don't use it. I agree, but there's more to it than that. From the W3C site: "The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web." ... and ... "One of W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits availa…

I don't see how DRM is incompatible with their goals. Of course one might argue that DRM might be platform specific. However, I very much doubt this standard will make DRM more platform specific than it already is.

Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5

#52

Post by cynicalkane »

The market problem is that people want to consume expensive art. There is billions of dollars of interest in making this market clear. The market will not go away because a bunch of hackers find it unethical. As the war on drugs has demonstrated, the market interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it.

I see a lot of opposition to DRM on principle. These principles will go nowhere. The interesting question to me is whether DRM is part of an standard s.t. required permissions are visible and minimizable and the platform is open, opt-in and extensible... or whether it will take over your devices with God-knows-what secret solutions, which is the situation today. I think the W3C standard is problematic (having read it) but represents a small step in the direction that is less wrong. The third option, an imaginary free-information utopia, is directly against the economic will of the people in general.

Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5

#54

Post by mikeash »

roopeshv wrote: post #2

Here's a radical idea: If you don't want DRM on your website, don't put DRM on your website. They are not making anyone use DRM against their will.

They are not making anyone use DRM against their will yet.

And then one day there's a government form you have to fill out, or a training video you have to watch, and it's behind some crazy DRM solution that the makers thought would be good to use, which was accepted because it's "standard".

Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5

#55

Post by duncan_bayne »

alipang wrote: post #43
duncan_bayne wrote: post #33

I've made this point already on the W3C CEO's blog, but it bears repeating here: DRM removes control of certain aspects of a device that I own, and places it in the hands of another. It does so in a manner that could not be less trustworthy: most DRM solutions are proprietary, closed-source applications. This means that I can't rely on others to audit it for me (as with FOSS) and I can't audit it myself. Some DRM imp…

DRM allows you to volontarily give up whatever control of your machine you're talking about. As painful as it is, one part of living in a capitalist society is to exercise your right/power as a consumer. Don't like it? Don't use it. To me, DRM is not something that infringes on your freedom, though I'm very glad we have the EFF when they spend their time combatting things like surveillance, that are not opt-in.

> I don't see how DRM is incompatible with their goals.

From my post on their blog (I'd link there, but their anchors are broken):

DRM is software that is designed to restrict a user from playing content on certain devices, in certain ways, and in certain locations. I think that is the very definition of a walled garden. I genuinely do not understand how you believe that supporting DRM will elminate walled gardens.

In the best case we will have moved from an ad-hoc collection of walled gardens, to an ad-hoc collection of walled gardens with the support and moral endorsement of the W3C.

If your concern is genuinely to eliminate the need for apps, and the enclosue of content in walled gardens, why not use your considerable influence in opposition of DRM altogether?

"Frankly, I don't understand the question about insisting that compliant implementation respect geographic location. As a general rule, we don't provide conformance testing and have no way of insisting what people implement."

That was my point :). The W3Cs mission states that:

"One of W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability."

Breaking down that list, we see that DRM is inimical to several goals:

* hardware: DRM implementations are known for being hardware-locked; Netflix is the most prominent recent example, re. the ARM-based Chromebook

* software: existing DRM implementations are tied to specific browsers and operating systems

* geographical location: many (most?) DRM implementations implement geographical segregation (a.k.a. region encoding)

That is, by lending support to DRM, the W3C is helping to ensure that at least some web content is restricted by hardware, software, and geopgraphical location. This is in direct opposition to several of your stated goals.

Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5

#56

Post by alipang »

jlgreco wrote: post #50
alipang wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DRM allows you to volontarily give up whatever control of your machine you're talking about. As painful as it is, one part of living in a capitalist society is to exercise your right/power as a consumer. Don't like it? Don't use it. To me, DRM is not something that infringes on your freedom, though I'm very glad we have the EFF when they spend their time combatting things like surveillance, that are not opt-in.

> Don't like it? Don't use it. ...and also feel free to complain about it. ... which is what he is doing . I have never understood responses such as yours. No part of being able to vote with your money means that you should only vote with your money. Capitalism does not mean that people shouldn't complain.

Just saying that DRM doesn't concern me. I don't feel it infringes on my rights, so no need to complain.

It's an (my) opinion, feel free to complain as much as you prefer.

Of course I also feel that businesses need a legitimate means of getting paid, and I prefer them using DRM over convincing congress to let them spy on us.

Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5

#57

Post by mythz »

mikeash wrote: post #53
mythz wrote: post #10

This objection, does a solution not help make.

Sure it does. "Don't" is a perfectly reasonable solution here. It won't satisfy all parties, but not all parties are worth satisfying.

The future of everyone being able to view online video (e.g. Netflix/Hulu/BBC) without a plugin is not getting anywhere closer.

Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5

#58

Post by acqq »

mwcampbell wrote: post #36
kunai wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's extremely narrow-minded. First of all, the DRM is proprietary. Those using open-source browsers like Firefox or Chromium won't be able to view any sites that push DRM at their will; especially if it's integrated INTO the web standard itself. It doesn't only affect web developers, it affects users , and the fact that you can't see that is astonishing. I don't know whether to be appalled or amazed, to be honest.…

Actually, Google isn't as innocent as you might think. They acquired a DRM company called Widevine, and the Widevine DRM system is now integrated with recent Google Chrome dev builds.

Maybe that's why is Google Chrome installer more complicated than some rootkits.

Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5

#59

Post by fafner »

bitwize wrote: post #4

The Web is going to get DRM one way or another. Now we can do this the easy way, with standards that are agreed upon across vendors -- or the hard way, with proprietary plug-ins that only work in Windows and Internet Explorer.

We can NOT do this the easy way! Please read the W3C proposal. The proposal is NOT an alternative to proprietary plug-ins but rather a proposal to introduce proprietary plug-ins into HTML5. DRM can't be free software because you could simply change it to write the data to your disk and recompile it.

This proposal is turning HTML5 into "New Flash" because the CDM will have to do the decoding and rendering of frames. This is not only dangerous to freedom but this is dangerous to all the achievements and advances in HTML5 and the web stack.

https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-med...

Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5

#60

Post by shawnz »

alipang wrote: post #51
duncan_bayne wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As painful as it is, one part of living in a capitalist > society is to exercise your right/power as a consumer. > Don't like it? Don't use it. I agree, but there's more to it than that. From the W3C site: "The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web." ... and ... "One of W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits availa…

I don't see how DRM is incompatible with their goals. Of course one might argue that DRM might be platform specific. However, I very much doubt this standard will make DRM more platform specific than it already is.

> However, I very much doubt this standard will make DRM more platform specific than it already is.

Of course not! In fact, due to the nature of the web, it will make DRM in general less platform-specific! The problem is that HTML will become more platform-specific.

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