The objection is good, but how exactly is the final decision made by W3C? By majority of participants or some other way?
EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5
81–90 of 280 posts
Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does this proposed W3C standard really get us any further away from taking over our devices with god-knows-what secret solutions? After all, the CDM plugins themselves are still proprietary.
I think it's a case of pushing at the margin; exposing more details of the CDM plugins than would otherwise be exposed. Opening the CDM spec is also a design win for reasons that should be obvious to people who've worked on software. It's been the general trend in web browsers to minimize the permissions you need to give to plugins--I would expect CDM plugins to evolve the same way.
You may be right about minimizing the permissions given to CDM plugins. In the current Chrome dev build, the Widevine CDM plugin is a Pepper plugin, which suggests that it might be sandboxed.
However, DRM has sometimes been very over-reaching. Perhaps the most infamous example of this was the content protection introduced in Windows Vista, which went very deep into the OS. [1] After that, can we really expect that DRM proponents would be satisfied with letting their content "protection" system be a well-behaved, harmless little program inside a sandbox?
[1] http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5
#83What's the Mozilla Foundation's position on this? Are they planning on staying involved in a post-DRM W3C? It's about time to for the anti-DRM pressure groups to go down this list: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List And start demanding the member organizations to make a public statement as to exactly how far the EME DRM standardization is allowed to advance before they will withdraw from the W3C.
I am not sure of the official position, but I seriously doubt Mozilla will EVER implement this. They've been opposing H.264, which is a lesser evil (patents) than outright DRM.
Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5
#84The 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.
Proprietary plugins sounds good to me. Working with nastier code will be their penance.
Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5
#85The 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.
That's incorrect. The proposed EME standard merely specifies the interop between Javascript and the CDM.
The CDM will in almost all cases be a platform-specific, proprietary, closed-source binary blob.
_Please_ do not buy in to the idea that including EME in HTML5 will reduce the platform dependence of DRM solutions.
Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5
#86What exactly is DRM supposed to achieve? For it to work it seems to need to prevent 100% of all opportunities, worldwide, of duplicating copyrighted material. A single copy is all it takes to seed every single pirated copy. I can't see that the sales of DVDs and Blu-rays are going to dry up any time soon and given how easy it is to copy those how does DRM help at all?
Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5
#87OK, I am gonna catch hell for this, but there is one major reason for having DRM in HTML 5. NetFlix.
Streaming video sites are handcuffed to the media owners. Those media owners(Viacom, Time Warner, etc.) REQUIRE DRM in any contract with a streaming video provider. NetFlix uses Silverlight for this reason.
Without DRM, NetFlix can never move to HTML5 and VP9. It's sad, but true. The W3C is not just being a buncha dicks. They're listening to all sides.
Who cares if there's DRM in the spec, anyway? It doesn't mean people have to use it. And we all know it'll be cracked in a matter of SECONDS upon formal implementation.
Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
The DRM will change nothing about platform interoperability. If anything, it will probably make the situation worse . For DRM to work, someone needs to control that DRM (which means plugins) - preferably as few people as possible. You can't really have "open DRM" or anything like that, which means "HTML5 DRM5" is completely inconsistent and conflictual with the values of the web, and what W3C is supposed to stand for…
Is it impossible to have an open DRM parametrized by some sort of secret key/cryptography/whatever? Honest question.
What would stop someone from just rebuilding their browser to dump both the key and the stream to their disk?
In other words, no.
Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5
#89OK, I am gonna catch hell for this, but there is one major reason for having DRM in HTML 5. NetFlix. Streaming video sites are handcuffed to the media owners. Those media owners(Viacom, Time Warner, etc.) REQUIRE DRM in any contract with a streaming video provider. NetFlix uses Silverlight for this reason. Without DRM, NetFlix can never move to HTML5 and VP9. It's sad, but true. The W3C is not just being a buncha dic…
Who cares if Netflix needs it? If Netflix wants to do DRM in the browser, then they can continue to do it the painful way with traditional proprietary plugins. Why should we oblige them and dirty the standard in the process?
Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
The enthusiasm against DRM is mostly based on principle because the technological argument is so uninteresting. "DRM is part of an standard s.t. required permissions are visible and minimizable and the platform is open, opt-in and extensible" isn't possible and this is non-controversial among anyone not in the business of trying to sell it to someone who doesn't know that.
DRM is just a math problem (encryption) coupled with a hardware problem (retaining control of the results). The industry in, say, video games has settled on an equilibrium of making it very hard but not impossible to crack the hardware. But uncrackable encryption hardware already exists, it would just be inconvenient to make it uncrackable inside an XBox. But whether the methods of DRM are open or closed is an implem…
Your post includes a lot of words, but none of these even attempt to justify your claim that there exists open, uncrackable DRM.