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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

#91

Post by cynicalkane »

shmerl wrote: post #71
cynicalkane wrote: post #52

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…

> the market interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it. You said it. DRM is close to censorship in its core idea - it's preemptive policing. The market will find routes around it. > I see a lot of opposition to DRM on principle. These principles will go nowhere. Not true. There is a lot of opposition in principle to the totalitarian approach (which DRM embodies). If there would be no opposition, then it w…

It's true that people are routing around existing DRM solutions. It's not true that this represents any threat to DRM. As the Steam platform has demonstrated, if you make paying the easy solution and piracy the hard one, the target audience (viz. people willing to pay money) will choose the easy one.

The average consumer will not try to route around unfree information as long as it shows up when they click play. Policing content is not the sort of "market censorship" they care about.

Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5

#92

Post by cynicalkane »

tomp wrote: post #90
cynicalkane wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The whole reason I started this thread is that it doesn't currently exist but I think it should.

Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5

#93

Post by VonGuard »

jlgreco wrote: post #89
VonGuard wrote: post #87

OK, 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?

Because not doing so concedes this type of market to Microsoft. Open standards are a way to ensure no specific company has control over stuff like this.

Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5

#94

Post by jlgreco »

mythz wrote: post #57
mikeash wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This could not possibly be further from the truth.

Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5

#95

Post by johnvschmitt »

duncan_bayne wrote: post #80
johnvschmitt wrote: post #46

Good for EFF. DRM is futile. There is NO stopping people from recording what's on their screen (with a cell phone camera among other devices). What we've seen is: A) The more barriers you put in front of legitimate use, the more you see illegitimate use grow. B) The EFF is rock solid in standing up & protecting our rights & values in the modern, internet, connected age. Please help fund them. Meaning: DRM all you wan…

Netflix uses DRM, and is one of the sponsors of this attempt to add DRM to HTML5.

Yes, that's a shame. But: Netflix makes it easy & convenient. They are not the bad guy. They are really stuck between a rock & a hard place. (Between old school distributors of content (Hollywood), squeezing them for money to make sure they have no margin), and ISP's (Comcast, AT&T) who are saying, "Hey, Netflix is popular, >50% of bandwidth, so let's shake them down" (net neutrality needs to keep them from doing this).

Don't blame Netflix for that DRM behavior. They are the early innovator & they look after their customers. They are just squeezed so badly. If you support net neutrality & ban DRM, you'll see more convenient, customer-friendly companies thrive in that ecosystem. If you don't, you'll see only bad players (DRM+$$$$+inconvenience) playing content you like.

Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5

#96

Post by betterunix »

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.

"DRM allows you to volontarily give up whatever control of your machine you're talking about."

Not when there are no (legal) machines without it. See: DVD players.

Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5

#97

Post by tacticus »

ollysb wrote: post #86

What 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?

It allows you to restrict what products OEMs are allowed to make and sell forcing them to license shit from you.

Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5

#98

Post by dragonwriter »

jlgreco wrote: post #89
VonGuard wrote: post #87

OK, 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?

> 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.

I thought part of the reason for DRM-plugins-with-standardized-hooks-in-HTML is that it was the one particularly widely-used current use case for plugins that browser vendors weren't aiming to replace completely internally with HTML, CSS, and/or JS APIs, and switching to a standard mechanism for it would allow browser vendors to deprecate general purpose proprietary plugin mechanisms.

Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5

#99

Post by mwcampbell »

cynicalkane wrote: post #79
bcoates wrote: post #74

Earlier 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…

All of the crypto in the world is worthless for a DRM system if a user can easily circumvent the system by replacing one of the components between the black-box DRM module and the hardware in order to get a perfect digital copy of the "protected" stream. This is why "content protection" systems, like the one introduced in Windows Vista, tend to be so over-reaching; they want to create a leak-proof pipe between the "protected" media and our senses.

Re: EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5

#100

Post by cynicalkane »

mwcampbell wrote: post #99
cynicalkane wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All of the crypto in the world is worthless for a DRM system if a user can easily circumvent the system by replacing one of the components between the black-box DRM module and the hardware in order to get a perfect digital copy of the "protected" stream. This is why "content protection" systems, like the one introduced in Windows Vista, tend to be so over-reaching; they want to create a leak-proof pipe between the "p…

That's a last mile problem the industry doesn't need to solve. How many people would rather hack hardware than pay money to watch TV and play video games? Of course, if it becomes cost-effective to hardware encrypt the entire stream, I don't think the lack of a W3C standard will make any difference in stopping it.
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