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Requirements for DRM in HTML are confidential

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Re: Requirements for DRM in HTML are confidential

#211

Post by Angostura »

zmb_ wrote: post #165
MichaelGG wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which seems more rooted in the overall ease-of-use and lock-in Steam creates as well as goodwill towards Valve from their games. Steam's terrible - fight them on a transaction, and you could lose your entire library.

You don't even have to fight them on a transaction to lose access to your library. My Steam client (on Mac) is hanging on startup every time and as a result I can't play the games I've bought and paid for. And of course Valve's customer support is doing nothing but sending canned replies. Steam's DRM is still DRM and has all the downsides that come with it. You're exactly right that it's accepted by gamers due to Val…

Hsve you tried creating a new clean OS X account? it could be that you have a corrupted preference file, or something similar.

If Steam works on the new account you can start deleting plists.

Re: Requirements for DRM in HTML are confidential

#212

Post by Perseids »

Nursie wrote: post #69

Great. DRM. The best example of shooting yourself in the foot ever. Give customers encrypted content and the keys, try to prevent them from freely using the two together, undermine copyright fair use and first sale doctrines as you go along. Intended effect - No Piracy Actual effect - Paying customers get crippled products, pirates carry on regardless It's crazy. And the more they try to lock it down the worse their…

Also, availability is a huge issue. For me in Germany it is nigh impossible to legally watch a recent episode of Game of Thrones. And Breaking Bad or Doctor Who has only recently become available via the new service watchever.de. And even there they are published far too late if you want to participate in the online discussion of an episode.

Re: Requirements for DRM in HTML are confidential

#213

Post by masklinn »

lucian1900 wrote: post #204
masklinn wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * For games, Steam makes it easy to avoid SecuROM Hell Steam has its own DRM, and games distributed via steam may have additional third-party DRMs (including SecuROM and other similar shite). IIRC GOG is only DRM-free games, although it is less convenient.

GoG is actually quite convenient, it has a much better website and a good downloader. The only downside is the much smaller library than Steam.

I find the site good, but I only got grief from the downloader (back when I tried it a year or 2 ago, it may have gotten better since), for all of its slowness Steam's installation and updating process is much more hands-off and convenient.

Re: Requirements for DRM in HTML are confidential

#214

Post by RexRollman »

rmc wrote: post #187
tzs wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Music is largely available DRM-free now, thanks to Amazon's MP3 store (at the least, I'm sure there are others) Apple should get significant credit here. It was Steve Jobs' open letter of 2007-02-06 to the big four labels calling for them to go DRM free that got the ball rolling. EMI agreed, and Apple started selling DRM-free tracks from them on 2007-05-27. Amazon's public beta of their MP3 store launched on 2007-0…

Actually I think you can also attribute it to (a) the iPod becoming massively popular and becoming synonmous with "portable music player", (b) Only Apple DRM and non-DRM-able MP3s supported on the iPod. The iPod won the music player market, so if you tried to sell music with DRM you need to either (i) play by Apple's rules or (ii) have mundane tech users being confused when they can't play the music they bought on th…

True, but the Apple music beast was really created by the music industry who insisted on them using DRM in the first place.

Re: Requirements for DRM in HTML are confidential

#215

Post by Silhouette »

simias wrote: post #162
gfosco wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if you're a total jerk about it?... I purchased the full iD collection once for like $90+, and the next day I requested a refund because several of the old titles didn't want to run. Despite the no-refund policy, they reversed the transaction. I've heard more positive stories than negative ones.

Are you in Europe? Because I'm pretty sure european law forces them to refund you in that case.

The trouble with laws like that is that they are only worth anything if you have the means to enforce your legal rights under them. If Steam -- or any other supplier or on-line service you use -- is based in one jurisdiction and you're based in another, the cost of actually taking them to court to force compliance could easily be prohibitive.

I'm a little surprised that they haven't been dinged by the card companies yet if reports of whole accounts being blocked based on one chargeback are true. Even Valve are just another retailer to the likes of Visa and Mastercard, and the card services tend to take a very hostile view of merchants who try to evade their obligations under the card service policies if something comes to their attention.

I'm also surprised there haven't been more legal cases considering the implications of SaaS, on-line media library services, software that requires phone-home activation/DRM, and the like. There are obvious ways that such systems/services could provide unfair leverage against consumers in the event of any dispute, and as you mentioned it seems very likely that they would fall foul of the law here in Europe, or at least in several national jurisdictions within Europe. The US tends to give businesses a lot more slack to play with on such matters, though.

Re: Requirements for DRM in HTML are confidential

#216

Post by RexRollman »

andybak wrote: post #196

A key paragraph: link: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-restrictedmedia/2... Well, as I say, the actual requirements that lead to the proposal of EME would be a start. This is how it looks to those who don't agree that EME is a good fit with the Open Web: - 'big content' has certain requirements relating to preventing users copying data streams - they won't make those requirements public (as you've said, th…

Well, my question is does HTML even need to encompass everything it does. It seems to me that we have an ever expanding monster. HTML does not have to be everything for everyone.

Re: Requirements for DRM in HTML are confidential

#217

Post by tripzilch »

captainmuon wrote: post #208
jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DRM only works if you don't know how it works. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerckhoffs's_principle

Doesn't really apply here. When sending an encrypted message, the adversary doesn't know the secret key. With DRM, the adversary is the receiver of the message. You (or your computer) already has the secret in Kerckhoff's sense. It's just a matter of finding out where the key or the unencrypted data is stored - in the worst case by hooking up hardware to the mainboard or the screen. You could make DRM "Kerckhoff hard…

> or you could just record the signal during playback ("analoge gap")

And for that we are striving for newer technologies to close that gap from the analogue side. I'm not being entirely serious (yet), but thinking about Occulus Rift or Google Glass, etc.

Once we get our media/games to jack in directly to our brains, like all the cyberpunk novels prescribe, it's going to be pretty hard to get a tap between the analogue side :)

Re: Requirements for DRM in HTML are confidential

#218

Post by flavor8 »

onli wrote: post #181
bitwize wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me tell you how things work in the real world. When the people with money say "we want this", you don't argue. It doesn't matter if it's technically infeasible. It doesn't matter if it won't have the intended effect. When the people with money want something, YOU GIVE IT TO THEM. And let them deal with the consequences. Otherwise, you won't get the business, and life can otherwise be made very, very difficult for…

Let me tell you something about the state of the real world: The content Hollywood produces is already fully available on the Web. They try to fight that, but they lose. So the w3c is in no position where it is necessary to accommodate them to get their content. Besides, for the w3c, where is the business incentive, where is the money involved?

> The content Hollywood produces is already fully available on the Web.

For people willing to pirate, it, yes. However, it's far less convenient to pirate movies and get them to your big screen TV than it was to use napster and listen to songs on your mp3 player. On the flip side, Netflix (i.e. content with DRM) accounts for roughly 1/3 of nightly internet traffic in the US. DRM facilitates consumer access to restricted content.

> Besides, for the w3c, where is the business incentive, where is the money involved?

The w3c is primarily an industry group. The players pushing DRM in HTML5 are Google, Netflix and Microsoft, all of whom have a business interest in being able to stream content via browsers.

Re: Requirements for DRM in HTML are confidential

#219

Post by lazyjones »

simonsarris wrote: post #107

I suppose that the title assertion is to be expected. DRM only works if you don't know how it works. ~~~ I'm not sure I see anything wrong with DRM per se (this could be my fever talking), there are probably good uses I'm too dim to think about, but I do think it's unnecessary as part of the HTML specification. There's no industry or company that has switched to DRM-free content, that I know of, that has failed or su…

> For games, Steam makes it easy to avoid SecuROM Hell

Not really, there are Steam games with all kinds of additional vendor-specific DRM, including SecuROM.

http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_3rd_Party_DRM_o...

Re: Requirements for DRM in HTML are confidential

#220

Post by vidarh »

bitwize wrote: post #163
Nursie wrote: post #69

Great. DRM. The best example of shooting yourself in the foot ever. Give customers encrypted content and the keys, try to prevent them from freely using the two together, undermine copyright fair use and first sale doctrines as you go along. Intended effect - No Piracy Actual effect - Paying customers get crippled products, pirates carry on regardless It's crazy. And the more they try to lock it down the worse their…

Let me tell you how things work in the real world. When the people with money say "we want this", you don't argue. It doesn't matter if it's technically infeasible. It doesn't matter if it won't have the intended effect. When the people with money want something, YOU GIVE IT TO THEM. And let them deal with the consequences. Otherwise, you won't get the business, and life can otherwise be made very, very difficult for…

In reality, most of the pirate activity in this house is my 4 year old son watching full length pirated movies on YouTube.

There is no real barrier to piracy. There's a minimal barrier for the hottest Hollywood properties - meaning you have to go through the hassle of a torrent instead of just going to YouTube - but if you want the content for free bad enough, you'll get it. Usually before it is available through legal channels.

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