141–150 of 195 posts
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I really hope Mozilla manages to become financially independent of Google, whether through donations or some other revenue stream. They announced Directory Tiles a while ago, which is a step in that direction.
that plan was canceled.
This is terrible news from end to end. To solve it, we need to tackle the root problem and not blame the browsers: those who want to infect our open web with DRM. Cancel your Netflix subscription. Let them know why. Same with Hulu. Same with amazon video. same with anyone who tells you to that your open web is less important than their unwillingness to embrace the new, digital frontier. Don't give money to the asshat…
Canceling your streaming service subscriptions won't be sufficient, even if everyone did it. You have to stop consuming Hollywood content. Stop going to movies. Stop watching TV shows. Stop listening to recorded music. Then you might actually make a difference. The streaming services are just stuck in the middle here -- Hollywood won't sell them, or anyone, content without DRM. DRM actually makes sense for a streamin…
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did you read the blog post? you have to actively consent in installing that plugin to use it. without plugin the sandbox is code without attack surface.
It's unclear to me from the post that the sandbox code will be unbundled from Firefox. Furthermore, it should be possible to distribute a compiled version of Firefox that doesn't have the ability to install the module in the first place, with a minimum of effort. If you don't enable it by default, but the first time a user visits any website with a video ad they get a clickthrough that downloads and installs it, a hu…
If you are installing firefox as sysadmin for someone else, you don't need a version with the support compiled out; don't give the users rights to install plugins.
What use case has less security just from the sandbox being enabled?
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Claiming that rentals don't make sense in the digital age is focusing far too heavily on the technical fact of how digital data works, and completely ignoring the legality of things, including intellectual property. If I make a movie and sell you a DVD, the terms of the sale prohibit you from, say, showing this movie in a theater to a bunch of strangers and charging them money. Yes, you own the physical DVD, but you…
> yes, you own the physical DVD, but you don't own the intellectual property of the movie itself. This holds true for physical copies, and it holds true for digital distribution as well. This is really irrelevant. When you buy a book you also own the book, and not the intellectual property it contains. Same thing with files - you can own the file, but not the intellectual property it represents. So legally nothing is…
But a book is not a movie. You can't take your physical book and let 500 people read it simultaneously. So there's no need for even considering restrictions on what you can do with your physical book. The closest thing that comes to mind is scanning and re-printing the book 500 times and distributing that. And you can't do that. That's illegal.
> I don't see how it correlates with any necessity for DRM.
Because of the extreme ease of reproduction + distribution, coupled with the near zero chance of being caught, is a strong incentive to violate IP law.
> Limited time of rental is justified for physical goods. For digital it's not (I explained above why).
No you didn't. What you said has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the validity of limited-time licensing of the right to view content.
> I don't see any sense in limiting access. Netflix can charge the same thing for unlimited access, plus allowing making backups and still make the profit
Hah, in your dreams. Netflix's ability to negotiate (with the content providers) for the legal right to stream content to you is predicated on there being limitations. The more unrestricted the access, the more they have to pay.
Not only that, but if you did remove all limitations (and restricting access to the duration of your membership is, of course, a limitation), then there would be no reason for people to stay Netflix members for longer than it takes to download and save all the movies they want to watch for the next few months. Subscribe for one month, download 6 months worth of movies, unsubscribe. Doesn't sound like a great business model, does it? But of course they couldn't do this even if they wanted to, because no content provider is going to give Netflix a license to re-license the content to Netflix subscribers in perpetuity.
> No, DRM can't enforce it (since this stuff is pirated practically instantaneously). So why is it used?
Because it's better than nothing. New content is pirated pretty fast, sure, but stuff doesn't stay easily available forever. Netflix doesn't deal in new content anyway (barring their recent ventures into producing their own content, which is a different discussion).
Without DRM, if I have a friend with a Netflix subscription, I can just ask him to grab a few movies and send them to me. Not only does this work even if the movies aren't easily available on BitTorrent, but it's also a lot safer because nobody can track this (whereas BitTorrent does have a non-zero risk of being tracked, or of quality problems, or fakes, etc). At this point it's about convenience. Make it hard enough or risky enough to acquire the content for free, and people will decide it's easier to just pay for it. And that's what DRM does.
Granted, DRM solutions do not work particularly well. But in the eyes of the rights-holders, it works better than nothing.
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To clarify, I'm not an advocate of DRM. I would much rather get content without it. DRM-free content is more convenient to work with than DRM'd content. But there is a vast gulf between saying "I'd rather have DRM-free content" and saying "All content must be DRM-free". The former is something I can ask for. The latter is just wishful thinking.
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DRM is more about having leverage over the provider of the playback device and casual piracy than it is about protecting the content against hardcore piracy.
Which in reality translates to: DRM is about screwing honest users, pirates always find a way around it.
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Nobody really uses the analog hole. It's actually easier to do it digitally, and will remain so, because securing a device against arbitrarily many attackers with physical access and arbitrarily large amounts of time and resources is a practical impossibility. The analog hole is just the formal proof that DRM can never be effective, because if you can see it or hear it you can record it.
Actually Cinavia is an interesting example of trying to close the analog hole. You can point a camcorder at your screen and record a movie, but if you try and play that recording back on a fancy TV or BluRay player, it still won't work because the audio track has encoded instructions in it saying "expect an encrypted/DRMd media stream". If the player sees the content expects to be DRMd, it silences the audio after ab…
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Legitimate reasons to directly access the OS are typically "there isn't a browser API for this yet". We have multiple Open Source browsers now; submit a patch to one or more of them to add a new API, and ideally start working to standardize it. The result will be far better and more secure than a one-off custom plugin to pass through specific OS functionality.
Yes, step right this way to begin the 10 year+ w3c standardization dance, with a high likelyhood that large vendors never implement the functionality anyways. Web standards and the web standardization process are broken. An example is webrtc, which was practically designed for webcam chat, yet this is still completely broken in a cross platform/browser context years after the fact.
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"greed" You mean profit? The reason that businesses exist? That is, the distinction that is literally in the description of for-profit corporations?
Profit and greed are not the same thing. Greed means overcharging for no reason besides wanting to overcharge. I.e. ripping users off for the sake of it. Usually it's possible only when competition is weak. Otherwise customers would just walk away to the competitors. In the case of DRM in video, publishers are a tight conglomerate and there is little disruption there. So they enjoy all kind of sick idiocy they can fo…
Copyright law provides for the difference between a one-time and perpetual license for content. Clearly, viewing content multiple times is more valuable than watching it once, and thus is appropriate for price differentiation.
The fact that the company could take less profit by marking both as the same low price is irrelevant.
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> yes, you own the physical DVD, but you don't own the intellectual property of the movie itself. This holds true for physical copies, and it holds true for digital distribution as well. This is really irrelevant. When you buy a book you also own the book, and not the intellectual property it contains. Same thing with files - you can own the file, but not the intellectual property it represents. So legally nothing is…
> When you buy a book you also own the book, and not the intellectual property it contains. But a book is not a movie. You can't take your physical book and let 500 people read it simultaneously. So there's no need for even considering restrictions on what you can do with your physical book. The closest thing that comes to mind is scanning and re-printing the book 500 times and distributing that. And you can't do tha…
So what? Because you can make 500 copies doesn't justify using an unethical police state approach which DRM implies (i.e. treating all users as criminals by default). DRM is unethical by definition, because it's an overreaching preemptive policing. One would reject all DRM on the same ethical grounds one would reject police state approach to society.
That's besides the fact that DRM doesn't prevent any piracy, since it's broken practically right away and subsequent pirates never deal with it. Therefore this argument of copies is completely irrelevant to justify it.
> Because of the extreme ease of reproduction + distribution, coupled with the near zero chance of being caught, is a strong incentive to violate IP law.
Again, DRM has no effect on easiness of illegal reproduction (see above). It has nothing to do with incentives or fear of being caught. It's the same with or without DRM.
> What you said has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the validity of limited-time licensing of the right to view content.
I disagree. If you have some point to present for the benefit of the discussion, address what I expressed above, otherwise we just affirm our disagreement.
> Not only that, but if you did remove all limitations (and restricting access to the duration of your membership is, of course, a limitation), then there would be no reason for people to stay Netflix members for longer than it takes to download and save all the movies they want to watch for the next few months.
Even that out with a fee per file. That would prevent downloading the whole catalog at once.
> Because it's better than nothing.
No, it's worse than nothing, because it cripples usability for legitimate users while having no effect on pirates.
> New content is pirated pretty fast, sure, but stuff doesn't stay easily available forever
On the contrary. Once it's pirated by the first pirates which scrape DRM, it becomes easily available practically forever for the rest of the pirates.
> Without DRM, if I have a friend with a Netflix subscription, I can just ask him to grab a few movies and send them to me.
Too much hassle for potential pirates when they can access the same with just a few clicks through P2P networks. The scale of such copying can't compare. Pirating through P2P is waay more massive than any potential copying from friends. DRM doesn't make piracy neither more risky nor more scary. According to some, DRM actually only increases piracy (see an interview with CD Projekt Red).
> Granted, DRM solutions do not work particularly well.
They work - to cripple the product for users who pay for it. Plus they work for whatever shady reasons those who push for those solutions came up with. They surely don't work for stopping any piracy.