131–140 of 374 posts
Maybe it can be disassembled? Like it what was done with some proprietary blobs of Linux kernel.
Mozilla had to be dragged into this acceptance kicking and screaming (metaphorically). They were faced with a hard choice, Not implement EME (HTML5 DRM) and risk users moving to other browsers (user loss) or implement EME and risk looking like they are contradicting their core mission (trust loss). They figured a little loss of trust is worth keeping most of the users on the Mozilla platform - which in my view is the…
Yes I know.. I was an executive as a major record label, trust me it's hard to be on both sides of this argument and it's not as simple as everyone makes it out to be...
I can't explain how many times I tried to help executives understand that the path between the media to the human eye or ear was vulnerable to so many attacks it clearly was a fruitless goal to protect media in that way. They hear some bright young person tell them they can protect their media like it was in the good 'ole days and they have the need to believe because without that belief they are out of a job..
And artists are on their own to figure out how to make money on their work...
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I feel like this is a rationalization. The fact that a market is free doesn't mean that producers can't sell on the terms they want. There is DRM-free content, just not the content you want. Content creators choose to use DRM because very few users object to it, and I bet with modern DRM most don't even know it exists. That's a perfectly functional free market. Its like saying that there isn't a functional free marke…
> The fact that a market is free doesn't mean that producers can't sell on the terms they want. Copyright laws stand in the way of a free market. If there was a free market anybody could make a copy of some content and sell it (perhaps they would have to pay parts of the profit to the original owners, but nevertheless anybody would basically allowed to sell what they want: that's what a free market is about).
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The whole point of replacing Flash with HTML5 video is to get rid of buggy third party plugins that crash all the time and have shitty cross-platform support. If HTML5 video is going to rely on buggy third party DRM plugins, we lose the benefit that was the whole point of HTML5 video.
I run my browsers without Flash in order to avoid Adobe's exploit-du-jour crapware. This means, for example, that I don't run Chrome. If this binary blob from Adobe isn't presented with a similar UI as regular "plugins" (that the user can disable or uninstall), then I will look into writing an extension to disable it, or perhaps rely on a Firefox fork to give me a Flash-lite(tm) free browser.
This is most certainly the wrong choice, but people need to understand they essentially had no choice. Their options were rather limited: Option 1) Stick to your laurels and refuse to implement DRM. Other browser vendors implement DRM, certain parts of the web become inaccessible via Firefox as DRM is implemented into more and more web services (think Youtube, Vimeo, Netflix, Hulu). Firefox's lack of DRM means its us…
Firefox's lack of DRM would mean that users are being encouraged to used the services not encumbered with this nonsense, instead of all gravitating to whichever DRM service is most popular.
Mozilla supporting DRM is a failure because of Metcalfe's Law[1]. By giving access to the network of people using DRM to their n users, they support that network by O(n^2) and make it that much harder to dislodge in the future.
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Right, they are using "their power to influence the development of the open web" by supporting DRM. What's the point in having this power if you immediately cave?
Ding ding ding! You've hit the nail on the head. Mozilla has no real power over the web. Google, Microsoft, and Apple have the power (look at the names associated with EME DRM - what a surprise). Mozilla has an illusion of power, which is tolerated by the other actors because it makes everyone happy. But no one should mistake it for real leverage.
That's not right either. It's the users that have the power. Users can pick which browsers they use and which sites they visit.
There was essentially no boycott of EME-shipping browsers (Chrome and Internet Explorer). That shows that we, the people on the internet, did not care enough to fight EME.
EME isn't fought by talking about it and hoping someone like Mozilla will kill it. We would have had to actually do something ourselves, and a successful boycott of Chrome and Internet Explorer would have killed EME very effectively.