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Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

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Re: Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

#161

Post by jgon »

ep103 wrote: post #138

There are so many people here claiming this is the wrong choice, and yet I wonder what percentage of the commenters here are using chrome? By most sources I've seen, Chrome has 2x the marketshare, and actively pushed FOR EME. Perhaps if FF had Chrome's current marketshare, they would have been in a position to say no, but its the users who made that impossible. Mozilla should be commended for fighting as far as they…

Thank you. Watching people on this site verbally fellate Chrome and Safari on the basis of incredibly trivial things like look and feel and "minimal UI", while ignoring the incredibly important things like the company building the products and it's positions is frustrating, even more so now that they are all crawling out of the woodwork crying alligator tears.

The tech community brought this upon itself when it switched over to browsers provided by two enormous corporations fully beholden to their shareholders, instead of sticking with a browser developed by goddamn public benefit corporation.

The tech community brought this on itself when it couldn't be bothered to test sites in anything other than Chrome and maybe Safari on their iphone.

The tech community brought this on itself when it started making websites webkit only, without a thought for what vendor prefixing would do to web compatibility.

The tech community brought this on itself when it decided that per-process tabs were more important than preventing the future of the web from being controlled by 3 enormous corporations.

So I say that we stop complaining and start getting used to it. This is what we all wanted, and now we can reap what we have sown, while the gentle glow of the chrome url box lights up our screen.

Re: Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

#162

Post by vehementi »

GuiA wrote: post #45
howeyc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Er, you claim Google has power. What if Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple implemented EME but Google didn't want to, and then everyone stopped using Chrome for all of the reasons mentioned in this thread? Then, Google doesn't have power. Contradiction!

Re: Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

#164

Post by kevincrane »

dllthomas wrote: post #97
nullc wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that thats quite fair— Firefox won't run the CDM without user consent. You can still say no. Having a choice doesn't magically resolve the issues, it doesn't prevent content providers from making things formerly available unavailable, it doesn't help us (as users) make better more considered decisions rather than clicking yes a lot to get things done, etc. But it does retain the choice to not run this st…

If content providers knew that there was a large chunk of users they'd be excluding by choosing the DRM option, they would be less likely to choose it. Firefox may be only 20% of web users, but that's still a lot of revenue to leave on the table if we can rely on firefox users to stick with firefox. I don't know whether or not we can - apparently, Mozilla is worried about it. The best option might be to sink this dev…

How many users would stick around when YouTube or Netflix stop working though?

Re: Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

#165

Post by azakai »

shmerl wrote: post #150
azakai wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The code is 100% open source, so even if there isn't a GUI option for it, it would be easy for people to make builds without it. There are already many forked builds of firefox like iceweasel, etc.

Yes, I expect such thing to surface, but it would be nice if Mozilla could provide such options on their own too. That would be some small positive gesture towards those who don't appreciate their move and see it as a betrayal of Mozilla's core values. It would as well make this issue more apparent. Doesn't Mozilla care about educating the public on such matters? It surely would be a positive thing for the Open Web.

As the blog post mentioned, the EME stuff will be an option that the Firefox user would need to agree to install. That would be an opportunity to educate users on the topic, I think.

Re: Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

#166

Post by Dylan16807 »

rayiner wrote: post #141
brownbat wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that a market is free... We're talking about a government-created monopoly though. If there is competition over distribution, rather than content, better delivery mechanisms eventually win. We had this when FM displaced AM radio. There was a compulsory licensing regime, which means that anyone can distribute any content they want for a reasonable fixed fee. FM was a better distribution technology, so it wo…

All property rights are government created monopolies. Imagine applying compulsory licensing to other things. They government forces you to sell your widgets at a "reasonable fixed fee." Imagine the government forcing Google or Facebook to share their databases to potential competitors for a "reasonable fixed fee." Compulsory licensing was a tactic used to shift profits from content creators to middlemen.

Obviously compulsory copyright licensing only applies to things that were being sold in the first place.

Anyway can you explain your widget scenario more? In particular, how is it less fair than existing compulsory radio licensing?

Re: Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

#167

Post by nullc »

kevingadd wrote: post #101
saganus wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...until we decide otherwise" (for different values of "we") Edit: Added last part.

Bullshit. It's open source. You're being paranoid. You can recompile it with CDMs turned off entirely or download a fork that does it.

> It's open source [...] You can recompile it

Careful. Thats a somewhat empty response. It's technically true, but its an enormous barrier— even if someone else compiles it for you, how do you know their binary is trustworthy?

It's like saying that humans don't need oxygen to survive, because you can extract oxygen from the electrolysis of water. :)

You have to consider the tradeoffs users are presented with, and the _practical_ freedom to choose is lost far before the cost of the choice becomes infinite.

Fortunately in this case participation will be opt in, though perhaps market forces will make it hard to opt out— but if so the belief is that the same forces would just force you to use Chrome and miss out on the other choices that Firefox leaves open to you.

Re: Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

#169

Post by Daiz »

Oh, so the web has given up and is now genuflecting at the altar of video DRM. Next up: picture DRM, because since we're protecting videos we should naturally protect still pictures too. You know what? We also have all this professional writing on the web, and anyone can just copy & paste that! That clearly shouldn't fly in our brand new DRM-protected world - authors should be able to control exactly who can view and read their texts, and copying is strictly forbidden. Screenshots should be blocked too. Browser devtools will naturally have to be disabled on the World Wide Web, as they are capable of hurting our benevolent protector, the almighty DRM. Eventually, we'll arrive at The Right To Read[1].

Or we could just not give the devil our little finger.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Also, a reminder about the nature of this beast that everyone should be aware of:

HTML DRM will not give you plugin-free or standardized playback. It will simply replace Flash/Silverlight with multiple custom and proprietary DRM black boxes that will likely have even worse cross-platform compatibility than the existing solutions. In other words, giving in to HTML DRM will only make the situation worse than it currently is. Especially since it paves the way to an even more closed web.

Re: Can This Web Be Saved? Mozilla Accepts DRM, and We All Lose

#170

Post by Xenmen »

msbarnett wrote: post #124
IgorPartola wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's more important Mozilla or the web? This is a case where Mozilla thinks that by sticking around they can do more good than by killing this particular attack on the free web. Can we justify this completely? IMHO, no. Perhaps the whole existence of Mozilla was leading up to this point where it could commit ritualistic suicide and take this DRM proposal with it. Of course nobody at Mozilla will see it that way. Or…

> Perhaps the whole existence of Mozilla was leading up to this point where it could commit ritualistic suicide and take this DRM proposal with it. Except, if Mozilla had committed "ritualistic suicide" over EME, it wouldn't have taken EME with it. Users would move to every other browser with HTML5 DRM implemented, Mozilla would die accomplishing nothing. A world with entrenched HTML5 DRM & Mozilla strikes me as stri…

But... Mozilla IS irrelevent without it's differentiating principles.

Microsoft sacrificed backwards compatibility with Vista and look where that got them...

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