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Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME

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Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME

#161

Post by saluk »

shmerl wrote: post #131
icebraining wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason why the games on the front page of GOG are Deus Ex and Beyond Good and Evil, and not the latest edition of Call of Duty. GOG sells old games, which are much past their prime time, and people don't play old games nearly as much as they watch old films and even shows. Not that Netflix doesn't have influence, of course, but it's still far from being their decision.

No, GOG don't sell just old games only. They changed their strategy a few years ago. They work with publishers on getting new games and successfully (for example Deep Silver). It's a tedious process, but they put an effort into it and it produces results. They gave a few interviews about this in the past. How they have meetings with publishers who ask for graphs, stats and other information in order to decide whether…

There are plenty of good indie films - they just aren't desirable in the way indie games are right now. The glut of content is really helping sites like GoG or humble to experiment with different models and push things like no drm. Successful films, and successful indie films, are different.

There is a similar glut of tv content as indie games, so you see many more ways to access this content, but no real push for free-drm here. They are still following the ad-based method.

Netflix/amazon/hulu as they grow their own original content could get to a point where they can disrupt distribution (more than they already have). But all of them already have a culture of drm so it's not clear that they would follow a similar stance as gog given the chance.

Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME

#162

Post by shmerl »

saluk wrote: post #161
shmerl wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, GOG don't sell just old games only. They changed their strategy a few years ago. They work with publishers on getting new games and successfully (for example Deep Silver). It's a tedious process, but they put an effort into it and it produces results. They gave a few interviews about this in the past. How they have meetings with publishers who ask for graphs, stats and other information in order to decide whether…

There are plenty of good indie films - they just aren't desirable in the way indie games are right now. The glut of content is really helping sites like GoG or humble to experiment with different models and push things like no drm. Successful films, and successful indie films, are different. There is a similar glut of tv content as indie games, so you see many more ways to access this content, but no real push for fr…

> Netflix/amazon/hulu as they grow their own original content could get to a point where they can disrupt distribution (more than they already have). But all of them already have a culture of drm so it's not clear that they would follow a similar stance as gog given the chance.

Yes, I was thinking about that. Netflix sounded apologetic in their W3C discussions, blaming the need for DRM on the publishers. Let them prove that with actions - when we'll see DRM free content that Netflix owns, it would mean that they themselves don't want it. So far I see no indication of any movement in that direction, so their arguments don't sound sincere.

Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME

#163

Post by bzbarsky »

phillc73 wrote: post #140
Ygg2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think most users will care if it ships EME or no? Like seriously?! I'd love to live in that world. Basically if Netflix doesn't work with Mozilla who's gonna be blamed? Netflix that works on Chrome? Google, whose browser plays Netflix or Mozilla that doesn't open Netflix? If you answered Mozilla, you live in real world :( No, this one is squarely on shoulders of those that supported that damned crud of W3C standa…

Who gives a fuck about Netflix? What percentage of the Internet population are ever likely to or are even interested in subscribing to Netflix/Hulu/Amazon Prime etc? What grates me most is that if Mozilla was really targeting the developing world, as per their aims with cheap FirefoxOS phones, then there would be no need to implement this, which simply panders to the needs of first/western world media companies deman…

One issue here is that Mozilla's revenue and ability to influence decisions at the W3C may depend more strongly on their usage share in the "developed" world than the "developing" world... The W3C issue may be even more of a problem than the revenue issue.

Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME

#164

Post by eridius »

shmerl wrote: post #150
eridius wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> But a book is not a movie. You can't take your physical book and let 500 people read it simultaneously. 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 re…

You've drifted from your original claim that rentals don't make sense for digital goods, into railing against the effectiveness of DRM, while presenting your argument as railing against the idea of DRM itself. DRM is ineffective, yes, but that doesn't mean the concept is inherently bad. It just means the implementation is bad. It's certainly quite plausible that there is no way to produce good DRM, but that would be a different argument.

I'm not interested in debating the merits of implementations of DRM, nor of its morality (as it is quiet unlikely that an argument about the morality of DRM will ever sway any participant, as this is not a topic where logic and reason tends to apply).

If you want to try and argue again as to why you think the concept of renting digital goods doesn't make sense, feel free. But you'll have to go back and address my original reply again.

Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME

#165

Post by bzbarsky »

Ygg2 wrote: post #60
higherpurpose wrote: post #55

So - what other good truly open source browser is out there?

Firefox. Chromium is a mess, Opera is Chromium, WebKit will support this no doubt.

Given that Apple is one of the major DRM vendors, it's a pretty good bet that Safari will support EME. WebKit proper, it's unclear.

Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME

#166

Post by shmerl »

eridius wrote: post #164
shmerl wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But a book is not a movie. You can't take your physical book and let 500 people read it simultaneously. 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 re…

You've drifted from your original claim that rentals don't make sense for digital goods, into railing against the effectiveness of DRM, while presenting your argument as railing against the idea of DRM itself. DRM is ineffective, yes, but that doesn't mean the concept is inherently bad. It just means the implementation is bad. It's certainly quite plausible that there is no way to produce good DRM, but that would be…

Two arguments combine and reinforce the conclusion that DRM is never needed. To clarify:

1. Rental of digital goods doesn't make sense for me (explained above).

2. Even if you can come up with sensible reason for rentals of digital goods, DRM is still ineffective so there is no point of using it anyway, which makes rental unenforceable which kind of makes it pointless even more and brings the argument back to #1.

> I'm not interested in debating the merits of implementations of DRM, nor of its morality

That doesn't fit with your statement that "that doesn't mean the concept [of DRM] is inherently bad". Unethical nature of it makes it inherently bad. Ineffectiveness of it in combination with always crippling the usability makes it inherently bad. Security and privacy threats it represents makes it inherently bad. Implementation is always bad because it's always aimed at crippling usability and treating all users as potential criminals by default. It's the definition of DRM. So there can't be a good implementation, otherwise it wouldn't be DRM anymore.

> as it is quiet unlikely that an argument about the morality of DRM will ever sway any participant, as this is not a topic where logic and reason tends to apply

Why not? Ethics has its logic. I explained in this thread why DRM is unethical. The logic is pretty straightforward and similar to how it's explained that police state is unethical.

There are two major objections to DRM - ethical and pragmatical. Both can be discussed and both have valid logic. I expressed that before here: https://secure.gog.com/forum/general/day_against_drm_1/post6...

So far I never saw proponents of DRM coming with any convincing arguments against either of those objections. They either claim that since many users are ready to accept DRM's overreaching policing it's not unethical, or they claim that DRM is actually doing something useful. Neither of that is convincing, because many users have no clue or don't understand the nature of DRM, so their acceptance doesn't mean much. And DRM is proved to be ineffective on the constant basis. I'm yet to hear any other argument which actually makes sense.

Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME

#167

Post by nitrogen »

shmerl wrote: post #126
wmf wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a form of price discrimination. If you want to watch a movie once ("rental") it costs $5 but it you want to watch it unlimited times it costs $20. As a customer, I appreciate this because it allows me to pay less when I want less.

Why discriminate? Let's say users watch N movies per month on average. They can set average purchase price per movie at $20 / N, not at $5. That's it. They can combine the two to make it more even. Charge X per month for the convenience of streaming and Y per movie for the purchase (and aim to arrive at the same $20 / month roughly). All that doesn't require any DRM.

Because money. If 20 users are willing to pay $20, and 80 are willing to pay $5, Hollywood can make $2020+$580=$800 instead of $5*100=$500.

Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME

#168

Post by natch »

>we vary this unique identifier per site (each site is presented a different device identifier) to make it more difficult to track users across sites

What a load of horseshit. They know perfectly well that different identifiers can be tied to the same user with other shared identifiers like advertising tracking identifiers, and yet they pretend they're somehow solving the problem.

Worse, the focus on privacy, while fine, misses the point. Users WANT to be able to download and save content for later consumption. Enabling the prevention of that is not a user friendly act. Sure, content owners have to cope with content sharing and piracy. But maybe that's for the best. Really great content owners like O'Reilly Publishing are providing non-DRMed content today and doing just fine. Create more value than you capture.

Something is rotten at Mozilla. They should be fighting this tooth and nail, but they're going the way of the money. And giving Adobe more credibility in the process... ugh, talk about adding insult to injury. This will mark the demise of Mozilla as a respectable organization.

Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME

#169

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

ygjb wrote: post #154
davexunit wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, the user may want to access DRM-encumbered content, but we shouldn't promote such a thing. You're not denying the users anything by refusing to implement EME, the media companies are denying the users freedom by insisting on using malware to deliver content! Just because users want Netflix in Firefox doesn't mean that it's the right thing to provide.

| You're not denying the users anything by refusing to implement EME Mozilla is if they claim to be an open source, standards based browser that promotes user choice. If Mozilla doesn't adhere to standards, and users are denied content because of that, then Mozilla cherry picking standards is explicitly denying users their choice.

So, a doctor that doesn't offer injections of carcinogens is denying patients their choice?

Re: Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME

#170

Post by shmerl »

nitrogen wrote: post #167
shmerl wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why discriminate? Let's say users watch N movies per month on average. They can set average purchase price per movie at $20 / N, not at $5. That's it. They can combine the two to make it more even. Charge X per month for the convenience of streaming and Y per movie for the purchase (and aim to arrive at the same $20 / month roughly). All that doesn't require any DRM.

Because money. If 20 users are willing to pay $20, and 80 are willing to pay $5, Hollywood can make $20 20+$5 80=$800 instead of $5*100=$500.

It's not $20 per film. Not sure what you are calculating.
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