81–90 of 105 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say lots of people are extremely dogmatic when its comes to certain topics. They will condemn things like DRM without even considering the positive aspects. I like to see DRM the pragmatic way: Without it, neither cheap streaming of music and movies nor would cheap games via services like Steam would be possible.
There are no long-term positive aspects to DRM for users. I don't consider trading computer freedom for streaming movies to be positive.
That's entirely your choice — and one with which I tend to agree. Don't presume your opinion on these matters is a universal truth, however. Other people have other priorities, and it's not up to you to decide that they're wrong.
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I wasn't a vehement opponent of W3C implementing DRM, but I'll put my two cents in; I don't mind if private companies implement DRM in their own products. I do mind DRM being standardized, meaning every vendor has to implement it in order to be complaint with the standard. Ubuntu != linux, it is just a distro. Similarly Chrome is not the browser standard, it's only an implementation. If this story was actually "Linux…
That sounds logical at first blush, but you're actually looking at the problem backwards. Markets have power, standards organisations don't. If the W3C had for some reason told browser vendors "now you have to ship DRM to comply with the standard", with no evidence that it was something that consumers wanted, they would have been told to go to hell. Exactly that happened with a whole bunch of other W3C "standards" th…
But I think most the resistance is more ideological than pragmatic. People are upset because the standard represents a shared platform that every actor in the market has a say in. People who are anti-DRM, for whatever reason, saw it as an attack on something they identified with or felt like they were apart of. But those people don't really identify with Canonical or Google in the same way and feel those companies are within their right to implement whatever is best for them even if it's something they disagree with.
Why do these "Linux gets Netflix" stories not have the same bad attitude from folks as the "W3C caves to DRM" stories? They're the same topic, essentially.
Without DRM, someone will write a script to suck down all new Netflix videos and immediately post them to e.g. Popcorn Time. Then Netflix will drop Linux support. It's a shame that so many people in the OSS community have such an asymmetric and hypocritical view about paying people for their work and respecting creators' licensing intents. If I take a GPLed GitHub repo, clone it, incorporate it into my commercial clo…
DRM is not just harmful, it's pointless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without DRM, someone will write a script to suck down all new Netflix videos and immediately post them to e.g. Popcorn Time. Then Netflix will drop Linux support. It's a shame that so many people in the OSS community have such an asymmetric and hypocritical view about paying people for their work and respecting creators' licensing intents. If I take a GPLed GitHub repo, clone it, incorporate it into my commercial clo…
You can already suck down all of Netflix with only marginally more effort. Everything on Netflix is already on TPB. DRM is not just harmful, it's pointless.
Effort also introduces time lag. If the next episode of Walking Dead takes 24 hours longer to show up on TPB, I'll probably see a bump in legitimate streaming and rentals.
I'm not arguing that DRM works, especially in the CS sense that it really makes things "uncopyable." (That's impossible.) I'm attempting to explain why people keep doubling down on it and what behaviors drive that. If DRM leads to 5% more sales and costs less than what they get in revenue from 5% more sales, they'll use DRM.
These companies spend just as much time staring at their spreadsheets as they do in any other industry. If DRM does not correlate with increased sales, now the bean counters ask "why are we spending this money to license this DRM technology?" It becomes a red cell on the spreadsheet, not a black one.
It's also about changing customer habits. Napster, TPB, etc. mainstreamed industrial-scale piracy and taught users that this is easier and cheaper than buying content. The studios and record labels and such were definitely asleep at the switch for the rise of the Internet (understandable as they are not in tech), but now they've woken up and created channels that make it just as easy to buy. Now if they make it harder to pirate too...
Why do these "Linux gets Netflix" stories not have the same bad attitude from folks as the "W3C caves to DRM" stories? They're the same topic, essentially.
The W3C action is interpreted (rightly or wrongly) as forcing DRM on your machine whether you want it or not. Having the ability to watch Netflix, if you want, is not controversial among most Linux users.
The closest previous situation was probably the blow-up over Mono being installed by default. If it had been available for installation by those who wanted it, there would have been no issue, but it instead had to be installed and then removed. [To avoid upsetting anyone, I didn't care much one way or the other, I'm just saying that was the source of the problem.]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wasn't a vehement opponent of W3C implementing DRM, but I'll put my two cents in; I don't mind if private companies implement DRM in their own products. I do mind DRM being standardized, meaning every vendor has to implement it in order to be complaint with the standard. Ubuntu != linux, it is just a distro. Similarly Chrome is not the browser standard, it's only an implementation. If this story was actually "Linux…
That sounds logical at first blush, but you're actually looking at the problem backwards. Markets have power, standards organisations don't. If the W3C had for some reason told browser vendors "now you have to ship DRM to comply with the standard", with no evidence that it was something that consumers wanted, they would have been told to go to hell. Exactly that happened with a whole bunch of other W3C "standards" th…
A standard on the other hand can potentially live forever. And all implementations must follow it. And for example, a browser with DRM in it can no longer be fully open-source, which should be reason enough for W3C to not standardize DRM. Plus let's be honest, DRM is fundamentally flawed, its main purpose for which it actually works being the lock-in of honest users, purpose that is incompatible with the concept of a browser. If Netflix wants to serve DRM-ed content, they apparently have no problem in implementing their own thing, so I fail to see what the W3C is trying to solve. And yes, next we'll talk about the Linux kernel, because DRM is only "secure" if the whole chain is "secure".
And also if users want Netflix, that's fine, I'm actually happy that it works on Linux now, but I don't want DRM and users may not want DRM forever, as could be seen with MP3s and pushing for standardization is shoving it on people's throats.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wasn't a vehement opponent of W3C implementing DRM, but I'll put my two cents in; I don't mind if private companies implement DRM in their own products. I do mind DRM being standardized, meaning every vendor has to implement it in order to be complaint with the standard. Ubuntu != linux, it is just a distro. Similarly Chrome is not the browser standard, it's only an implementation. If this story was actually "Linux…
I've made this point before on HN. The standard does not require browser vendors to include any DRM scheme to be fully compliant. Netflix however can require a specific DRM component in order to play their content.
Imagine some private organizations decided it would be safer if everyone that came to their establishment had a fully loaded gun with their specified ammunition requirements (I know this is a ridiculous presumption, but just suspend disbelief for a second). So say a bunch of businesses like gas stations and restaurants implement this policy.
If you are anti-gun or a pacifist, you can just avoid those establishments. But what if the practice became wide spread enough that a state or the federal government decided to mandate that everyone had to own a gun. They didn't need to buy ammunition or ever use it, but they had to have the gun.
Obviously that would piss off a lot of ideologues who are vehemently opposed to guns and violence. You can pragmatically say, "Well if you're against it, then just don't use it. I mean the majority of people will use it or won't care." But forcing even the outline of something onto people who are ideologically opposed to it is obviously going to be met with resistance.
So I know that analogy isn't all that great, but I think the principle is mostly the same. This standard is forcing the outline of DRM to be enabled on everyone's browser (since pretty much every major or usable browser is going to implement it). Yea, you can never go to a web site or download a specific DRM component. But you're still forced to have the "unloaded gun" of DRM.
I'm not personally that much of an ideologue, so I don't think it's that big of a deal. But there's a pretty strong contingent that is ideologically opposed to all forms of DRM. It's not that hard to see why they are upset about the standard if you try to look at it from that point of view.
Has the DRM for Chrome been cracked yet? It seems that having the complete data flow from the server sent packets through to the displayed data would make it relatively easy to work back and crack it sufficiently to make saving drm-ed streams to a local compressed video format possible. Obviously you could use a modified video driver or grab the data from the actual display - the problem with that would be speed and…
https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-mpaa-knows-where-movies-are...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've made this point before on HN. The standard does not require browser vendors to include any DRM scheme to be fully compliant. Netflix however can require a specific DRM component in order to play their content.
Alright, I'm going to use an analogy that's a bit thin, but just stick with me on it. Imagine some private organizations decided it would be safer if everyone that came to their establishment had a fully loaded gun with their specified ammunition requirements (I know this is a ridiculous presumption, but just suspend disbelief for a second). So say a bunch of businesses like gas stations and restaurants implement thi…