W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards • Hacker News Board

Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards

#181

Post by takluyver » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 10:12 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #177

asadotzler wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"As it is now, businesses have to balance the cost of losing customers against the cost of not being able to DRM their content. Take that dilemma away and I think you certainly have a new incentive." And the businesses (Hollywood) with the content that Web users want have done that math and decided that DRM through plug-ins and native apps is an EXCELLENT system and they're happy to keep mandating it forever. If Plug…

If the Web cannot give them the content they want, they'll get it elsewhere, probably from silo'd App Stores where things "just work." And in this scenario (i.e., the way things are now), someone like me, who doesn't give a shit about "content" but does care about the Web itself, can still avoid DRM by not installing the plugins, not using the silo'd App Stores, etc. But if my browser is the silo'd plugin/App Store,…

This is unlikely to change. Firefox at least is not about to ship with DRM plugins built in, any more than it comes with Flash built in now.

EME is not strictly DRM in your browser: it's a standardised interface to allow your browser to talk to DRM modules.

Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards

#182

Post by wildster » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 10:12 PM UTC

If this means companies like Netflix use HTML5 rather than Silverlight to stream films it will ultimately make the world a better place.

Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards

#183

Post by Touche » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 10:14 PM UTC

makomk wrote: post #140

frozenport wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Your cellphone can't watch YouTube without hardware decoding. 2. An issue closer to home can be seen http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Raspberry_Pi/FAQ#Video_and_audio... . 3. Companies target audiences and not platforms. For example, Netflix on Linux.

Come to think of it, in theory the Raspberry Pi could support a DRM scheme that's entirely "open source" in the same way that their graphics drivers are already. Basically, the GPU is actually a fairly powerful processor running a binary blob that receives messages from the ARM CPU - if it did all the decryption the CPU-side code could be entirely open.

It doesn't matter unless the website acknowledges your DRM scheme.

Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards

#184

Post by makomk » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 10:15 PM UTC

schoen wrote: post #171

PeterisP wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see no way how an open source system can implement any effective DRM standard while staying open source. If a proper open source system has a component that enforces DRM, and is functional when I download it, then it includes those keys; but gives me an unconditional right to use and modify it. And I am physically able to modify it, un-implementing those restrictions. If part of the system cannot be modified by me,…

I agree. In previous discussions about this, some people emphasized the idea of open source development, as opposed to giving an open source software to an end user. For example, you could run a binary through an obfuscator after compiling in a decryption key -- from source code that had been published and distributed under an open source license. If the license isn't a reciprocal/copyleft license, this is probably n…

> For example, you could run a binary through an obfuscator after compiling in a decryption key -- from source code that had been published and distributed under an open source license.

Of course, if you do that you may as well just not release the source code at all, because there's no way for the user to tell that the binary does actually correspond to the source without also being able to extract the encryption key and break the DRM.

Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards

#185

Post by sliverstorm » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 10:20 PM UTC

cyrus_ wrote: post #3

The EFF has strong words about where this is taking the open web [1]: "A Web where you cannot cut and paste text; where your browser can't "Save As..." an image; where the "allowed" uses of saved files are monitored beyond the browser; where JavaScript is sealed away in opaque tombs; and maybe even where we can no longer effectively "View Source" on some sites, is a very different Web from the one we have today. It's…

We've already got Silverlight, Flash, Java, so on and so forth... denying DRM entry to HTML won't stop DRM web content, and allowing it might just make the experience less miserable.

Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards

#186

Post by cmircea » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 10:22 PM UTC

All of this is just the symptom of not providing a goddamn good service. If these media companies would provide a good service DRM wouldn't make sense even in their minds. But no, they're stuck in the dark ages, with their heads up their asses.

I mean, look at what Steam has done to the video game industry; or iOS/Android app stores. When it's easier to buy the copy pretty much nobody is going to bother stealing it.

Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards

#187

Post by nitrogen » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 10:23 PM UTC

jiggy2011 wrote: post #169

jeltz wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but it wont be OS agnostic. So it might work on all browsers on Windows but not in any one FreeBSD.

Not true at all, there is nothing in the spec that mandates the use of any particular OS.

Is there anything in the spec that ensures compatibility with more than one OS?

Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards

#188

Post by cbhl » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 10:23 PM UTC

lambda wrote: post #164

marcosdumay wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It matters because of two things: 1 - We'll lose the W3C. We'll have to either create another standards body, or go back to the 90's situation when nobody agreed on anything. 2 - There are a few places where actualy reading the data somebody sent to you is a crime. Despite the drawbacks on those kinds of law, some of those places are still very importantly economically, and we can't just ignore them, at least for now…

> 1 - We'll lose the W3C. We'll have to either create another standards body, or go back to the 90's situation when nobody agreed on anything. We already lost the W3C once for about 10 years. Remember XHTML and XHTML2? Those, and a bunch of special purpose not particularly interesting niche XML standards (P3P? XML-FO?) were pretty much all they worked on for a decade or so. It wasn't until the WHATWG was formed by so…

> W3C realized that's what people were actually interested in

So, with XHTML, the main thing is that people just wanted their web pages to work like they always had; they didn't want to deal with adding slashes to make their web pages XML and strict parsers and whatnot.

But with P3P, what people want is Netflix and Rdio on all their devices (such as ARM-based Samsung Chromebooks).

Frankly, I prefer the sound of standardized DRM to everyone rolling their own ala the 90s; with any luck it'll mean fewer formats/keys that need to be reverse engineered and whatnot.

Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards

#189

Post by sliverstorm » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 10:25 PM UTC

fafner wrote: post #12

tikhonj wrote: post #2

How will this work with open-source browsers like Firefox? After all, what's to stop somebody from publishing an extension or even a modified version of the browser itself? DRM seems fundamentally unenforceable, after all. Are the people pushing for this hoping it's just too much hassle? These questions aren't rhetorical: I'm interested in what exactly the DRM people are pushing and how they expect it to work. Just n…

They want to propose an API which would allow proprietary closed source binary blobs to display videos. In other words: They are pushing "yet another Flash" into HTML5.

A better Flash? Yes, please, and thank you.

Re: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards

#190

Post by toyg » Thu, Oct 03, 2013, 10:26 PM UTC

jiggy2011 wrote: post #169

jeltz wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but it wont be OS agnostic. So it might work on all browsers on Windows but not in any one FreeBSD.

Not true at all, there is nothing in the spec that mandates the use of any particular OS.

But there's nothing compelling plugin developers to support all OS/browser combinations, so no, in practice it likely won't be OS-agnostic.

This scheme basically just creates a special class of plugins; these plugins clearly won't be OS-agnostic, because they can't -- that's the whole point of the exercise: to restrict playback to devices that are fully authorised/controlled from top to bottom, with the browser piping streams from the web to trusted plugins running on trusted OSes using trusted hardware (TPM etc).