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

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

#241

Post by nemothekid »

adrr wrote: post #109
pkulak wrote: post #64

I don't understand why everyone is up in arms about this. Some content cannot go anywhere without DRM. That's not going to change. Do you think the Universal is just 6 months away from streaming the latest blockbuster with VP8 in a video tag? Right now we have Flash and Silverlight everywhere and it's a PITA. How open are those two? This adds the option of moving this stuff out of plugins. If you want to live in some…

I don't believe that. Music industry said the same thing, no one supported DRM and now music is DRM free. It was only a matter time before Netflix/Amazon Prime/Hulu went DRM free.

The movie/television industry wasn't crippled piracy, and most likely will never be. These guys print money and it seems they will print money for time to come, and Netflix/Prime/Hulu generates pennies compared to the TV/Movie industries billions.

Simply put, the movie/television is much more diverse than the music industry and won't see its lunch eaten.

The biggest hurdle in getting DRM content in the contract games that are being played with all the major providers right now (remember the TWC/CBS dispute). In these contracts are clauses for all content to be DRM'd. Even if everyone understood that DRM is bad UX, no one gives a shit about fighting those clauses when TWC is removing CBS over contract disputes. It just currently doesn't make sense to risk hundreds of millions of dollars for a moral issue that 99% of users simply don't care about.

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

#242

Post by shitlord »

wdewind wrote: post #42
cyrus_ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The W3C is the guardian of the world wide web, a system for disseminating information publicly and globally to all those who may benefit from it. By standardizing DRM for video, they are giving legitimacy to a technical kludge that is designed specifically to prevent the dissemination of information. There are legitimate reasons why someone may wish to save a video to their hard drive, just like they can save an imag…

If I had my way we wouldn't have copyright at all. It seems idiotic to me for the same reasons patents are. But we do, and so just as you say there are "legitimate reasons" why someone may wish to save a video, there are too "legitimate reasons" someone may want to share their work in a protected manner. It's a product. If you don't like it don't buy it. There is no part of this that forces the user to view only DRM…

What I don't understand is that if these companies want so desperately to enforce DRM, why are they using the web? A native application is better suited to what they want to do, and they are going to end up writing DRM modules in native code anyway. So why are they targeting the web at all, and why do they insist on getting something that is fundamentally closed (DRM) put into something that was meant to be open (HTML)?

IMO, this is a very dumb approach. This would not be OK anywhere else. Feel free to enforce your copyright, but don't expect me to bear your burden without kicking and screaming.

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

#243

Post by vlad003 »

chinpokomon wrote: post #172
x0054 wrote: post #112

Ok, it sounds to me like this is way, way, over blown. First, the DRM is NOT going to be built into the browser it self. It's basically a new name for a plug in system, nothing more. So, to everyone who thinks they can roll their own browser and avoid the DRM, no you will not be able to. It's not bad or good for consumers, at best, it's about the same. It's very simple, studios will not allow you to rent their movies…

Actually Netflix and Stream could both operate without DRM. If content providers don't want to provide their content to open systems, that is their concern, not that of the middle men. Adding a DRM standard just placates to corporate wishes to control content. This has the chilling effect to prevent fair use, or worse it can be used to lock up content that should otherwise be open and free.

It is the concern of the middle men, though. If content providers aren't willing to provide content, then the middle men will have no reason to exist. You can't have Netflix without any movies or shows on it.

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

#244

Post by chris_wot »

perrupa wrote: post #127
angrow wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't recommend it: the name and logo are trademarked, and even if you replaced those, if anyone noticed the rest of the copying, you'd be the laughingstock of the internet. Who'd want to buy your product then?

Zynga doesn't particularly seem to care about that kind of thing and they're doing pretty ok...

Worst. Example. Evar.

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

#245

Post by akjj »

Pxtl wrote: post #25
mikeryan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DRM isn't actually implemented by the browser its more of a plugin architecture (Encrypted Media Extensions) which commercial closed source DRM plugin can fill.

If it's just going to end-up plug-ins, I don't understand why DRM is being treated specifically at all instead of tweaks to the existing general-purpose plug-in architecture. If you want DRM, deal with Microsoft Silverlight or Adobe Flash or roll your own.

The existing plugins are heavy and don't integrate well with other web technologies. In addition, the NPAPI interface is not standardized (I believe). Thus, the point is to narrow down the scope of plugins from everything that Flash and Silverlight do to just a piece of code focused on DRM. Everything else that people use Flash and Silverlight can be replaced by standards and directly implemented in the browser. However, DRM, by its nature depends on closed-source compiled binaries, which means that it has to remain in a plug-in.

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

#246

Post by wavefunction »

maggit wrote: post #170
wavefunction wrote: post #114

I'm just curious about what all of you opposed to this would offer as an alternative to companies like Netflix or other streaming sites. No DRM? That's simply not going to fly. If you really want to undermine DRM in an honest and ethical manner, you should leave those DRM'd properties to their owners and support non-DRM media. How many of you listen to itunes media and are raging about this...

DRM-free is the way to go, and has been the way for music on iTunes since March 2009 ( http://www.macworld.com/article/1137946/itunestore.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Store#Movement_against_D... ) I seem to remember reports that iTunes sales increased quite a bit as they removed the DRM, indicating that removing DRM does indeed make the most business sense, not just the most moral sense or whatever. T…

They only went DRM free in response to pressure from Amazon who began selling DRM free MP3s. I am not a fan of DRM at all but I believe that if a "content owner" wants to encumber their own creation with it, they should have that right and freedom.

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

#247

Post by lambda »

johnbm wrote: post #221
lambda wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> architecture astronauts That's an awesome term for something I never quite had a word for.

I suspect this may be the article that introduced the term:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html

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

#248

Post by JoshTriplett »

wdewind wrote: post #10
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…

> It's a place where the next Tim Berners-Lee or Mozilla, if they were building a new browser from scratch, couldn't just look up the details of all the "Web" technologies. They'd have to negotiate and sign compliance agreements with a raft of DRM providers just to be fully standards-compliant and interoperable. I may be totally naive here, but I'm not really sure why this matters. That there is a WC3 standard does n…

The problem isn't that browsers do or don't have to implement this "standard"; the problem is that the standard itself isn't enough to actually support the content it claims to support.

It's the equivalent of standardizing the object or embed tags: it's a standard way of getting at non-standard functionality, and sites then depend on specific implementations of that non-standard functionality, the same way they depend on the Flash plugin today in ways that knowing how to implement the object tag doesn't help with.

Standardizing a single fully-specified mechanism for DRM might actually be useful (debatably), but that would break the current model in which DRM is completely unsound and relies on security-through-obscurity. "Standardizing" a means of getting at the myriad non-standard DRM implementations and their non-standard APIs is worse than worthless: it's actively harmful, and it prolongs the death of those technologies.

Right now, content providers have to choose whether to support the open web or DRM. They should continue to have to make that choice, with supporters of the open web reaching a larger audience, until eventually all the holdouts either switch or lose. This is a major step backward for that goal, and the W3C has no business claiming EME has anything to do with the open web.

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

#249

Post by bigphishy »

rimantas wrote: post #220
jonahx wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This news makes me so sad. Also: The more things progress, the more and more sense RMS makes.

Actually RMS makes less and less sense each day (and has nothing to do with this issue at all), and comments of this kind are getting annoying.

Wait.. are you being facetious? Can you explain why you feel this way.

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

#250

Post by oscargrouch »

cmircea wrote: post #186

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.

Only that steal is such a strong word for that.. i dont think digital goods can be stealed, cause steal is to subtract somebody of something.. if i get your watch without your consent, you will be without it.. thats steal..

With a digital good you can copy over and over, and never subtract the original author of its own copy..

The industry itself tried to implant this wrong concept on the peoples mind so they would think its the same.. only its not..

i think the best approach from them would be to accept that new reality in the digital age.. and try to collect money from good customers, the buyers, and try to collect from the people that have made copies of the work by stating they have obligations, and expenses to do that work, and ask for the users the support..

i think thats pretty much what microsoft did with windows.. trying to fight with a possible customer treating him as the enemy, will only hurt them in the long term..

They need to think with a new perspective, not with the same ideas as the XX century.. it will only cause them more damage than good.. people will see them as the enemy, much like we are seeing now

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