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

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

#311

Post by parasubvert » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 3:16 PM UTC

Supermighty wrote: post #6

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…

What is the WHATWG's position on this? They represent the browser makers. If they support DRM then it's game over. Another break-away standards group won't be able to do anything to sway the browser makers. What could they do?

Seemingly, the WHATWG is against this. But there's a big difference between individuals on a mailing list and broader corporate interests.

It's a tragic comedy that everyone's yelling at the W3C for losing their way yet again... the WHATWG, weren't they great. Yet the WHATWG is basically a proxy for Google, Apple and Microsoft. And they have driven the W3C agenda for a long while.

When you repeatedly shit on the hippies, academics, and non-browser makers that had more sway in the past at the W3C, and replace them by corporate browser makers, you weaken the antibodies that were in place. The WHATWG's presence has marginalizing other voices within the W3C and forced it to listen to its primary members - i.e. corporate, pay-to-play ones.

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

#312

Post by burntsushi » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 3:25 PM UTC

dublinben wrote: post #290

wdewind wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, I'm conflating the two. I mean to be saying intellectual property law in general, which I am not a huge fan of.

If you're against "intellectual property" then you shouldn't use that propaganda term. Refer to the specific legal protections at issue, like copyright, patents, or trademarks, because they are all have very different functions and purposes. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

Copyrights, patents and trademarks all share a single unifying assumption: ideas are things that can be owned. Since I disagree with that assumption, it makes sense to speak about "disagreeing with intellectual property" if IP is just a synonym for "a legal framework that uses violence to support laws that allow ideas to be owned."

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

#313

Post by nitrogen » Sat, Oct 05, 2013, 10:44 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #282

camus wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TCP/IP is an open standard, DRM are not.

Your statement is as wrong technically as stating that encryption cannot be open source. What matters are the keys, not the code.

The purpose of encryption is to secure communications between two trusted endpoints against untrusted intermediaries. Since all parties to the exchange are trusted and the intent is for both parties to have access to the data, an open source encryption system works.

DRM's purpose is similar, but one of the endpoints is in the physical control of an untrusted entity: you. Since the point of DRM is to prevent the user at one of the endpoints from accessing the data, if you have the source and keys to the destination endpoint (e.g. TPM, HDCP-enabled GPU), the endpoint can't be trusted, you can get the data, and the DRM fails at its purpose.

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

#314

Post by cbhl » Mon, Oct 07, 2013, 8:26 PM UTC

lambda wrote: post #214

cbhl wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 stand…

First of all, I think you have gotten P3P confused with EME (or whatever the new term is). P3P, the "platform for privacy protection" was just one of my examples of previous useless stuff the W3C has worked on (it was basically a schema for describing a website's privacy policy, with dubious advantages over simply linking to a privacy policy in the footer). Second, none of the proposals for EME that I've seen actuall…

Yes, I typed the acronym wrong; that's what I get for writing HN comments in the middle of the night.

I agree with the rest of what you've said, but I don't think the typical end-user worries about "openness" until it's too late.