Isn't it trivial to reverse engineer the DRM module to create its clean room open source implementation thus effectively deprecating it?
Save Firefox
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Re: Save Firefox
#52The biggest problem is intellectual property. Copyright lasts life + 70 years and patents last 20 years. That's a long time to have a legal monopoly on something, and is partly why companies are so big and can behave so badly.
Innovation comes through competition, not monopoly. Ideally, we'd eliminate patents and copyrights altogether, but as a compromise, I think having terms of 3 years, with no renewals, is fair. That way a business can capitalize on what it creates and get a 3 year head start on competition, but you still get competition fairly soon which benefits consumers.
Re: Save Firefox
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is that to consume any particular piece of content, the publisher decides which CDM is appropriate, which effectively lets them decide who (which browser) can consume their content.
In the assumption I'm describing, it's irrelevant which CDM a publisher chooses. The reason being that the CDM must operate via EME, an open standard that can be implemented by any browser. Therefore, CDMs are inherently browser agnostic just like NPAPI plugins. Is it really true that CDMs are actually browser-specific or are able to enforce a browser whitelist? If so, that is horrific.
Exactly. As far as I knew, EME was the solution to the problem they were talking about.
A standard way to allow anyone to run one of those CDMs and removing the publishers as the gatekeepers.
Re: Save Firefox
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is that to consume any particular piece of content, the publisher decides which CDM is appropriate, which effectively lets them decide who (which browser) can consume their content.
In the assumption I'm describing, it's irrelevant which CDM a publisher chooses. The reason being that the CDM must operate via EME, an open standard that can be implemented by any browser. Therefore, CDMs are inherently browser agnostic just like NPAPI plugins. Is it really true that CDMs are actually browser-specific or are able to enforce a browser whitelist? If so, that is horrific.
I'm afraid I don't know the history of it well enough to give a good answer, but IIUC what the EFF is claiming here is that CDMs are (potentially proprietary) blackboxes and that EME treats them as such. Therefore, publishers are able to decide which browsers are even allowed to use the CDM which they designate.
As far as CDMs being blackboxes in the standard - you can verify that yourself: https://w3c.github.io/encrypted-media/
It would be good to have an EFF expert explain some of the nuance here though.
Re: Save Firefox
#55Honestly, I'm not against online/streaming content being protected with DRM. I don't think it's very effective but it doesn't effect me as I don't own the content so I don't really care. This seems to be a step to far though. The browser should be a standards based 'viewer' that anyone with the will and the time can create. Let's say Netflix implements this DRM. They account for more than a third of internet traffic.…
But the idea with EME was to create a standard interface to those CDMs. That way the entertainment companies can't be gatekeepers, as the CDM will work in any browser that implements EME, even your own that you made from scratch.
Re: Save Firefox
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Browsers want to get rid of Flash and other plugins. Netflix was the largest site using Flash. Netflix distributes content, and the content owners aren't willing to have their content distributed. I don't disagree with what you say, but it's possible to see EME as a pragmatic inevitability, assuming that browsers want to get rid of plugins (which seems like a good change) and assuming that content owners demand DRM (…
> Netflix was the largest site using Flash. Netflix didn't use Flash; it used Silverlight. > don't disagree with what you say, but it's possible to see EME as a pragmatic inevitability, assuming that browsers want to get rid of plugins Or browsers could just collectively get rid of plugins, and the media industry could whine ineffectually at the lack of DRM. They're not going to build their own browser, and people wo…
They 100% would "build their own browser" in the form of custom apps.
Hell they already do on just about every platform except desktop...
Re: Save Firefox
#57Honestly, I'm not against online/streaming content being protected with DRM. I don't think it's very effective but it doesn't effect me as I don't own the content so I don't really care. This seems to be a step to far though. The browser should be a standards based 'viewer' that anyone with the will and the time can create. Let's say Netflix implements this DRM. They account for more than a third of internet traffic.…
But the idea with EME was to create a standard interface to those CDMs. That way the entertainment companies can't be gatekeepers, as the CDM will work in any browser that implements EME, even your own that you made from scratch.
I'm not 100% clear on the technical side of this but according to the article, in order to implement the 'standard' you require permission from the entertainment companies as they control the CDM. So they're the gatekeepers. Is this incorrect?
Re: Save Firefox
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> something that DRM isn't preventing you from doing something you're otherwise not supposed to be doing anyways. And what would that be?
Recording it. It's a stream, you're paying $company for the rights to access content over the wire. Recording that isn't a right, legal or moral.
I was under the impression that you are generally allowed to record content for your own personal use, as long as you don't distribute it to others.
Re: Save Firefox
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am a little confused by this comment. What status quo? Silverlight is deprecated. Flash is (at least seems to me) taking its final breaths. HTML5 pushed many web native standards for open media: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/HTML/Usin... . In fact, the HTML5 video/audio was so open that YouTube had to kill a Chrome extension that allowed users to use YouTube as a music source without advertisem…
The status quo is this: If I build a browser right now from scratch, it can't play Netflix videos.
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Re: Save Firefox
#60> [The W3C] needs to hear from you now. Please share this post, and spread the word. Help the W3C be the organization it is meant to be. This isn't about the W3C. This is about EME, and about the companies that created it and promoted it: Google, Microsoft and Netflix (as you can see on the spec, for example https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/ ). Telling the W3C not to do DRM is not going to be effective. The only…
Your last sentence is exactly right. Sure DRM is bad, but you can't tell people not to build things a priori like that, and DRM will be built because the content studios demand it, and the studios hold the content which everyone wants. The EFF greatly overestimates the amount of influence browser makers have. No amount of technical pressure will make an ounce of difference, because browser makers have literally no le…
EME is not even a complete standard, its basically just a shim to bridge in a closed source DRM module that can do arbitrary things on the host platform, and needs specific DRM module support from providers. You cant just target EME as Netflix, or some other streaming site, you have to target Google Widevine, or Apple Fairplay etc.
Implementing EME in no way enables you to use these DRM technologies, so its a 100% worthless "standard".
The DRM/CDM modules are not browser agnostic either, and the browser CDM api is entirely unspecified.