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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

#51

Post by schoen »

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…

In most DRM systems the information is distributed encrypted. The decryption keys are given to technology developers who have specifically promised to obey the DRM rules, as well as to make their technology hard for users to understand or modify so that the users can't easily undo the restrictions or extract the decryption keys.

Hence a browser developer or OS developer or developer of whatever software is in question wouldn't be permitted (by the DRM system's inventor or administrator) to get decryption keys if they didn't promise to implement these restrictions.

Some of the people who invented the modern DRM business ecology called this "the intersection of technology, law, and commercial licensing" (the title of a 1996 article by Dean Marks and Bruce Turnbull). Here, the "technology" is DRM implementations -- including software obfuscation and other measures; the "law" is anticircumvention laws like the DMCA §1201 that make it risky for people to use the decryption keys in ways that industry dislikes; and "commercial licensing" is the permission from a DRM developer to interoperate with that DRM, including "compliance" rules (about the functionality of the technology product) and "robustness" rules (about tamper-resistance), that result in the licensee being issued decryption keys.

In my view (I worked on EFF's objection) this is a deliberate attack on software interoperability: the whole point is to allow someone to try to prevent interoperability with software that hasn't been "approved". And it's also in extreme tension with the idea of having browsers that end-users can modify (their individual instances of).

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

#52

Post by dublinben »

AlexanderDhoore wrote: post #37

Can someone PLEASE explain to me the following: If my computer is playing the video and playing the audio. How on God's green earth can they stop me from capturing that? ... It's playing right in front of me... I can hear and see it. It's not hidden or secret. Look. If you ask me, the only reason DRM has worked up to now, is because code/file formats/protocols were secret. People didn't have access to the source. But…

HDCP does a 'pretty good' job of achieving that. There's a protected path all the way to the display, that can't be accessed by other software.

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

#53

Post by jrockway »

AlexanderDhoore wrote: post #22
Touche wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DRM is not in the browser. The browser just acts as a gateway to allow the website to talk to a DRM component in the OS (or potentially in hardware).

Take for example a DRM protected video. That video is being send to the framebuffer of my video card. If I use an open source OS and open source Browser, what on earth is stopping me from capturing that video output?

Absolutely nothing. DRM is pointless. Everything ever published in video form is already available to pirate.

DRM just makes lawyers happy. I say, let them eat cake.

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

#54

Post by wdewind »

marcosdumay wrote: post #40
wdewind wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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. I don't agree that this is true at all. The W3C is not created to destroy copyright, which seems to be the implication of your statement (ie: we will need a new standards body that does not provide a copyright-compliant standard). I don't agree with copyright law, but it is law. We currently have a web that provides the ability to companies to protect their data via implementation, this simply provides a spec to do it in a different way. It does not fundamentally change the user experience of the web.

2. Yes, like in the United States. Just like receiving stolen goods is a crime. No offense, but when you say things like "If you create a code for "don't read this data" to be sent over the web, disobeying it will become a crime there." I don't think you fully understand how DRM currently works and how it would work using this standard. It is simply a standard people can implement.

Edit: as some of you have pointed out, the phrase "copyright-compliant" is somewhat meaningless. I should've chosen my words more carefully. I meant "copyright-enforcement-enabling."

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

#55

Post by schoen »

balabaster wrote: post #14
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…

I'm curious how with the whole open source community how this will be at all enforceable... there's nothing stopping me releasing a browser that says "To hell with DRM, I'm just not going to enforce any of it"... and because it's open source and out there in the wild, there's not a whole hell of a lot anyone can do to shut it down...

See my comment upthread about encrypted media and how licensing is used to control the availability of decryption keys. In existing DRM people are not required to implement it, but they can't achieve interoperability without the decryption keys.

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

#57

Post by AlexanderDhoore »

dexen wrote: post #47
AlexanderDhoore wrote: post #37

Can someone PLEASE explain to me the following: If my computer is playing the video and playing the audio. How on God's green earth can they stop me from capturing that? ... It's playing right in front of me... I can hear and see it. It's not hidden or secret. Look. If you ask me, the only reason DRM has worked up to now, is because code/file formats/protocols were secret. People didn't have access to the source. But…

Ever heard of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia ? Sure you can record in the analog hole, but the playback of copies will becut or limited. Imagine a browser refuse playback video or audio clip based on Cinavia DRM plugin, and also a website requiring such plugin -- via the DRM API -- to provide any content.

From that link: "When media with the watermark is played back on a system with Cinavia detection, its firmware will detect the watermark and check that the device on which it is being played is authorized for that watermark."

So I just make a media player that ignores the watermark, based on the open source code I found in the browser... DRM hacked.

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

#58

Post by saraid216 »

wdewind wrote: post #54
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. I don't agree that this is true at all. The W3C is not created to destroy copyright, which seems to be the implication of your statement (ie: we will need a new standards body that does not provide a copyright-compliant standard). I don't agree with copyright law, but it is law. We currently have a web that provides the ability to companies to protect their data via implementation, this simply provides a spec to d…

> The W3C is not created to destroy copyright, which seems to be the implication of your statement (ie: we will need a new standards body that does not provide a copyright-compliant standard).

No, what he means is that, if we stop listening to the W3C because of this, the W3C will no longer matter. So either we won't have a standards body, or we will need a new one.

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