Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME

that plan was canceled.

Netflix is considered the main driver behind this DRM madness. In the context of Netflix, an often voiced reason for DRM is the fact that it rents movies, rather than sells them. Besides DRM being completely ineffective to prevent piracy, the concept of rentals itself doesn't make any sense for digital goods.

The core logic behind a rental (for physical goods) is reusability. Physical goods have a fixed cost of production per copy, so the price of selling it should cover that cost. Renting is expected to be cheaper than buying, because the object is returned to the renter which allows reusing it for new clients without expenses on another physical copy. I.e. most of the price in the rental case goes for the service of using it, and not for covering the cost of production.

With digital goods this whole premise doesn't apply. There is practically zero cost of producing another copy, so reusability is implicitly achieved with practically no expense by copying bits. And it also means there is no need to return the merchandise so it could be reused by others, since the merchant easily duplicates the merchandise practically for free. Therefore why would renting cost any different than buying? The whole concept of renting is illogical for digital goods. Therefore user can buy the digital merchandise for a (lower) price as paralleled by physical renting, while still retaining the ownership.

Netflix proponents claim, that they are charged per month to access anything, so in such context renting makes sense. But it still doesn't. They are charged for the service to stream the data. I.e. for convenience. It's cheap not because they need to return the merchandise so others could reuse it (as above). It's just cheap as is. There is completely no need to prevent users from retaining a copy once they watched it (i.e. which means buying). In order to it put in practical perspective, Netflix can be achieved without any DRM by selling each copy for some small price or / and charging a monthly fee for a convenience of streaming that data from the cloud while users could also keep those downloaded DRM-free copies all they want. I'd totally subscribe to such service. But I'd never subscribe to Netflix the way it is now because of DRM.

Leaving DRM to Flash and external plugins is preferable to injecting it into the standard. It makes a clear delineation between broken and improper / insecure tools and proper way forward. I.e. DRM is insecure and unethical by design. Let it stay outside.

Claiming that rentals don't make sense in the digital age is focusing far too heavily on the technical fact of how digital data works, and completely ignoring the legality of things, including intellectual property.

If I make a movie and sell you a DVD, the terms of the sale prohibit you from, say, showing this movie in a theater to a bunch of strangers and charging them money. Yes, you own the physical DVD, but you don't own the intellectual property of the movie itself. This holds true for physical copies, and it holds true for digital distribution as well. You are purchasing the right to personal use of the movie (i.e. viewing), and that's it.

If you want to e.g. show it in a theater (whether or not you're charging admission), you have to purchase that right separately. And that costs a lot more.

In the case of rentals, the company that is doing the rentals pays for the privilege of renting out the movie, and the cost they pay is predicated on concurrent access to the movie being limited.

When it comes to digital rentals, limiting concurrent access to the digital movie file doesn't make sense. Users who rent things digitally expect there to be no wait. But in turn, they're only given access for a limited time. For iTunes, that's 30 days since you paid for the rental, and then only 24 hours since you started actually watching it. You can't rent a movie on iTunes and watch it every day for a month, because you don't have that legal right. You must pay for that privilege, which is to say, you must buy the digital movie.

For Netflix, the limited access to the movie is gated by you having an active Netflix subscription. The moment you stop paying for Netflix, you no longer have access to the movie. This again makes perfect sense, since you're paying Netflix for the right to access all of their streaming movies for the duration of your active membership. You are not paying for completely unrestricted access.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of digital content, the only way to actually enforce these legal restrictions is by use of DRM. It sucks, but it's a fact of life. This is true for rentals, and it's generally true for purchases as well.