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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

#91

Post by yk »

dublinben wrote: post #52
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.

Pretty good job, until the key was leaked. [0][1]

[0] http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/14/hdcp-master-key-supposedl... [1] Key: http://pastebin.com/kCA3dFDv

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

#93

Post by aaronbrethorst »

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…

    If I had my way we wouldn't have copyright
    at all. It seems idiotic to me for the same
    reasons patents are.
Excellent news! So it's ok if I copy the images, CSS and HTML on your landing page for your employer for my competitor, then?

Edit: I'm obviously not serious.

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

#94

Post by epsylon »

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…

The thing is most Firefox users don't even know what an extension is. If my parents' Firefox ships with support for DRMs, they won't care about it. Once it becomes widespread, there's simply no way to start "un-supporting it".

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

#96

Post by gavinlynch »

wdewind wrote: post #63
saraid216 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And why would we stop listening to the W3C because of this?

Exactly. There are countless standards issued by the W3C that are completely ignored by Browser Vendors at large. Yet it's still the most relevant consortium on the matter.

Conversely, there are countless features introduced by Browser Vendors that do not exist in the W3C's specs. (And some of those are even eventually picked up by the W3c.)

I honestly don't think people understand how the Standards Body's work, and how their specs propagate into actual products that people use on a daily basis.

Many companies have cherry-picked what to implement and what not to. This is not new. If anything, it's the norm. Vendors will continue to do this as long as the W3C will exist, and can continue to do so in this case, without destroying the W3C or making it an invalid body.

This particular argument is totally bunk.

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

#97

Post by biturd »

isnt this the equivalent of greying out the "view source" menu item or removing the developer menu item?

You can still get the entire page, it comes in over the wire. If they do this, I would assume we can just capture the raw data, and new apps that decode that raw data and give the same tools as the browser developer tools offer.

If not, hopefully there are browsers who refuse to implement, and hopefully it takes less time than it took Adobe to learn their lesson.

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

#98

Post by cheald »

stackcollision wrote: post #4

I don't see it taking too long for someone to make an open source DRM-free browser that just ignores the HTML 5 DRM functionality.

Read the spec. This wouldn't work, specifically because EME is a set of interfaces to proprietary blobs which do the actual content decryption and optional rendering.

Building a browser that ignores EME would be functionally equivalent to building a browser that can't use Flash.

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

#99

Post by thrillgore »

hayksaakian wrote: post #66
dublinben wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you want DRM, you use a plug-in or a separate application. There's no reason that an app like Netflix or whatever can't use pure-HTML for everything but the video-stream and use a plug-in based object for the stream. That's exactly what this standard would allow.

That's how it is now without a standard. We don't need a standard for stupid anti-UX features like built in DRM

And I seriously doubt with EME that it will change this way. I work for a media company, Flash is used not just for its DRM but because our ad vendors don't care about HTML5 support. It's why we can't move forward with HTML5 outside of mobile.
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