8 ms·

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 conte

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 leverage on rights holders. If the streaming technology isn't available, then the studios will simply choose not to stream it, and whoever builds it first will have a huge market advantage. Fighting EME not only is ineffectual, it harms open web standards by giving legs to completely proprietary solutions like Flash and Silverlight. The bottom line is that EME is a cleaner solution which compromises in a way that will make open standards more relevant going forward rather than taking an ideological position that will undermine the utility of open standards in the marketplace. Instead of attempting to fight a self-harming losing battle, I wish the EFF would focus on the real problem which is the DMCA's overreach. Studios should feel free to build whatever DRM schemes they want, just like the people should be free to circumvent those measures for content they have legally purchased. Copyright law is sufficient to balance individual and studios' rights across a diversity of scenarios with getting a technical quagmire that benefits no one.

jflatow 11y ago
I think I agree with you, but the EFF raises some good questions. If content producers have this kind of control, how do you ever create a new browser? And can users really choose their browser if the major publishers have that much control? In other words, if I want to create a new browser, I then have to convince every single publisher whose content I want to display that they should add me to some list of approved providers. This does seem like it's just going to reenforce any initial power dynamics. I'm not sure what a better solution is though.
- takeda 11y ago
  I believe this is also reason why Google, Microsoft, Netflix all support EME. It essentially makes it harder for new competitors to emerge.
  - jflatow 11y ago
    That would be consistent, and relates to the main question I have: Why does the CDM need to be a blackbox? Couldn't the decryption be standardized with all proprietary information boiling down to secret license keys?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - zanny 11y ago
      The CDM depends on whole-pipe proprietary implementation. You cannot implement, say, a video decoding library that is both open source and prevents the user from rerouting the video output away from HDCP HDMI sinks.
    - nialv7 11y ago
      Because what they want to achieve is fundamentally impossible, and have to be done in a security-through-obscurity way.
      - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
        > Because what they want to achieve is fundamentally impossible, and have to be done in a security-through-obscurity way. Which clearly cannot both be true at the same time. It isn't that it's impossible but there is actually some way to do it. It's just regular unadulterated impossible. So why not give up the charade and publish the source code to the DRM? That can't cause it to be ineffective because it's already ineffective. It's not even a fig leaf, it's just security theater.
        thomasz 11y ago
        > Which clearly cannot both be true at the same time. They meant that all they can do is delay the inevitable for some time by security-through-obscurity. And yes, the IP holders are perfectly aware of that, but preventing piracy even for a few weeks after release can have a measurable impact on their profits.
azakai 11y ago
> The EFF greatly overestimates the amount of influence browser makers have. And you greatly underestimate it. Look at the history of DRM in music.
- nine_k 11y ago
  Apple made highly successful hardware, players named iPods. Apple effectively controlled what most users put on these players. The music industry had to consider it. And getting rid of DRM there took many years.
throwaway2048 11y ago
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.
- dasil003 11y ago
  Yes, having spent the last decade founding and building a premium content streaming service I am well aware of what EME is and how the CDMs work. It is infinitely preferable to a proprietary plugin.
  - throwaway2048 11y ago
    How? It is totally inoperable without a proprietary plugin backing it up.
    - dasil003 11y ago
      Because everything else happening on the page is still regular web stuff, not encapsulated in a proprietary plugin like Flash. Essentially much smaller surface area of proprietary stuff, and because each browser only implements one CDM and they are responsible for the integration it doesn't break as much the way that Flash increasingly did over time.
      - pdkl95 11y ago
        If I go to a page with a video on it that uses flash, the rest of the page works just fine if I don't have the flash plugin installed. This is identical behavior to not having the CDM. If the rest of the page also uses flash, that's entirely separate. It is even possible that the rest of the page could be flash, while playing a video with either the native <video> tag or through a CDM. Integration between the video and the rest of the page is going to break without {video tag support with the necessary codec,flash,EME support with the necessary CDM}. Again, there is no difference. You're trying to pretend that there is somehow a more usable page with EME+CDM over flash, when most of the time the video was the goal. > having spent the last decade founding and building a premium content streaming service You're fighting against the General Purpose Computer. Sorry, you don't get to run code on my computer without my approval. You don't get to turn my General Purpose Computer into an appliance. If you care at all about preserving any control over your own General Purpose Computers, stop. You've already spent a decade building the seeds of technology that lock down the web. Now John Deere has used the same ideas to take away property rights. You are adding difficulties to legitimate users while the pirates ignore your CDM and go straight to torrents/etc. Was the delusion that you're protecting anything worth these costs?
severine 11y ago
What's the endgame? Free OSes "banned" from the "open web"?
- Freak_NL 11y ago
  Not from the open web, but excluded from participating in parts of the web economy and content. I am under the impression that the big content owners have renewed faith in winning the battles on the two fronts that matter to them: enforcing end-to-end controlled digital channels, from service to the consumer's own computer (DRM), and preventing the alternative of piracy. They have learned that piracy cannot effectively be prevented by technical means, but that no longer matters if you can scare the vast majority of consumers with lawsuits and out of court settlements. This is now happening in a lot of economically strong countries.
- ejlo 11y ago
  I think this poses a real threat to the open web itself. First we have DRM video and soon after music. Next the game industry wants to protect their source code. And app developers. After that come images. A lot of companies would love to display their pictures but keep them from being "stolen". And, at last, normal text will also be DRM'd and the open web is history.
stcredzero 11y ago
Instead of attempting to fight a self-harming losing battle, I wish the EFF would focus on the real problem which is the DMCA's overreach. I have heard that this is too high a hurdle. Why is that?
- falcolas 11y ago
  Because, for all of its sins, the DMCA provides one very crucial piece of legislation, without which the web as we know it would crumble: Safe Harbor. Without the Safe Harbor, people wouldn't be getting takedown notices or content ID - sites like YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News, comment boards, blogs... all would have been sued into oblivion years ago, as they would have been held liable for the content uploaded by their users. Fixing the DMCA, then, requires a precise modification of the law, not just a straight up repeal - and getting that done without loosing ground in other areas would be a tough job for any lobby or politician.
dTal 11y ago
>Fighting EME not only is ineffectual, it harms open web standards by giving legs to completely proprietary solutions like Flash and Silverlight. The bottom line is that EME is a cleaner solution which compromises in a way that will make open standards more relevant going forward rather than taking an ideological position that will undermine the utility of open standards in the marketplace. Counterpoint: Flash and Silverlight, being "unclean solutions", are fundamentally hampered - the market split, and "HTML5" won (for now). The mere existence of a widely-accepted "clean solution" could easily do more harm than good.
spacelizard 11y ago
>DRM will be built because the content studios demand it, and the studios hold the content which everyone wants Why do you believe the copyright holders (or the browser makers) are the ones who potentially hold absolute power in this scenario, rather than the users? Any DRM is an unsustainable system, EME is not going to change this. I also have strong doubts that EME will do anything to push the so-called "content industry" towards better sustainability as you suggest it will. There is still zero incentive for any knowledgeable user to buy into it. If anything it will just make the system more complicated because of the proliferation of even more competing, incompatible DRM systems that only work on certain devices with very specific configuration requirements. I agree that some of the ridiculousness in the DMCA is part of the problem, but this isn't going to be solved by building more walled gardens, it's going to be solved by thinking about how it can actually benefit the user in the long run.
- kangar00 11y ago
  > Any DRM is an unsustainable system Agreed. Every implementation of DRM has been or will be broken eventually, and can keep people out of something that wasn't intended to be always locked. Putting DRM on software and music is like building shitty locks into every book in the library or single in the record store. It doesn't make sense.
zanny 11y ago
> The EFF greatly overestimates the amount of influence browser makers have. The only reason the MAFIAA is lobbying the W3C and bribing Microsoft / Google / et al to support their backwards DRM is because the web has leverage over them. There would have been no market for this if there was not publisher demand for baked-in proprietary DRM at the browser level, because they knew they were constantly losing revenue depending on broken flash / silverlight plugins. If these companies had not caved to their demands, they would have had to accept gradual obsolescence since the web would have been wholly incompatible with their outdated business model. Because, up until this point, the web has been demonstrably more important to people than access to traditional big media IP, because they were losing revenue and market share.
rpgmaker 11y ago
> No amount of technical pressure will make an ounce of difference, because browser makers have literally no leverage on rights holders. I That's completely false. What would rights holders do if no browser supported their DRM extension? Stop streaming altogether? Browser makers just didn't want this fight because most of them have online streaming ventures of their own.
Bombthecat 11y ago
Exactly, I think you can't win versus a drm movement. The only thing you can do is make the thing as open, public, regulated and planned as possible. But I think they will try to block it, because, reasons. And then we will end with an implementation for chrome, ie, opera and a plug-in for Firefox...
literallynone 10y ago
"browser makers have literally no leverage on rights holders." Yes they do. They could implement a torrent client directly in the browser, and add a few torrent search engines to the standard search engines, so that searching and streaming a torrent becomes as easy as searching and streaming a youtube video.

jflatow 11y ago

I think I agree with you, but the EFF raises some good questions. If content producers have this kind of control, how do you ever create a new browser? And can users really choose their browser if the major publishers have that much control? In other words, if I want to create a new browser, I then have to convince every single publisher whose content I want to display that they should add me to some list of approved providers. This does seem like it's just going to reenforce any initial power dynamics. I'm not sure what a better solution is though.

takeda 11y ago
I believe this is also reason why Google, Microsoft, Netflix all support EME. It essentially makes it harder for new competitors to emerge.
- jflatow 11y ago
  That would be consistent, and relates to the main question I have: Why does the CDM need to be a blackbox? Couldn't the decryption be standardized with all proprietary information boiling down to secret license keys?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - zanny 11y ago
    The CDM depends on whole-pipe proprietary implementation. You cannot implement, say, a video decoding library that is both open source and prevents the user from rerouting the video output away from HDCP HDMI sinks.
  - nialv7 11y ago
    Because what they want to achieve is fundamentally impossible, and have to be done in a security-through-obscurity way.
    - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
      > Because what they want to achieve is fundamentally impossible, and have to be done in a security-through-obscurity way. Which clearly cannot both be true at the same time. It isn't that it's impossible but there is actually some way to do it. It's just regular unadulterated impossible. So why not give up the charade and publish the source code to the DRM? That can't cause it to be ineffective because it's already ineffective. It's not even a fig leaf, it's just security theater.
      - thomasz 11y ago
        > Which clearly cannot both be true at the same time. They meant that all they can do is delay the inevitable for some time by security-through-obscurity. And yes, the IP holders are perfectly aware of that, but preventing piracy even for a few weeks after release can have a measurable impact on their profits.

azakai 11y ago

> The EFF greatly overestimates the amount of influence browser makers have. And you greatly underestimate it. Look at the history of DRM in music.

nine_k 11y ago
Apple made highly successful hardware, players named iPods. Apple effectively controlled what most users put on these players. The music industry had to consider it. And getting rid of DRM there took many years.

throwaway2048 11y ago

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.

dasil003 11y ago
Yes, having spent the last decade founding and building a premium content streaming service I am well aware of what EME is and how the CDMs work. It is infinitely preferable to a proprietary plugin.
- throwaway2048 11y ago
  How? It is totally inoperable without a proprietary plugin backing it up.
  - dasil003 11y ago
    Because everything else happening on the page is still regular web stuff, not encapsulated in a proprietary plugin like Flash. Essentially much smaller surface area of proprietary stuff, and because each browser only implements one CDM and they are responsible for the integration it doesn't break as much the way that Flash increasingly did over time.
    - pdkl95 11y ago
      If I go to a page with a video on it that uses flash, the rest of the page works just fine if I don't have the flash plugin installed. This is identical behavior to not having the CDM. If the rest of the page also uses flash, that's entirely separate. It is even possible that the rest of the page could be flash, while playing a video with either the native <video> tag or through a CDM. Integration between the video and the rest of the page is going to break without {video tag support with the necessary codec,flash,EME support with the necessary CDM}. Again, there is no difference. You're trying to pretend that there is somehow a more usable page with EME+CDM over flash, when most of the time the video was the goal. > having spent the last decade founding and building a premium content streaming service You're fighting against the General Purpose Computer. Sorry, you don't get to run code on my computer without my approval. You don't get to turn my General Purpose Computer into an appliance. If you care at all about preserving any control over your own General Purpose Computers, stop. You've already spent a decade building the seeds of technology that lock down the web. Now John Deere has used the same ideas to take away property rights. You are adding difficulties to legitimate users while the pirates ignore your CDM and go straight to torrents/etc. Was the delusion that you're protecting anything worth these costs?

severine 11y ago

What's the endgame? Free OSes "banned" from the "open web"?

Freak_NL 11y ago
Not from the open web, but excluded from participating in parts of the web economy and content. I am under the impression that the big content owners have renewed faith in winning the battles on the two fronts that matter to them: enforcing end-to-end controlled digital channels, from service to the consumer's own computer (DRM), and preventing the alternative of piracy. They have learned that piracy cannot effectively be prevented by technical means, but that no longer matters if you can scare the vast majority of consumers with lawsuits and out of court settlements. This is now happening in a lot of economically strong countries.
ejlo 11y ago
I think this poses a real threat to the open web itself. First we have DRM video and soon after music. Next the game industry wants to protect their source code. And app developers. After that come images. A lot of companies would love to display their pictures but keep them from being "stolen". And, at last, normal text will also be DRM'd and the open web is history.

stcredzero 11y ago

Instead of attempting to fight a self-harming losing battle, I wish the EFF would focus on the real problem which is the DMCA's overreach. I have heard that this is too high a hurdle. Why is that?

falcolas 11y ago
Because, for all of its sins, the DMCA provides one very crucial piece of legislation, without which the web as we know it would crumble: Safe Harbor. Without the Safe Harbor, people wouldn't be getting takedown notices or content ID - sites like YouTube, Reddit, Hacker News, comment boards, blogs... all would have been sued into oblivion years ago, as they would have been held liable for the content uploaded by their users. Fixing the DMCA, then, requires a precise modification of the law, not just a straight up repeal - and getting that done without loosing ground in other areas would be a tough job for any lobby or politician.

dTal 11y ago

>Fighting EME not only is ineffectual, it harms open web standards by giving legs to completely proprietary solutions like Flash and Silverlight. The bottom line is that EME is a cleaner solution which compromises in a way that will make open standards more relevant going forward rather than taking an ideological position that will undermine the utility of open standards in the marketplace. Counterpoint: Flash and Silverlight, being "unclean solutions", are fundamentally hampered - the market split, and "HTML5" won (for now). The mere existence of a widely-accepted "clean solution" could easily do more harm than good.

spacelizard 11y ago

>DRM will be built because the content studios demand it, and the studios hold the content which everyone wants Why do you believe the copyright holders (or the browser makers) are the ones who potentially hold absolute power in this scenario, rather than the users? Any DRM is an unsustainable system, EME is not going to change this. I also have strong doubts that EME will do anything to push the so-called "content industry" towards better sustainability as you suggest it will. There is still zero incentive for any knowledgeable user to buy into it. If anything it will just make the system more complicated because of the proliferation of even more competing, incompatible DRM systems that only work on certain devices with very specific configuration requirements. I agree that some of the ridiculousness in the DMCA is part of the problem, but this isn't going to be solved by building more walled gardens, it's going to be solved by thinking about how it can actually benefit the user in the long run.

kangar00 11y ago
> Any DRM is an unsustainable system Agreed. Every implementation of DRM has been or will be broken eventually, and can keep people out of something that wasn't intended to be always locked. Putting DRM on software and music is like building shitty locks into every book in the library or single in the record store. It doesn't make sense.

zanny 11y ago

> The EFF greatly overestimates the amount of influence browser makers have. The only reason the MAFIAA is lobbying the W3C and bribing Microsoft / Google / et al to support their backwards DRM is because the web has leverage over them. There would have been no market for this if there was not publisher demand for baked-in proprietary DRM at the browser level, because they knew they were constantly losing revenue depending on broken flash / silverlight plugins. If these companies had not caved to their demands, they would have had to accept gradual obsolescence since the web would have been wholly incompatible with their outdated business model. Because, up until this point, the web has been demonstrably more important to people than access to traditional big media IP, because they were losing revenue and market share.

rpgmaker 11y ago

> No amount of technical pressure will make an ounce of difference, because browser makers have literally no leverage on rights holders. I That's completely false. What would rights holders do if no browser supported their DRM extension? Stop streaming altogether? Browser makers just didn't want this fight because most of them have online streaming ventures of their own.

Bombthecat 11y ago

Exactly, I think you can't win versus a drm movement. The only thing you can do is make the thing as open, public, regulated and planned as possible. But I think they will try to block it, because, reasons. And then we will end with an implementation for chrome, ie, opera and a plug-in for Firefox...

literallynone 10y ago

"browser makers have literally no leverage on rights holders." Yes they do. They could implement a torrent client directly in the browser, and add a few torrent search engines to the standard search engines, so that searching and streaming a torrent becomes as easy as searching and streaming a youtube video.