4 ms·

Everything that I have read suggests that this is standardizing what has already happened with video, which is a great deal better than the bad old days when co

by II2II 9y ago

Everything that I have read suggests that this is standardizing what has already happened with video, which is a great deal better than the bad old days when companies relied upon Macromedia/Adobe for video streaming. (Or worse, a plug-in from an obscure company with an unknown track record). As much as I would like to avoid DRM, relatively few producers are going to budge on the issue. The only options are standardized DRM, non-standardized extensions to provide DRM, or simply doing without. None of the options are particularly desirable. This one is likely the best of the three.

__jal 9y ago
I disagree. "Doing without" seems the most sensible to me. There is no rule that industries whose business is built on copyright need to be able to live in the browser. Netflix demonstrated that quite nicely. Just because the want it doesn't mean they should get it. I personally cripple EME on my browsers, and if your content won't display for me, I'll happily go elsewhere. (Haven't had the problem yet, but fully expect to.) It is bad enough, but unsurprising, that the closed browsers would go along with user-hostile bullshit like this. That Mozilla did, I find appalling.
- javajosh 9y ago
  Well, "doing without" is certainly the principled stand. But there is a lot of (almost certain, moderate) pleasure hiding behind one of door #1 (EME) or door #2 (torrent), and it is difficult indeed to go through door #3, (not this pleasure).
  - Simon_says 9y ago
    I fully expect torrenting to be made impossible or obscenely impractical and cumbersome inside the next couple decades. The rightsholders are too politically connected, and the general populace too apathetic and ignorant.
- metajack 9y ago
  For doing without to work, all browsers must agree to do without. As soon as one browser ships it and people prefer browsers that can stream Netflix, everyone else must follow suit or wallow in obscurity. Microsoft and Google make CDMs; no one else had a chance in this fight.
  - indigochill 9y ago
    If I follow, you're implying browsers that hypothetically refused to work with Netflix's DRM would wallow in obscurity. While probably correct since the majority of users do seem to like Netflix, others ignore Netflix and get their media through, shall we say more "obscure" sources. Such an obscure browser would seem to suit their needs just fine. Tor Browser doesn't need to be popular among the masses for those who use it to find lots of value in using it, for example.
    - kelnos 9y ago
      I think you're missing the point here: the minority of users simply do not matter. If Mozilla wants Firefox to remain a browser with large market share, it must implement standards that allow DRM. And that's what they want. They don't want to be obscure like Tor Browser. They want to be popular, and they want to have political clout and influence over standards bodies. That doesn't remove the ability of a minority of users to use something different and make use of the more "obscure" sources, but it does allow the majority of non-technical users who don't care one bit about all this to play the content they want, and in a way that protects their security much better than the old plugin-based approach.
4bpp 9y ago
The standard argument against this says that while every bug, security breach and inconvenience that arises due to the alternative (non-standardised, proprietary DRM, or no in-browser DRM at all) may individually make engineers thinking about the system from an engineering standpoint break out in hives, the discomfort will also be felt by end users and associated with DRM, therefore serving as an obstacle to its public acceptance and proliferation. As a relevant comparison, I think the current situation with the plethora of proprietary video game DRM solutions that are universally recognised to be terrible is strictly preferable to an alternative world in which video game DRM Just Works™, possibly with hardware support: in no small part thanks to it, we have a healthy amount of pressure on game studios to hold back and a market for DRM-free publishers such as GOG, and perhaps more controversially a healthy piracy ecosystem to punish the worst actors in the market.
- zdkl 9y ago
  Exactly, not all tough problems have to be solved. In this case we probably should optimise for choice rather than an elegant system!
cyphar 9y ago
> This one is likely the best of the three. I don't agree. Ignoring the massive injustice of ramming proprietary extensions into an open standard, standardising DRM has several secondary detriments to the free culture movement. In fact, standardising EME might actually be the worst of the three choices (the best being no DRM of course). Non-standard extensions are better to the movement (though still disastrous) than standardised ones, and here's why. The most serious one is that it will appear to be far more convenient. One of the man ways that we could appeal to users who didn't particularly care about their software freedom being trampled on by corporations is that the method they used to trample on their freedoms were inelegant. Your monitor would flicker (and software would break) when it went to HDCP mode, Netflix might break every once in a while, Flash websites always were incredibly buggy. Meanwhile, VLC and family always just worked. Now, EME will make this experience "more seamless" which is a huge downside because now users won't even be aware of how many of their freedoms are being taken away. The second is that now DRM is more appealing than it might've been 5 years ago. DRM isn't some horrible Flash applet that nobody understands the inner workings of, and when it breaks then you just have to deal with it. It's a standardised system around which more cabals will form. It's not something that just the AAC conspiracy operates around, it's far more accessible. If you thought that Blu-Ray was insane, you've seen nothing yet. Every Flash vulnerability was a reminder that the status quo was not acceptable. Sure, the reminder came about for the wrong reasons (it turns out the pawns behind a conspiracy aren't generally very good at conspiring), but it came nonetheless. Now that EME will presumably be secure enough, all of these secondary issues that acted as entry-points for people to learn about how badly they are being mistreated will no longer be accessible. "Who needs a copy of their data when you can just stream it with a proprietary player that probably tracks you?"
- metajack 9y ago
  It's a bit tough to argue we should keep computers insecure and hope people get annoyed and change their minds. Keeping people's computers safe is a primary goal of browser vendors, and this improves that state of affairs. Sure, DRM sucks, but at least the vendors can't root your machine and install keyloggers now.
  - 9y ago
tveita 9y ago
> relatively few producers are going to budge on the issue They would budge if they had to - what are they going to do, stop selling their only product to paying customers out of spite? But of course it doesn't cost them anything to bluff, and they are used to get their way far beyond what their importance merits.
acabal 9y ago
But the web is the one in the position of power here. Media wants badly to be on the web--it's not the web that badly wants media. Imagine if, back in the 90s, bigcorp still-image licensors like Getty or Bridgeman were able to magically foresee how big the internet was going to be. They campaign hard to include a DRM standard into the 90s web, so that nobody could right click and "save as" images from the web. After all, their bread-and-butter is licensing images. They succeed, and now it's the 90s, the web is in its infancy, and nobody can share or save images. How would have the web evolved differently, if that was the case? I think most of us would agree that this would have put a terrible stranglehold on the evolution of the web as a technology and the web as a cultural force. We're in a similar position today. Video is fairly new to the web, and bigcorp see how important a deal the web is. Instead of us making a stand and demanding the same freedom we got with images (freedom we largely received because of a combination of ignorance and benign neglect), we've caved and allowed videos to be locked away. Now we'll never see how the web could have evolved if anyone could have right click "saved as" a video.
- metajack 9y ago
  I feel like that case was true back when this fight actually mattered. These days people use native-ish apps on iPads and smart TVs and not just laptops. So I think there is less market power on the web's side than there used to be. Google and Microsoft both sell the CDMs (content decryption modules, ie, the actual DRM components used in EME), and it was certainly a benefit they touted for consumers before Firefox had an implementation as well. Now anyone who wants to make a web browser must pay to play, and the people you pay are your competitors. Even if you could write your own CDM and get it ceritifed/trusted or whatever, you'd still have to convince every DRM-using video provider to also use it in addition to the others, which is going to be a very tough sell. And of course, it may be that no one wants to license a CDM to you to start with, and now part of the web is closed off to your users.
- icebraining 9y ago
  There's no "web" vs "bigcorp". There's only bigcorp vs a motley bunch of weirdos like us, Mozilla, FSF and so. And they control 80%+ of the browser share.
d8421l01vv4r 9y ago
I, for one, am perfectly happy not giving money to companies enforcing DRM. If only 1/10 to 1/5 of the population cared (which will never happen), I'm sure we would see a major change in attitude from media companies.

by II2II 9y ago

__jal 9y ago

I disagree. "Doing without" seems the most sensible to me. There is no rule that industries whose business is built on copyright need to be able to live in the browser. Netflix demonstrated that quite nicely. Just because the want it doesn't mean they should get it. I personally cripple EME on my browsers, and if your content won't display for me, I'll happily go elsewhere. (Haven't had the problem yet, but fully expect to.) It is bad enough, but unsurprising, that the closed browsers would go along with user-hostile bullshit like this. That Mozilla did, I find appalling.

javajosh 9y ago
Well, "doing without" is certainly the principled stand. But there is a lot of (almost certain, moderate) pleasure hiding behind one of door #1 (EME) or door #2 (torrent), and it is difficult indeed to go through door #3, (not this pleasure).
- Simon_says 9y ago
  I fully expect torrenting to be made impossible or obscenely impractical and cumbersome inside the next couple decades. The rightsholders are too politically connected, and the general populace too apathetic and ignorant.
metajack 9y ago
For doing without to work, all browsers must agree to do without. As soon as one browser ships it and people prefer browsers that can stream Netflix, everyone else must follow suit or wallow in obscurity. Microsoft and Google make CDMs; no one else had a chance in this fight.
- indigochill 9y ago
  If I follow, you're implying browsers that hypothetically refused to work with Netflix's DRM would wallow in obscurity. While probably correct since the majority of users do seem to like Netflix, others ignore Netflix and get their media through, shall we say more "obscure" sources. Such an obscure browser would seem to suit their needs just fine. Tor Browser doesn't need to be popular among the masses for those who use it to find lots of value in using it, for example.
  - kelnos 9y ago
    I think you're missing the point here: the minority of users simply do not matter. If Mozilla wants Firefox to remain a browser with large market share, it must implement standards that allow DRM. And that's what they want. They don't want to be obscure like Tor Browser. They want to be popular, and they want to have political clout and influence over standards bodies. That doesn't remove the ability of a minority of users to use something different and make use of the more "obscure" sources, but it does allow the majority of non-technical users who don't care one bit about all this to play the content they want, and in a way that protects their security much better than the old plugin-based approach.

4bpp 9y ago

The standard argument against this says that while every bug, security breach and inconvenience that arises due to the alternative (non-standardised, proprietary DRM, or no in-browser DRM at all) may individually make engineers thinking about the system from an engineering standpoint break out in hives, the discomfort will also be felt by end users and associated with DRM, therefore serving as an obstacle to its public acceptance and proliferation. As a relevant comparison, I think the current situation with the plethora of proprietary video game DRM solutions that are universally recognised to be terrible is strictly preferable to an alternative world in which video game DRM Just Works™, possibly with hardware support: in no small part thanks to it, we have a healthy amount of pressure on game studios to hold back and a market for DRM-free publishers such as GOG, and perhaps more controversially a healthy piracy ecosystem to punish the worst actors in the market.

zdkl 9y ago
Exactly, not all tough problems have to be solved. In this case we probably should optimise for choice rather than an elegant system!

cyphar 9y ago

> This one is likely the best of the three. I don't agree. Ignoring the massive injustice of ramming proprietary extensions into an open standard, standardising DRM has several secondary detriments to the free culture movement. In fact, standardising EME might actually be the worst of the three choices (the best being no DRM of course). Non-standard extensions are better to the movement (though still disastrous) than standardised ones, and here's why. The most serious one is that it will appear to be far more convenient. One of the man ways that we could appeal to users who didn't particularly care about their software freedom being trampled on by corporations is that the method they used to trample on their freedoms were inelegant. Your monitor would flicker (and software would break) when it went to HDCP mode, Netflix might break every once in a while, Flash websites always were incredibly buggy. Meanwhile, VLC and family always just worked. Now, EME will make this experience "more seamless" which is a huge downside because now users won't even be aware of how many of their freedoms are being taken away. The second is that now DRM is more appealing than it might've been 5 years ago. DRM isn't some horrible Flash applet that nobody understands the inner workings of, and when it breaks then you just have to deal with it. It's a standardised system around which more cabals will form. It's not something that just the AAC conspiracy operates around, it's far more accessible. If you thought that Blu-Ray was insane, you've seen nothing yet. Every Flash vulnerability was a reminder that the status quo was not acceptable. Sure, the reminder came about for the wrong reasons (it turns out the pawns behind a conspiracy aren't generally very good at conspiring), but it came nonetheless. Now that EME will presumably be secure enough, all of these secondary issues that acted as entry-points for people to learn about how badly they are being mistreated will no longer be accessible. "Who needs a copy of their data when you can just stream it with a proprietary player that probably tracks you?"

metajack 9y ago
It's a bit tough to argue we should keep computers insecure and hope people get annoyed and change their minds. Keeping people's computers safe is a primary goal of browser vendors, and this improves that state of affairs. Sure, DRM sucks, but at least the vendors can't root your machine and install keyloggers now.
- 9y ago

tveita 9y ago

> relatively few producers are going to budge on the issue They would budge if they had to - what are they going to do, stop selling their only product to paying customers out of spite? But of course it doesn't cost them anything to bluff, and they are used to get their way far beyond what their importance merits.

acabal 9y ago

But the web is the one in the position of power here. Media wants badly to be on the web--it's not the web that badly wants media. Imagine if, back in the 90s, bigcorp still-image licensors like Getty or Bridgeman were able to magically foresee how big the internet was going to be. They campaign hard to include a DRM standard into the 90s web, so that nobody could right click and "save as" images from the web. After all, their bread-and-butter is licensing images. They succeed, and now it's the 90s, the web is in its infancy, and nobody can share or save images. How would have the web evolved differently, if that was the case? I think most of us would agree that this would have put a terrible stranglehold on the evolution of the web as a technology and the web as a cultural force. We're in a similar position today. Video is fairly new to the web, and bigcorp see how important a deal the web is. Instead of us making a stand and demanding the same freedom we got with images (freedom we largely received because of a combination of ignorance and benign neglect), we've caved and allowed videos to be locked away. Now we'll never see how the web could have evolved if anyone could have right click "saved as" a video.

metajack 9y ago
I feel like that case was true back when this fight actually mattered. These days people use native-ish apps on iPads and smart TVs and not just laptops. So I think there is less market power on the web's side than there used to be. Google and Microsoft both sell the CDMs (content decryption modules, ie, the actual DRM components used in EME), and it was certainly a benefit they touted for consumers before Firefox had an implementation as well. Now anyone who wants to make a web browser must pay to play, and the people you pay are your competitors. Even if you could write your own CDM and get it ceritifed/trusted or whatever, you'd still have to convince every DRM-using video provider to also use it in addition to the others, which is going to be a very tough sell. And of course, it may be that no one wants to license a CDM to you to start with, and now part of the web is closed off to your users.
icebraining 9y ago
There's no "web" vs "bigcorp". There's only bigcorp vs a motley bunch of weirdos like us, Mozilla, FSF and so. And they control 80%+ of the browser share.

d8421l01vv4r 9y ago

I, for one, am perfectly happy not giving money to companies enforcing DRM. If only 1/10 to 1/5 of the population cared (which will never happen), I'm sure we would see a major change in attitude from media companies.