8 ms·

Do you have any evidence or reason to believe there is actual corruption on the committee (aside from them making a decision you disagree with)? I suspect I ag

Do you have any evidence or reason to believe there is actual corruption on the committee (aside from them making a decision you disagree with)? I suspect I agree with you on DRM but this style of debate, where there is no attempt to argue or explain the issue, and the first line of argument is personal attacks or denigrating anyone with an opposing viewpoint, is depressing. Consider that accusing climate scientists of corruption has also been fairly effective. For this particular issue, Netflix etc already requires DRM to play in a browser, and the browsers already provide DRM for Netflix etc to use. I would like to understand what the consequences of this decision are, if some of the way this works is standardized. Will this lead to more DRM? Is the only conceivable explanation that the MPAA is slipping the W3C members some bribes?

burkaman 9y ago
The parent comment is not the first line of argument, it's the continuation of a years-long argument. Even if you completely ignore the history, the first line of argument is found in the article, not the comments. If you would like to understand the fundamentals of this debate, this comment section is not the right place to start. It's very easy to find arguments and proposals from all sides of the issue elsewhere.
5_minutes 9y ago
"In 2013, EFF was disappointed to learn that the W3C had taken on the project of standardizing “Encrypted Media Extensions,” an API whose sole function was to provide a first-class role for DRM within the Web browser ecosystem" With so much money involved here, it's quite naive to believe the W3C members are virgins here and did this out love for the web and for the consumers. And: "It is clear that the W3C allowing DRM technologies to be developed at the W3C is just a naked ploy for the W3C to get more (paying) member companies to join"[0] 0 - https://blog.whatwg.org/drm-and-web-security https://blog.whatwg.org/drm-and-web-security
- mozumder 9y ago
  DRM is also how you get media companies to publish on the web. Media companies couldn't give any less fucks about the web. They can go 100 years without publishing on the web, since they have other revenue paths that they're perfectly happy with. This whole process of enabling DRM is web developer's efforts to kiss media-companies ass in order for them to publish their products on the web. Artists and other creatives have the option to publish their works wherever they see fit. It's their creation, not the public's. In fact, there are actual art galleries that won't sell you their works if they don't deem you sufficient enough. How you exhibit their work matters to them. That's their right. The web needs these media companies more than the media companies need the web. Anyone that complains about DRM is doing it wrong. You are limiting the web because you are saying you don't want media companies to publish on the web. You are now causing the web to compete against media companies private apps or physical media, which is a losing proposition. No one gives a shit about freedom. Everyone wants to use rights-managed content online. And the ONLY way to do that is with DRM. So, yah, I'm not seeing any corruption here. Just acknowledgement of the fact that artists own their works, and web developers need to kiss their ass if they want artists to publish on the web.
  - AOsborn 9y ago
    > They can go 100 years without publishing on the web, since they have other revenue paths that they're perfectly happy with. I accept your logic but disagree with your premise. Online media is the future, and any media company knows this.
    - AlexMax 9y ago
      They do not need the web to distribute their content online.
      - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
        Then let them suffer the loss of revenue from losing all of those potential customers. Content producers who don't use DRM will be happy to take those customers from them, and those will be the content producers who have more money with which to make new content tomorrow.
- cbhl 9y ago
  A lot of people think that the battle here is EME versus DRM-free content, but that's not the case. You can still have all the DRM-free content you want, whether that's YouTube videos or iTunes MP3s. Really, the decision being made is between EME and Adobe Flash. Flash was the one cross-platform way to serve DRMed content before EME. And now that EME is ratified, Adobe, Microsoft, Google and Mozilla can all work together to get rid of Flash, and all the 0-days it has been responsible for, and improve security and battery life for everyone on the Internet. https://blog.chromium.org/2017/07/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-flash.html https://blog.chromium.org/2017/07/so-long-and-thanks-for-all... Of course, we should also work to get rid of DRM -- it gets in the way of legitimate uses, and annoys legitimate users far more than it annoys pirates. But rather than vilifying Google and W3C and expecting them to be our saviors, instead we should be talking to Hollywood and Authors to adopt a DRM-free model just as many top musicians already have. Disclaimer: I work at YouTube, and this is my personal opinion, not that of my employer.
  - appleflaxen 9y ago
    but the converse is also true: if they don't implement EME, then you are welcome to install any third-party attack surface on your PC that you wish. so why should _I_ have to install the un-auditable attack vector on _my_ machine? you are well-positioned to understand this issue, so I'm baffled about how you can conclude this should be part of the default software suite in a browser.
  - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
    > A lot of people think that the battle here is EME versus DRM-free content, but that's not the case. Yes it is. Suppose that in order to play DRMed content, the user was required to be staked to the ground and covered in angry fire ants. Nobody would be willing to do that, so people who use DRM would have no customers, so everyone would stop using DRM. EME is in the opposite direction from this, so it will cause more DRM and less DRM-free content. Adobe Flash has been slowly dying for years, which is not a problem.
    - matthewmacleod 9y ago
      That's just wishful thinking, I fear. In reality, all that will happen is that users will continue to be forced into using native applications where DRM can be enforced arbitrarily by whatever service they are trying to use.
- Oxxide 9y ago
  The fun thing about DRM, is that people love to defeat it. They (the general public AND 3DM, to TorrentFreak, bunch of whiners IMO) said Denuvo was the death of cracking and piracy. 3DM: No games crackable in 2 years time, said the headline. now the cracking scene, which was mostly dying, has seen some revival. It has adapted, but it's a slow moving ship. Now a new generation (or the older generation, who knows, I'm just relaying my own observations)) are taking everything being thrown at them: encryption, virtualization, obfuscation, changing keys each patch, etc and making it look like light work to crack properly. They make short, short work of it for the amount of complexity involved. So I hope they continue to throw new things at them with Denuvo, to keep them interested. One group cracks the base game, sometimes someone else grabs all the updates and rolls them into a cracked patch, etc. It's nice to see some life return to something that was basically dead, made automated.
  - superflyguy 9y ago
    "No games crackable in 2 years time, said the headline...now the cracking scene, which was mostly dying, has seen some revival" Do you have a citation for this? Every game, dvd, stream, book etc ever has been cracked. Software protection has a 0% success rate.
    - gabriel34 9y ago
      Excerpt from wikipedia's article on Denuvo In January 2016, 3DM reportedly nearly gave up attempting to crack Just Cause 3, which is protected with Denuvo, due to the difficulties associated with the process.[8] They also warned that due to the current trends in encryption technology, in two years' time, the cracking of video games may become impossible.[8][9] [8] Owen S. Good (9 January 2016). "Piracy group nearly gives up on cracking Just Cause 3, warns of bleak future". http://www.polygon.com/2016/1/9/10741274/just-cause-3-crack-pc-3gm-denuvo http://www.polygon.com/2016/1/9/10741274/just-cause-3-crack-.... Retrieved 17 January 2016. [9] Robert Purchese (8 January 2016). "Finally, tide turns in war with PC game crackers". http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-01-08-denuvo-game-crack-success http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-01-08-denuvo-game-cra.... Retrieved 18 January 2016.
    - 9y ago
- y_tho 9y ago
  > it's quite naive to believe the W3C members are virgins here and did this out love for the web and for the consumers. So, no evidence, only a feeling of evidence.
  - ehsankia 9y ago
    "There's a lot of money involved, therefore there must be foul play." I personally would much rather have a secure, optimized and clean implementation, rather than hacky plugins and poorly developed solutions that put me at risk and destroy performance.
    - slrz 9y ago
      But hacky, platform-dependent plugins is exactly what we get. Websites just get a standardized JS API to talk to these hacky binary-only plugins.
ori_b 9y ago
No, it's probably not intentional corruption and malice. Just a belief that users are getting more of what they want as passive consumers paying large companies for services, rather than as creators in a peer to peer web. Realistically, they're likely to be right.
otakucode 9y ago
I agree that this style of debate is not terribly useful, but I will grant that this issue does stir significant emotion in people who are seeing their baby suffocated to death. However, I am uncertain what you believe is meant by 'actual corruption'? How could abandoning consensus, the normal functioning of the body for decades, and refusing to continue discussion in order to reach a compromise, not be a de-facto corruption of the organization?
rnhmjoj 9y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h94ZKGVg-B8&t=8m23s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h94ZKGVg-B8&t=8m23s If they are not corrupted they certainly acted in an extremely suspicious way. I advise you to watch the whole video because it gets better and better, the press conference part in particular.

burkaman 9y ago

The parent comment is not the first line of argument, it's the continuation of a years-long argument. Even if you completely ignore the history, the first line of argument is found in the article, not the comments. If you would like to understand the fundamentals of this debate, this comment section is not the right place to start. It's very easy to find arguments and proposals from all sides of the issue elsewhere.

5_minutes 9y ago

"In 2013, EFF was disappointed to learn that the W3C had taken on the project of standardizing “Encrypted Media Extensions,” an API whose sole function was to provide a first-class role for DRM within the Web browser ecosystem" With so much money involved here, it's quite naive to believe the W3C members are virgins here and did this out love for the web and for the consumers. And: "It is clear that the W3C allowing DRM technologies to be developed at the W3C is just a naked ploy for the W3C to get more (paying) member companies to join"[0] 0 - https://blog.whatwg.org/drm-and-web-security https://blog.whatwg.org/drm-and-web-security

mozumder 9y ago
DRM is also how you get media companies to publish on the web. Media companies couldn't give any less fucks about the web. They can go 100 years without publishing on the web, since they have other revenue paths that they're perfectly happy with. This whole process of enabling DRM is web developer's efforts to kiss media-companies ass in order for them to publish their products on the web. Artists and other creatives have the option to publish their works wherever they see fit. It's their creation, not the public's. In fact, there are actual art galleries that won't sell you their works if they don't deem you sufficient enough. How you exhibit their work matters to them. That's their right. The web needs these media companies more than the media companies need the web. Anyone that complains about DRM is doing it wrong. You are limiting the web because you are saying you don't want media companies to publish on the web. You are now causing the web to compete against media companies private apps or physical media, which is a losing proposition. No one gives a shit about freedom. Everyone wants to use rights-managed content online. And the ONLY way to do that is with DRM. So, yah, I'm not seeing any corruption here. Just acknowledgement of the fact that artists own their works, and web developers need to kiss their ass if they want artists to publish on the web.
- AOsborn 9y ago
  > They can go 100 years without publishing on the web, since they have other revenue paths that they're perfectly happy with. I accept your logic but disagree with your premise. Online media is the future, and any media company knows this.
  - AlexMax 9y ago
    They do not need the web to distribute their content online.
    - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
      Then let them suffer the loss of revenue from losing all of those potential customers. Content producers who don't use DRM will be happy to take those customers from them, and those will be the content producers who have more money with which to make new content tomorrow.
cbhl 9y ago
A lot of people think that the battle here is EME versus DRM-free content, but that's not the case. You can still have all the DRM-free content you want, whether that's YouTube videos or iTunes MP3s. Really, the decision being made is between EME and Adobe Flash. Flash was the one cross-platform way to serve DRMed content before EME. And now that EME is ratified, Adobe, Microsoft, Google and Mozilla can all work together to get rid of Flash, and all the 0-days it has been responsible for, and improve security and battery life for everyone on the Internet. https://blog.chromium.org/2017/07/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-flash.html https://blog.chromium.org/2017/07/so-long-and-thanks-for-all... Of course, we should also work to get rid of DRM -- it gets in the way of legitimate uses, and annoys legitimate users far more than it annoys pirates. But rather than vilifying Google and W3C and expecting them to be our saviors, instead we should be talking to Hollywood and Authors to adopt a DRM-free model just as many top musicians already have. Disclaimer: I work at YouTube, and this is my personal opinion, not that of my employer.
- appleflaxen 9y ago
  but the converse is also true: if they don't implement EME, then you are welcome to install any third-party attack surface on your PC that you wish. so why should _I_ have to install the un-auditable attack vector on _my_ machine? you are well-positioned to understand this issue, so I'm baffled about how you can conclude this should be part of the default software suite in a browser.
- AnthonyMouse 9y ago
  > A lot of people think that the battle here is EME versus DRM-free content, but that's not the case. Yes it is. Suppose that in order to play DRMed content, the user was required to be staked to the ground and covered in angry fire ants. Nobody would be willing to do that, so people who use DRM would have no customers, so everyone would stop using DRM. EME is in the opposite direction from this, so it will cause more DRM and less DRM-free content. Adobe Flash has been slowly dying for years, which is not a problem.
  - matthewmacleod 9y ago
    That's just wishful thinking, I fear. In reality, all that will happen is that users will continue to be forced into using native applications where DRM can be enforced arbitrarily by whatever service they are trying to use.
Oxxide 9y ago
The fun thing about DRM, is that people love to defeat it. They (the general public AND 3DM, to TorrentFreak, bunch of whiners IMO) said Denuvo was the death of cracking and piracy. 3DM: No games crackable in 2 years time, said the headline. now the cracking scene, which was mostly dying, has seen some revival. It has adapted, but it's a slow moving ship. Now a new generation (or the older generation, who knows, I'm just relaying my own observations)) are taking everything being thrown at them: encryption, virtualization, obfuscation, changing keys each patch, etc and making it look like light work to crack properly. They make short, short work of it for the amount of complexity involved. So I hope they continue to throw new things at them with Denuvo, to keep them interested. One group cracks the base game, sometimes someone else grabs all the updates and rolls them into a cracked patch, etc. It's nice to see some life return to something that was basically dead, made automated.
- superflyguy 9y ago
  "No games crackable in 2 years time, said the headline...now the cracking scene, which was mostly dying, has seen some revival" Do you have a citation for this? Every game, dvd, stream, book etc ever has been cracked. Software protection has a 0% success rate.
  - gabriel34 9y ago
    Excerpt from wikipedia's article on Denuvo In January 2016, 3DM reportedly nearly gave up attempting to crack Just Cause 3, which is protected with Denuvo, due to the difficulties associated with the process.[8] They also warned that due to the current trends in encryption technology, in two years' time, the cracking of video games may become impossible.[8][9] [8] Owen S. Good (9 January 2016). "Piracy group nearly gives up on cracking Just Cause 3, warns of bleak future". http://www.polygon.com/2016/1/9/10741274/just-cause-3-crack-pc-3gm-denuvo http://www.polygon.com/2016/1/9/10741274/just-cause-3-crack-.... Retrieved 17 January 2016. [9] Robert Purchese (8 January 2016). "Finally, tide turns in war with PC game crackers". http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-01-08-denuvo-game-crack-success http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-01-08-denuvo-game-cra.... Retrieved 18 January 2016.
  - 9y ago
y_tho 9y ago
> it's quite naive to believe the W3C members are virgins here and did this out love for the web and for the consumers. So, no evidence, only a feeling of evidence.
- ehsankia 9y ago
  "There's a lot of money involved, therefore there must be foul play." I personally would much rather have a secure, optimized and clean implementation, rather than hacky plugins and poorly developed solutions that put me at risk and destroy performance.
  - slrz 9y ago
    But hacky, platform-dependent plugins is exactly what we get. Websites just get a standardized JS API to talk to these hacky binary-only plugins.

ori_b 9y ago

No, it's probably not intentional corruption and malice. Just a belief that users are getting more of what they want as passive consumers paying large companies for services, rather than as creators in a peer to peer web. Realistically, they're likely to be right.

otakucode 9y ago

I agree that this style of debate is not terribly useful, but I will grant that this issue does stir significant emotion in people who are seeing their baby suffocated to death. However, I am uncertain what you believe is meant by 'actual corruption'? How could abandoning consensus, the normal functioning of the body for decades, and refusing to continue discussion in order to reach a compromise, not be a de-facto corruption of the organization?

rnhmjoj 9y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h94ZKGVg-B8&t=8m23s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h94ZKGVg-B8&t=8m23s If they are not corrupted they certainly acted in an extremely suspicious way. I advise you to watch the whole video because it gets better and better, the press conference part in particular.