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DRM’s Dead Canary: How We Lost the Web, What We Learned, and What to Do Next

• blackhole 9y ago
  I think it's amazing how a lot of comments on EFF's resignation from W3C (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15278883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15278883) seemed to focus on how they were being unreasonable about EME, and that allowing companies to have DRM is necessary. Yet, both then and now, the EFF keeps making the point that none of the DRM even works! It was never ABOUT the DRM. The companies don't give a shit about "copyright laws" or people "stealing movies". As this article very clearly demonstrates, the companies are using this to crush competition. That's it. There's no other use for this. The DRM is a legal excuse to sue competitors out of existence. The existing EME-compliant DRM implementations don't even work. This whole thing is a farce.
  • leereeves 9y ago
    The companies that make movies certainly care about people "stealing movies". Netflix, in turn, cares because they have to negotiate with those companies. Should the W3C, in turn, care about keeping Netflix happy? That seems like the relevant question to me.
    • Joeri 9y ago
      They definitely shouldn’t because netflix doesn’t need their help to succeed. They should make upstart netflix competitors happy however, to grow an ecosystem. The frustrating part is that my choice to be a law-abiding media consumer subscribing to a bunch of services makes me get a worse service in many ways than a pirate. I can’t use a player of my choice, i can’t have a single UI on top of all media, I can’t rely on content remaining available. Pirates don’t have these problems. The DRM legislation and media conglomerates power ensures that the market can’t fix itself. You can’t make a netflix competitor without DRM because you’ll never get access to licenses for popular culture products. Even had the W3C refused to deal, the situation wouldn’t be meaningfully better.
      • WorldMaker 9y ago
        How does W3C enabling a DRM option stop Netflix competitors, though? It's not like the next Netflix could legally start by just downloading the current Netflix. They'd have to go back to the media owners and negotiate their own contracts for it. At that point, anyone trying to compete with Netflix presumably winds up with the same contractual requirements from the media providers to use some sort of DRM. From that perspective, the W3C adding web platform support for DRM surely enables more competitors than it stops, right? Now the startup engineering cost is to build or hire one EME-compatible DRM provider, you don't have to build proprietary apps for every platform, you can trust people's browsers to run your DRM as easily as Netflix's and quickly launch to every platform that has a supporting browser. There's also still room left to compete with a DRM free product, assuming you find a way to negotiate media contracts without it, and figure out how to market that fact both to media companies and to users why that would be an advantage. From a web platform standpoint the work that goes into providing pleasant DRM experiences still floats some of the needs of DRM-free video playback, because browsers are going to engineer one on top of the other to save effort.
        • quadrangle 9y ago
          The article explained in depth how the W3C didn't just enable a DRM option, they were in a position to create a standard that furthered the whole concept of DRM in a way that wouldn't have otherwise happened at all. And they make it painfully clear that DRM is used abusively to undermine otherwise legal rights.
          • WorldMaker 9y ago
            None of which invalidates my points, which was with regards to corporate competition. It furthers the whole concept of DRM, but as a standard open to any party, thus not really damaging competition on the scale of companies like Netflix, that if anything helps the next company to come along and wish to replicate the Netflix streaming experience, because Netflix "has" to share that baseline DRM standard with them (otherwise W3C wouldn't have endorsed it and browsers wouldn't support it). Yes, DRM is used to abusively undermine the legal rights of users, but that doesn't stop competition for those users, and supposedly in a fair market the least abusive company you'd hope might be able to market a better value proposition. A DRM standard doesn't stop companies from being less abusive and using that as competitive leverage, even if it arguably furthers, or at least favors, the baseline amount of abusive behavior amongst that corporate ecosystem.
    • simion314 9y ago
      Does Netflix actually hates DRM but is forced to use it? are the Netflix original movies DRM free? If not then we need to stop excusing Netflix for using DRM because bad guys in Hollywood are forcing them to do it.
      • gsnedders 9y ago
        Netflix's argument for the longest time was they didn't want DRM, but they had no choice. But, now their originals are becoming a larger and larger part of what they provide, they've steadfastly stuck to having DRM on all their content (first and third party). So that prior argument kinda falls flat on its face.
        • Arnt 9y ago
          Shipping new player variants is a pain. The kind of pain you read about on thedailywtf. Once you have streaming working with DRM on all devices you need a %@#$$@#$@ good reason to introduce DRM-free streaming. Netflix wouldn't want to discover that its own content plays with very low quality on, say, Panasonic TVs made between April and August 2016.
          • simion314 9y ago
            Because all devices can play only DRM videos? Most devices if not all can play not DRM video and probably not including DRM uses less resources so this is not an excuse not to offer the option, (that can be off by default and only power users could enable it). Is there extra work, yes it is, but you can't be anti DRM but use it because we need to put some work to offer no DRM version of a stream.
            • Arnt 9y ago
              I've worked with this. I've dealt with blackbox player blobs with >100 undocumented tuning variables, and with TVs whose manufacturer didn't really know what worked and what broke. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some TV manufacturer broke some streaming variant (such as high-bitrate unencrypted smoothstreaming), discovered after a few months, and silently fixed it in new models without issuing an update for the old models. EDIT: I wouldn't assume that TVs are better at playing DRM. Just from my experience, non-DRM works better (less code that might be buggy). What I'm saying is that once Netflix had a few hundred working devices that worked with DRM, avoiding player bugs became a really good reason to stay with DRM.
    • bobajeff 9y ago
      That has been proven false by their response to the DRM non-aggression pact.
    • icc97 9y ago
      The W3C is supposed to care about keeping Netflix and EFF happy. They're supposed to reach a compromise. There seems to have been very little compromise here. They've certainly managed to make EFF very unhappy.
      • hmm_really 9y ago
        EFF argument was highly politicised and conflating US law, with global technology standardisation. Quite simply EFF had a weaker argument, even though there is a lot of sympathy for their cause from representatives in W3C, who also think US law is an arse, its simply not the correct forum for the battle.
    • josteink 9y ago
      > Netflix, in turn, cares because they have to negotiate with those companies. Which is why Netflix has around 200 native clients for all known hardware and platforms where DRM is implemented outside the web. Why people think it’s reasonable to have apps for everything, but somehow Netflix is special and must run in a browser built on an open stack... Now that is something I cannot fathom. Install a goddamn app. Leave the web pure. Leave the web alone :(
    • dasil003 9y ago
      To stay relevant as a content platform and limit the scope of proprietary code to a small encryption module instead of a bloated behemoth like Flash. That's not say that's a great argument, but the problem with making EME a battleground is that there is zero leverage over the content companies that insist on DRM, zero. Studios have the content people want to watch, if they can't watch it on the web they'll use proprietary apps. Technologists like to believe we shape the future, but browsers do not shape the content industry, rightsholders do. From their perspective, refusal to implement EME is damage they will route around, and they have the leverage to do it. Also note the inefficacy of DRM in general. The place to win this battle is in congress. We need to move towards strengthening fair use and outlawing DRM, that's the only way to take the teeth out. The idea that the browser is an important battlefront is nonsense, EME is a sensible compromise that keeps the browser relevant. I respect the Stallman-esque view that the web should in no way be compromised but it's not a winning move in the long-term.
  • nikbackm 9y ago
    Well, surely DRM prevents enough users from copying the product to make it worthwhile? It does not need to be perfect to achieve that. Many people will never go looking for tools to break the DRM or DRM-free copies from torrent sites and the like. But if anyone could just copy what they see on e.g. Netflix with the click of a button, then many more probably would.
    • icebraining 9y ago
      If it's just to prevent that, you could just have a "copy=false" attribute on the tag, which browsers would respect. No need for proprietary encryption nonsense.
      • Mindwipe 9y ago
        Browsers didn't respect Do Not Track.
        • icebraining 9y ago
          I don't understand what you mean. DNT is a flag supposed to be respected by web services, not by browsers.
          • logfromblammo 9y ago
            Some versions of some browsers turned DNT on by default. Respecting DNT in this instance would have always made this flag a choice by the user. There is still room to argue that the user's choice was to install a browser that made DNT the default option. But it's a moot point, since the sort of web services that were in mind when DNT was proposed largely ignored it. They never set the evil bit in their responses, either.
    • belorn 9y ago
      No, the cost of DRM do not repay itself by preventing enough users. There have been tests cases, studies, and the repeated conclusion I keep seeing is that DRM has no correlation to the revenue from individual music, games and films. It has however a correlation to platform and user retention, which is what this article continuously refers to. To take a few examples, remember when the European Commission hired researches to do a study on the effect of piracy? What about the revenue from itunes after it went DRM free? Sale of music that is available on youtube after it went HTML5? Revenue from music, film, and games on the longer term after aggressive blocking of torrent sites? What about the long term effect from anti-piracy/DRM laws? The whole EFF article ends on the conclusion that DRM will not exist if their only purpose is to prevents enough users from copying the product. That effect won't be worthwhile enough to pay the cost of DRM. Only a sticky platform that prevent competition will bring the revenue to validate investing into DRM.
  • mattmaroon 9y ago
    I'd say DRM works really well for some definition of "works". It certainly doesn't make it impossible to pirate anything, but the technology and the laws make it difficult enough that I rarely bother anymore and just pay for Hulu, Netflix, etc. I don't think they're attempting to stifle competition, and if so they sure are not succeeding at that because there are new streaming services all the time. It's so they can prevent a commercially viable piracy business.
    • weeksie 9y ago
      Yeah, this right here. DRM might be technically impossible to get 100% right but you don't have to get it 100% right if you have regulation to back it up. The alternative is that there is no way to protect IP on the web, which means that there is no incentive to transmit IP over the web which takes a shitload of value off the table. These anti-DRM arguments smack of blind ideology.
      • esigs 9y ago
        "But if someone goes around your DRM and doesn't violate any other laws, the non-aggression pact means that you couldn't use the W3C standardised DRM as a route to legally shut them down. That would protect security researchers, it would protect people analyzing video to add subtitles and other assistive features, it would protect archivists who had the legal right to make copies, and it would protect people making new browsers." This is a major part of the argument being made here and helps to close the gap between blind ideology and serious issue.
        • weeksie 9y ago
          That's a perfectly reasonable point (which I agree with). It's naive to dismiss the concerns of content creators out of hand, but surely there's a middle ground we could get to legally over what constitutes fair use (or fair cracking?) when it comes to DRM.
          • esigs 9y ago
  • bunderbunder 9y ago
    In implying that the point of DRM is to make copying the data impossible, the EFF is creating a straw man. I don't lock my doors and windows because I think it makes it impossible to break into my house. I know full well how easy it is to get in anyway, just by breaking a window. I lock my doors and windows because I expect it to create just enough of an inconvenience to mostly deter others from breaking into my house. Let me re-iterate the emphasis on the word 'mostly'. I'm not trying to make the perfect the enemy of the good here. It's the same for media companies. They're not looking for something that will prevent everyone from pirating movies. They're looking for something that will make pirating movies just inconvenient enough that most people choose to pay for content instead. The EFF really needs to come up with a less specious argument if it wants to see much success in convincing anyone who doesn't already agree with them in the first place.
    • AnthonyMouse 9y ago
      Except that the cost of circumventing DRM has nothing to do with the cost of pirating movies. People pirate movies by downloading them with the DRM already removed. The DRM only affects the source, and by all evidence it doesn't affect them enough to prevent the first copy from happening, which is the only useful thing it could possibly do since it isn't present on any of the subsequent copies. It's like arguing that all citizens should wear shackles because it will keep prison inmates from escaping. It doesn't work that way and the people insisting it does have ulterior motives.
    • glitcher 9y ago
      I can see your point for calling straw man, but you seem to be implying this was their only argument. My takeaway was that the primary arguments centered more around controlling competition to secure monopolistic positions, threatening legitimate security researchers from disclosing truths, and preventing fair use. And just to play devil's advocate for a moment, while I tend to agree about your straw man point, is it completely a straw man argument if some of the CEO's at the large corps pushing DRM actually do believe they can make copying data impossible? I mean, just because we know this is a pipe dream, and many very smart people may argue convincingly against it with hard evidence, does not mean everyone will actually believe it.
  • fixermark 9y ago
    DRM was the means. The goal was to shift away from the need to embed Flash.
  • saas_co_de 9y ago
    I think the more accurate view is that the W3C is dead and has been for a long time. At this point it is just a mechanism for oligopolists to collude with each other to maintain their dominant market positions. It is funny to watch how something like Web Crypto takes years to implement, even though the technology is ancient, but if Google wants a new feature to spy on users it will be released next week.
    • vog 9y ago
      *> the W3C is dead and has been for a long time. This. With all due respect to the great vision of Tim Berners-Lee, as well as his historical achievements: The W3C has turned into an anti-pattern of what to expect from a standardization organisation. In some sense, the W3C standards are the opposite of the RFCs by the IETF. (and ISO is somewhere in between - they do produce over-engineered crap, but their signal-to-noise ratio is still tolerable, even though it hurts)
      • cat199 9y ago
        > In some sense, the W3C standards are the opposite of the RFCs by the IETF. sorry to burst the bubble here but.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Address_Redundancy_Protocol#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Address_Redundancy_Prot...
        • vog 9y ago
          Good point! Well, I did not intend to say IETF does everything right, but their signal-to-noise ratio is better by orders of magnitude. Also, I'm under the impression that IETF learned from that utter failure and took measures to prevent similar mistakes in the future (please correct me if I'm wrong). I did not observe that W3C actually learned anything from their mistakes, but produced less and less useful things over time (again, please correct me if I'm wrong).
          • hmm_really 9y ago
            Well please provide some examples of what you explicitly mean, and then we can see if your wrong or not.
  • conanbatt 9y ago
    It recently came to my attention that the mere concept of copyright law could be abolished with little economic consequence. In the end, the existence of those laws derives capital from other things, and it works as a sort of economic rent. Would we be better without copyright laws?
    • bo1024 9y ago
      It's a good question to ask as a thought exercise, especially since so many vested interests don't want you to think about it, and try to condition you not to question it. I think the concept of copyright law is good in lots of ways, but the current copyright laws in the USA are pretty awful. It was originally 20 years, now it's 90+. Lots of old works are being lost or having access denied because they're still under copyright, but nobody is publishing them. Also related: "the war on sharing" https://stallman.org/articles/end-war-on-sharing.html https://stallman.org/articles/end-war-on-sharing.html
    • mjevans 9y ago
      If I had to choose all or none, I'd choose none. Work for hire (producing something to begin with) would still be a thing. For a broader discussion I'd prefer to reference the actual text for the basis of US Copyright. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." With the meaning of those words at the time of their writing: * limited to scientific works * and methods of doing things that have direct industrial benefit. * ONLY by the author/inventor (not corporations) * LIMITED time, I think 5 years is probably plenty and 10 is a maximum. * I like the idea of a short default term, and paying (active effort) for longer renewal. * Consumer protections (trademarks) are a different matter entirely.
    • abritinthebay 9y ago
      No, we wouldn't, but I'd suggest going back to the earlier laws that weren't overreaching like the current ones. In many ways it isn't even about copyright - it's about IP, and that's actually a whole other problem.
    • dhimes 9y ago
• userbinator 9y ago
  though this hasn't happened yet, there's no reason that a company couldn't put DRM in its toasters to control whose bread you can use ...there was this recent attempt at adding DRM to a (not-quite) juicer, which --- fortunately --- didn't become successful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14148216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14148216
  • StavrosK 9y ago
    Isn't there extensive DRM already on coffee machines?
    • alexcroox 9y ago
      and printers?
      • zaarn 9y ago
        Printers are the best example of the worst case scenario of DRM. Not too long ago I obtained a office printer from Brother. Came with Cartridges. After only 4 papers these Cartridges where empty, or rather, it claimed to be empty. In reality they were still sloshing full of ink. Tried chinese cartridges for 2$ but had to settle for the 20$ ones from Brother. The windows driver comes with all kinds of malware (even a toolbar was included!) so I settled for PostScript, which the printer thankfully supported. I have since resold this piece of garbage on ebay, went back to my trusty old HP Laserprinter with cheap chinese cartridges.
    • mrguyorama 9y ago
      Hilariously, this might be the most effective way of explaining how DRM "works" and is damaging to the average user. Keurig's DRM was so poorly implemented that I defeated it with a piece of dirty scotch tape. That fiasco was the perfect moment to inform the public about why you should be able to make any coffee you want in the brand new coffee maker you just purchased, how the actual system itself doesn't stop you anyway, and how DRM is just a tool for powerful companies to continue to consolidate their power
• friedButter 9y ago
  I guess the one loud and clear message here is that companies prefer for exploits to be sold on the black market\given to the public anonymously than for the companies to be alerted to exploits
  • saintPirelli 9y ago
    I think that's a rather fair assessment of the situation.
  • fsloth 9y ago
    I think the trade-off described in the article was that companies value market share control more than the security of their products, since high security would go hand in hand with more open markets.
  • zaarn 9y ago
    I mean, if it goes through I'll definitely stock up my disassembler knowledge, I bet people on the black market will pay some cash for DRM breakers.
• leereeves 9y ago
  > We proposed a kind of DRM non-aggression pact, through which W3C members would promise that they'd only sue people under laws like DMCA 1201 if there was some other law that had been broken. So if someone violates your copyright, or incites someone to violate your copyright, or interferes with your contracts with your users, or misappropriates your trade secrets, or counterfeits your trademarks, or does anything else that violates your legal rights, you can throw the book at them. With that system, what would stop someone from selling software that can be used to infringe copyright. As long as they don't do so themselves or "incite" anyone else to do so (perhaps promoting a legitimate use like pre-buffering), could they be sued?
  • chrisweekly 9y ago
    > “software that can be used to infringe copyright” aka “software”
  • virgilp 9y ago
    The horror! I hear some people also sell hardware that can be used to infringe copyright (perhaps promoting a legitimate use like general-purpose-computing). They should be sued out of existence.
  • corydoctorow 9y ago
    We addressed that: both jurisprudence (Grokster) and global copyright laws establish a doctrine of "secondary liability" for incitement to copyright infringement. This right would be enforceable against technology firms if they produced such a technology. The fact that DRM advocates still wouldn't promise not to sue when no law was broken confirms that they weren't interested in DRM's power to curtail illegal activity. (Secondarily, the companies that advocated for DRM never questioned how someone operating under the non-aggression pact would be able to break the DRM; they tacitly acknowledged that this would be trivial -- so whether or not you're worried about secondary infringers like the ones you describe, they would exist, because things that are technologically trivial are impossible to stop, even if they're illegal -- all that EME would do is give these companies the power to stop people who WEREN'T using such tools for infringement and thus wanted to operate in the open; it would have no effect on people who WERE infringing and operating anonymously and in the shadows)
• exikyut 9y ago
  I'm reminded of the US RSA export fiasco of the 90s. I unfortunately can't find the cool email signature I learned about the whole thing from, but its home on the internet now seems to be http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/ http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/. Perhaps someone should come up with a small <5-line snippet that explains some portion of how to defeat Widevine, and then everyone in Israel should, I don't know, configure every mail server they know of to autoinject the fragment into all outgoing mail, or something. And/or configure everyone's browsers to autoinject it into every modified multiline text input field (maybe). Obviously it wouldn't be able to last. But it would be VERY good publicity. And the thing is, Widevine would constantly be being updated so the instructions would constantly break and need to be changed, so exact-string filtering wouldn't work ;) So. I'll start, despite not living in Israel: both Chromium and Firefox will use PulseAudio if it's available, and fake soundcard drivers exist for Windows/macOS as well, so sound isn't really problem if you're prepared for an "export" process that takes as long as eg SpotAHEM tracks take to play.
  • jchw 9y ago
    But as they say, it's not about piracy. Piracy is incredibly simple no matter what. I can also just take a camcorder to my screen to capture Netflix no matter what garbage crypto they put in the display connection. But I don't even need to do that, because I have a cheap-ass HDMI splitter from China that already strips HDCP effectively and effortlessly. It's always about control of something, whether it be the consumer, distribution channels, etc.
    • exikyut 9y ago
      TIL about cheap HDMI splitters stripping HDCP. I had no idea this was a thing, that's very interesting. I'm also very surprised that Google even autocompletes "hdmi splitter remove hdcp" (!) and then shows me eBay product listings with "Hdcp Stripper" in the product title. Wow. I also found https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/124762/how-does-hdmi-splitter-bypass-hdcp https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/124762/how-does... asking how they work, which corroborates that they really do have the key inside. Shakes head Nice...
• amq 9y ago
  The world where you fully owned a thing after buying it is over. Whether we like it or not, all businesses are working on deploying this new model.
  • KozmoNau7 9y ago
    I wrestled for a long long time whether I should get a Spotify subscription. I've been a subscriber for around 6 months now, and I like it. However, I have kept all of my ripped/bought/downloaded music as well, and I have a very clear exit plan for how to keep "my" Spotify library in case the company goes belly-up or decides to cripple its offerings somehow. It will take me a couple of weeks to recreate the library locally, but I'm OK with that. For now, I'll enjoy the recommendations and easy access to music that is new and exciting to me.
    • StavrosK 9y ago
      I designed a playlist format to solve your exact problem, but unfortunately there hasn't been much uptake so far: http://universalplaylist.stavros.io/ http://universalplaylist.stavros.io/
      • feeboo 9y ago
        I also thougth about this problem. Current playlist implementations are seriously lacking when you move your library. I have some shell scripts here that just replace parts of the path in the playlists. I looked at your playlist format specs, why do you use floats? I'm currently coding on a GO audioserver and save time intervals as Nanoseconds (time.Duration). This makes more sense to me, as floats may behave badly in some contexts.
        • StavrosK 9y ago
          I use floats because it's most natural to represent duration in time. Nanoseconds are going to be about as lossy as floats too, I guess (although for a different reason). If you're going for maximum accuracy, you'd need to represent the duration as the number of samples. I wonder if floats are going to be a significant problem, hmm.
• superasn 9y ago
  What the fuck is wrong with these lame excuses: "But now that apps exist and nearly everyone uses them, big companies can boycott the web, forcing their users into apps instead. That just accelerates the rise of apps, and weakens the web even more. Apps are used to implement DRM, so DRM-using companies are moving to apps. To keep entertainment companies from killing the web outright, the Web must have DRM too." That is equally lame as what Ajit pai said recently wrt to NN: "wouldn’t you want your surgeon to be able to buy access to an express lane in which a network was allowed to grant privilege to certain data over others? That is, AT&T should be allowed to provide a service in which data bytes flowing between an operating room and a surgeon take precedence over bytes of 100 dudes Googling to find out whether Jennifer Lawrence is married."
  • hobo2017 9y ago
    Well, whatever kills JS and React/Node/etc. There is an upside to everything.
  • mgkimsal 9y ago
    > wouldn’t you want your surgeon to be able to buy access to an express lane in which a network was allowed to grant privilege to certain data over others? That is, AT&T should be allowed to provide a service in which data bytes flowing between an operating room and a surgeon take precedence over bytes of 100 dudes Googling to find out whether Jennifer Lawrence is married A bit OT, but can't that already happen? I thought companies could set up private networks between various locations, and set up prioritized traffic on those already, with corresponding SLA if desired.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • yakcyll 9y ago
      If so, then it's that much more disingenuous, considering that specialists are more likely to be aware of issues like those and of options they have to solve them. The Average Joe will never feel compelled to cross-check a claim like this.
• jenscow 9y ago
  I think their argument of not being allowed to copy Netflix content (to watch later) is flawed. They're the equivalent of the video rental shops from the 80s/90s - we weren't allowed to rent a movie and copy it to watch after the return. Sure, I'd love to be able to watch Netflix on a RPi or while I'm away - so if there was a way to do this, while stopping me from watching it when my subscription ends, that would be great.
  • menacingly 9y ago
    I believe they mean that doing so is not a copyright infringement, even if it is a tricky situation for businesses who want to provide streaming services. The DRM is granting powerful stipulations beyond those specified by the law. I don't actually know the law, but I assume the EFF does. Also, I wish humans were able to resist the urge to downvote things they don't agree with. This comment contributes to the conversation and was not made in bad faith.
  • Consultant32452 9y ago
    You can download local copies of movies in the Netflix Android app. Then you could presumably watch it via Chromecast or HDMI cable to a bigger screen.
• austincheney 9y ago
  From the title I was expecting much more than just DRM. 20 years ago the web was a wildly diverse place, compared to today's web, even though there were so many fewer websites and people online. This is a substantially greater loss, but whatever. When you need to play politics everything becomes sensational and your primary argument is the center of the universe.
• davidgrenier 9y ago
  Could someone educate me as to how the media corps plan to handle the ever more vicious security disclosures that will result as an outcome of this? I mean, it's not like anyone's fooling themselves that it won't be possible to disclose anonymously... or is it?
• primer42 9y ago
  This is a little off topic, but this un-closed parenthesis pair is killing me > Since the earliest days of computing, there's been a simmering debate about whether computers exist to control their users, or vice versa (as the visionary computer scientist and education specialist Seymour Papert put it, "children should be programming the computer rather than being programmed by it" -- that applies equally well to adults.
  • corydoctorow 9y ago
    Thanks. Fixing now.
    • corydoctorow 9y ago
      Fixed.
• bambax 9y ago
  > the many crypto-currency members of the W3C warned that using browsers for secure, high-stakes applications like moving around peoples' life-savings could only happen if browsers were subjected to the same security investigations as every other technology in our life (except DRM technologies) That's a very big point that's not emphasized enough in the article, IMHO. If security researchers are (legally) prohibited from investigating EME technologies in browsers, then EME extensions become a big vector attack, and standards-compliant browsers that include them, become much less secure than browsers that don't. As a user, I care about that a lot more than I care about Netflix' competitors. Netflix is not only unjustly protecting itself from future competition, it is directly threatening my own safety.
  • JulianMorrison 9y ago
    EME is basically the new Flash Plugin.
    • _jal 9y ago
      Yep, and I will cripple it just like I did Flash. Any site depending on EME will not see traffic from me.
      • imhoguy 9y ago
        But then you need to disable of WebAssembly too -- another DRM lobbied standard.
        • steveklabnik 9y ago
          Could you elaborate on this? Wasm has nothing to do with DRM as far as I can tell.
          • imhoguy 9y ago
            Not directly, but encourages obfuscated binary blobs, like some DRM decoders and as a new complexity also new security challenges. It is come back to Flash, ActiveX or Java Applets. See top comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10487713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10487713
• alexandercrohde 9y ago
  This kind of thing makes me want to vote with my dollar by canceling Netflix and torrent instead.
  • chillydawg 9y ago
    Tried to watch a show on netflix the other day, some technical issue so I just torrented it and played it back on my PS4. Instant seeking, much better quality video, zero buffering. Piracy is STILL a better UX.
    • jerf 9y ago
      I still can't believe that every stupid streaming app still chokes and reloads if I want to backup ten seconds to catch something I missed, even in cases where I have more free RAM than the size of the entire video file. Come on, you have to buffer forward anyhow, just buffer backwards a minute or two or something. If we're in some hyperconstrained environment where that isn't possible, fine, but in 2017 even a lot of "embedded" environments have more than enough RAM to pull this off in comfort. Oh, and if I do back up 10 seconds, can you explain to me why you apparently just dumped your entire buffer and have to reload it from scratch before you're willing to play anything? Did the movie change because I backed up ten seconds? No. Sheesh.
      • Crespyl 9y ago
        Can't risk holding unencrypted frames in memory for a whole ten seconds mate, the paying customer might want to look at them!
• cies 9y ago
  > What to Do Next Demand the end of lobbying in order to restore democracy instead of living under the defacto rule of bog-corps (and their owners).
  • hardwaresofton 9y ago
    Maybe I'm too synical but that just seems impossible. Also, I don't know of an anywhere-near-ideally functioning democracy in the world (maybe I just haven't read anywhere). Recently I've started to think that democracy is never the steady state of any government, it's just a stepping stone to democratic republics and then to oligarchy. I mean just think about it. who's in the best position to influence the will of a large amount of people? people with the most resources. That's (probably) never going to change -- technological advances are the only things that seem to truly shake things up (as well as revolutions I guess), and even that has been successfully controlled/regulated. The only thing I can see as the future for the internet is mesh networks and a separation of the federated internet and a decentralized one.
    • RonanTheGrey 9y ago
      I can imagine a technology that aggressively defends its own openness, partly based on AI. E.g. any attempt to constrain it causes it to go full-on Chaos Monkey and start breaking things - a technology that enforces liberty on the society using it. Sounds a bit dystopian perhaps but hey, maybe we deserve it.
      • hardwaresofton 9y ago
        I think I understand what you meant (trying to detect bad actors through AI), but I don't think you need AI to do it. If it was easy to just buy a 3G radio and start hooking together nodes and create a new internet (with speed being a huge sacrifice), that could easily be the way forward. Bitcoin is a good example that basically raised the stakes for control to >50% of the nodes -- any other quorum system would do the same, but that basically moves the problem to "who has enough money to buy/confiscate lots of nodes". The real solution is something provably and completely decentralized. Maybe we need to go back to the stoneage -- create a new net, and start building the links one by one, person to person, and only use the traditional net as a place to store public keys or something.
• icc97 9y ago
  > The W3C version of the story goes something like this. The rise of apps has weakened the web. In the pre-app days, the web was the only game in town, so companies had to play by web rules: open standards, open web. But now that apps exist and nearly everyone uses them, big companies can boycott the web, forcing their users into apps instead. That just accelerates the rise of apps, and weakens the web even more. Apps are used to implement DRM, so DRM-using companies are moving to apps. To keep entertainment companies from killing the web outright, the Web must have DRM too. What it sounds like 'we' could do, is work to create websites using Service Workers [0] so that the importance of native apps becomes irrelevant [1]. [0]: https://jakearchibald.github.io/isserviceworkerready/ https://jakearchibald.github.io/isserviceworkerready/ [1]: https://xkcd.com/1367/ https://xkcd.com/1367/
  • tannhaeuser 9y ago
    The passage you cited (eg. W3C's motivation) is what I'm having trouble understanding. Why does the Web have to be everything to everybody? If "content providers" want apps and DRM, so be it IMHO; let them build up a content network and buy in from users. Why does the Web need to compete here? Why lend credibility and accessibility to closed-world networks? Why not let the Web be the place for text content and information it was designed for, rather than foobar web standards?
    • icc97 9y ago
      For the W3C to have importance then the web needs to be the main delivery mechanism. If Netflix can just say "either do what we want or we'll just use another solution", then they can force through their demands. I think using apps seems a backwards step to the days of having to write cross platform software. So it's better if there is just the one delivery mechanism that Apple and Google don't have total control over.
• interfixus 9y ago
  Am I the only individual in the known universe not doing business with Netflix or similar sleazebag outfits? Because principle and because absent pressing need for product.
  • RonanTheGrey 9y ago
    I increasingly feel left out of life because I don't contort my entire life around watching "the latest thing". It's becoming an increasingly sober realization that the world around me is becoming increasingly monocultural because _everyone is watching the same things_ and that it is a culture of which I am not a part. I don't lament this, really. It's my choice. I'm just wondering if it's an observation that can only be made when you're not scrambling to watch the latest season of Game of Thrones (which I have never seen).
    • interfixus 9y ago
      Neither have I, don't worry. Nor House of Madmen (whatever) or the latest installment on vampires. In fact, no TV at all. My life is fine.
      • RonanTheGrey 9y ago
        I truly don't miss it. In fact the past year, since I have turned off the tube, has been the most productive of my entire life.
• hardwaresofton 9y ago
  Is it wrong of me to think of the net neutrality battle in the same way? The more and more I think about the battles the EFFs fights, the more I respect them and think stallman's brand of insanity (if it's possible to call it that politely) is more and more necessary. Just like the DRM battle was lost, I get the feeling the net neutrality battle is a losing battle. Even if it's not this year, eventually, the deep pockets will win -- From what I've seen basic computer literacy (I don't mean using a smart phone) isn't even being taught consistently -- trying to get the majority of the general populace (which isn't even enough to win politically, but I'll ignore that) to understand why repairability and open source matter, nevermind net neutrality seems like an exercise in futility. While that happens, the tech companies benefitting the most from open source software and the openness that the web introduced are doing their best to split it up amongst themselves. I've given up on this iteration of the internet, instead of ranting what I should probably do is go try and contribute to whatever is next, whether that's mesh networks or ipfs.
  • saladeen 9y ago
    It is not, but I'd like to note one thing: while here Netflix is the 'bad guy', in the Net Neutrality issue they are positing themselves as the 'good guy'.
    • hardwaresofton 9y ago
      This article made me wonder if I should cancel my Netflix account. I still see them as a "good guy" (and haven't really considered it heavily until now) because of how straight forward and valuable their offering is, the contributions they make to the open source community, and their general underdog-ness in comparison to the entrenched cable industry. They just don't seem to be overtly evil, they seem to be making a fair amount of consumer and even business environment-friendly decisions (they're running a profitable business, not using VC money to suck the air from the market). I don't know that I blame Netflix as much as I blame the W3C for being spineless/bending to their will. It's absolutely Netflix's perogative to seek the most money, and to try to force their users into apps if that's how they can do so, but the W3C should have been different/stopped it. From my understanding that's the point of a standards body like that (and like the article states, it's in purported reason they were founded at all). In the end, I'm not as dissapointed with the W3C because the world just isn't that cut and dry most of the time (and browsers still at least give you the option to turn EME off), but
• shmerl 9y ago
  W3C has no excuse. And behavior of Netflix, Google, MS and Co. is disgusting. They should be blamed for this stupidity. > EFF is suing the US government to overturn Section 1201 of the DMCA. Yep. It's likely simply unconstitutional. And undemocratic way this law was passed[1] stinks, but repealing it is pretty hard. 1. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/ustr-secret-copyright-agreements-worldwide https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/ustr-secret-copyright-...
  • eadmund 9y ago
    What I'm interested in is when we as a community start to punish these companies. When will conferences refuse to allow Netflix, Apple, Google and Microsoft employees to present? In the 1980s the civilised world turned its back on the apartheid regime of South Africa, and in time South Africa ended apartheid. This didn't come at an insignificant cost (South Africa was at the time a well-developed economy which other nations would have liked to have traded with), but it was morally worthwhile. Clausewitz noted that war is diplomacy carried on by other means. It seems to me that this article is EFF's declaration of independence, and the next logical step is to declare war on the W3C and its members. They are breaking the web; they are destroying the security of the web's users; we need to stop enabling this behaviour.
• Bromskloss 9y ago
  I can't even remember when I last encountered DRM. Are you at all affected if you just stay out of the game?
  • zrm 9y ago
    If you use a browser that supports it then security flaws in the black box(es) can affect you unless you actually remove it or otherwise disable it. There are EME-free editions of Firefox available however. https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/57.0/ https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/57.0/
    • ekimekim 9y ago
      From what I can tell this chrome setting should also disable everything: chrome://md-settings/content/protectedContent. I believe there's also a way to disable it in firefox at runtime, so no need to install a completely seperate version.
• dannyobrien 9y ago
  I hope this is sufficiently on-topic: EFF is having a two-for-one matching donation drive this week. We depend on individual support for the work we do — whether it’s at standards bodies, in the courts, or building tech like Let’s Encrypt and Privacy Badger. There aren’t many people who understand what we do: if you’re one of them, please consider donating this week to double your effect: https://supporters.eff.org/donate/power-2017-s https://supporters.eff.org/donate/power-2017-s
• johnhenry 9y ago
  I think this post might have reached more people if the author's name had been included in title.
• fixermark 9y ago
  How does DMCA 1201 undermine the formation of a market for video transmission and the Internet of Things based around open and auditable standards?
• AlexandrB 9y ago
  I think it's only a matter of time before EME is extended to protect textual and code content (i.e. JavaScript) as well. Probably in the name of protecting intellectual property like web "apps". That would be the death knell of ad-blocking and other user-friendly web technologies which is probably why it will be widespread in the future.
  • underbluewaters 9y ago
    This is what really worries me. Is this possible with EME?
    • zb3 9y ago
      You can serve website as video (and on scroll just seek the video), but that would be very expensive since advertisements would need to be included in the video which means videos generated on-the-fly (incompatible with today's CDN's) or no personalized ads
• krylon 9y ago
  Here is a fun fact regarding DRM: Ever since I discovered how easy it is to buy music from Amazon, both legally and conveniently, I have not downloaded a single piece of music illegally. I do not mind paying for music. Making music is hard work. There are many gifted musicians I would rather pay for their efforts if that means I get to enjoy more of their music. I do mind jumping through all kinds of insane hoops that effectively punish me for playing fair while the kid next door gets his music illegally from the Pirate Bay and has no trouble putting it on any device he or she chooses. I really wish film studios understood this simple fact: If buying movies was as easy and painless as buying music from, say, Amazon, I would be happy to do so. Making movies, too, is hard work, and compared to making music, it is fairly expensive, too. I have no problem with paying for a movie. But having to watch a trailer that tells me I cannot make copies of a movie or watch it on a DVD player from another continent, being unable to watch a movie with its original audio track without subtitles, while the kid next door gets his (illegal) copy online, a copy that does not force him to watch a trailer that basically insults him for being stupid enough to pay for a legitimate copy, where he can choose to watch or not to watch the movie with subtitles, in any language he or she likes -- THAT annoys me to no end. It's not even that movie studios (ab)use the law to cling to a moribound business model - it's that they lack the creativity (ironic, given that their whole business is about creativity) to imagine it could work any other way, and that they effectively distrust their customers. Maybe I am just a naive dreamer, but I think if the movie studios trusted their customers enough to let them actually use the movies / series / ... they actually ____ing paid for in the ways they see fit, the problem DRM is - at least officially - supposed to solve, would at least shrink so much it would become negligible in practice. Okay, just in case I lost you there, let me repeat my key point: Buying music legally, from Amazon or one of many other companies, is so convenient it actually trumps downloading music illegally. Paying money turns out to be the least problem in the whole process. If buying movies legally was as hassle-free, I would happily go on a shopping spree of epic proportions. You don't even need to look at the ethical dimension of the whole issue. Just do the ____ing math. (Yeah, okay, sorry for ranting. If you are still reading this, you are probably the last person that needs convincing anyway.)
  • alexland 9y ago
    Gabe Newell said it years ago. Piracy is almost always a service problem, not a pricing problem.
• ben_jones 9y ago
  Everytime I see a "woe is us" post I think about how developer greed led to most of it. We were the ones who wrote ad tracking code, we were the ones who took VC money, we build the walled gardens, all because it pays well. We will continue to do so rather then make any effort against it.
  • callalex 9y ago
    The same can be said about war machines. This is a problem as old as human history.
• janito 9y ago
  Does anyone know if there are DRM-free alternatives to Netflix, Hulu, etc.? It doesn't have to be free (as in beer). Either a platform with content from smaller studios that aren't enforcing DRM on their content, or a studio that produces DRM-free content?
• TYPE_FASTER 9y ago
  The cable industry lost when they mandated OCAP for CableCard...they had a direct controlled connection to the consumer, and they provided really poor set top boxes and media selection. Now you can buy a Kodi Fire stick from Craigslist or Kodi AppleTV from eBay pre-configured with free access to all kinds of content.
• k3a 9y ago
  I am also totally against locked black boxes. This hiding and obscuring practice is just preventing learning, repars and inspections. It is a similar problem like Intel ME and closed bios. We use usecure proprietary code, closed unreparable one-purpose 'kiosk' devices yet we can still record video output or make a screen (camera?) recording. What are they thinking? This is all just to give them advantage over users, to more control and restrict them. Terrible.
• hmm_really 9y ago
  meh where to start with this ... So it was this kind of hyperbole that largely did EFF a disservice in my opinion. The W3C is composed of very experienced people who can see through straw man arguments and unsubstantiated facts. The main argument from w3c was that they deal with technical specifications, not US laws. It now seems that the EFF are starting to get this, and looking to tackle the actual issues. The EFF acted poorly through out this thing scenario.
• RestlessMind 9y ago
  Maybe, EFF can lobby one of the (truly) sovereign nations like Russia or China to declare a sanctuary for DRM researchers, similar to what Israel has. That would garner them good publicity, allow them to give the finger to US / EU shenanigans and expose this sham of DRM. I wonder how long could DRM hold if there is a steady stream of legit research breaking it all the time.
• cr0sh 9y ago
  I wonder if EME or some other similar mechanism in the future will be used to create websites that can only be viewed by certain browsers and/or operating systems? Perhaps even prevent you from copying any part of them or download anything from them? Maybe Web Assembly will also play a role (perhaps as a DRM'd browser "wrapper" to view content through) - it would be like using a DRM'd browser "window" via Flash or something. Where any browser can view the content, but it is impossible to get any of the content out (because no one saves bits of conversation from blogs or anything like that - and all websites will always exist). Hmm - indeed, imagine if you couldn't copy twitter feeds or facebook posts (and they were DRM'd in such a manner that trying to do so would be a violation)...? All of sudden, people could erase posts and claim they never said it, because there isn't any copies of it around (today, they have to get lucky and hope nobody made a copy first).
• nkurz 9y ago
  I came in agreeing with all the conclusions of this piece, and after reading it still agree with them, but I find myself less trusting of the EFF than I was before reading it. Is there a short descriptive term for "alienating your allies by obfuscating the details in an attempt to make a stronger case than the evidence actually supports"? Let me focus on a specific example that bothered me: "It is obviously not a copyright infringement to go into a store in (say) New Delhi and buy a DVD and bring it home to (say) Topeka. The rightsholder made their movie, sold it to the retailer, and you paid the retailer the asking price. This is the opposite of copyright infringement." A fine example, but why the rhetorical insistence on "obviously"? The author is an expert in this area, and almost certainly knows more about the details of US copyright law than I do. But this means he also knows that the legal situation is not nearly as clear cut as the word "obviously" would suggest. First, he knows that the US Supreme Court had a recent 6-3 decision regarding this: https://www.wired.com/2013/03/scotus-first-sale-decision/ https://www.wired.com/2013/03/scotus-first-sale-decision/. Yes, it was decided in the direction he and I both favor, but I refuse to accept that the subject of a recent split decision in the Supreme Court can fairly be defined as "obvious". Secondly, the author also knows that the legality of the importation of copyrighted material depends on who is doing the importing, the number of copies imported, and the purpose of the importing: https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap6.html https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap6.html. So while the current law does allow an individual to legally bring back a single copy of a work for personal use, it does not currently allow them to bring back an extra copy to give as a gift. Why not? Because this very similar action is still considered to infringe on the copyright holder's exclusive right of distribution. It would be fine to say that it "should be obvious" to import copyrighted items, or that "one would hope it would be obvious", but it's lying to claim that it is simply "obvious". This strikes me as a clear indication that the author is willing to mislead his readers when he feels it furthers his goals. This makes me distrust his characterization of all the behind the scenes decisions that I can't verify. What's the thought process behind this? Am I misinterpreting?
  • quadrangle 9y ago
    OBVIOUSLY, if you aren't copying something AT ALL, then you can't be infringing on copyright! I mean, okay, there's bizarro legal arguments, but their use of "obviously" is as simple as saying "it doesn't need to be stated that lending a physical book to a friend does not involve copying the book". The fact that first-sale stuff and the DMCA itself and all sorts of weird legal issues (e.g. about plagiarism) are tied into copyright law doesn't mean that this stuff is sensible. The "obvious" part is that the core concept of copyright has, in a logical intellectual (not necessarily legal) fashion NOTHING to do with playing the same disc on two different continents. It's a fine enough use of "obviously", and they don't mean it from a legal standpoint. If you were an editor of the article, you could probably have convinced them to change the sentence to say "…obviously not a copying issue…" instead of "copyright infringement" or some other nuanced edit. This is nothing more than being super picky about the exact wording in one sentence. > I refuse to accept that the subject of a recent split decision in the Supreme Court can fairly be defined as "obvious" While that may be a fine enough guideline, there certainly can be judges, even on the SCOTUS, who argue against what is "obvious". But again, the sentence you object to wasn't a legal brief, it was just an attempt to express the OBVIOUS lunacy in the DVD example having anything to do with copying / copyright. Reductio ad absurdem: if a law is passed saying that it shall be considered "homicide" if a fiction author describes a murder in a book, it would still be perfectly sensible to say, "that is obviously not homicide". Point is: the law can be "obviously" wrong. The only weird part of their sentence is that "copyright infringement" is a legal wording, and they were using it to refer to the concept rather than the legal interpretation.