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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=152

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

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