12 ms·

No, if the Director had overridden the majority of the membership, the browser vendors would've shipped something anyway, and the YouTubes and Netflixes of the

No, if the Director had overridden the majority of the membership, the browser vendors would've shipped something anyway, and the YouTubes and Netflixes of the world would be using it anyway.

fixermark 8y ago
Essentially. The money gated behind a closed DRM solution is so large that the w3c ran the risk of becoming an irrelevant standards body for this space if they didn't comply with what their members wanted to do. It's sub-optimal, but I don't think an optimal solution actually existed. A standards board divorced from reality is no better than no standard at all.
Touche 8y ago
> No, if the Director had overridden the majority of the membership, the browser vendors would've shipped something anyway That's fine. It's better that the burden for maintaining non-standard plugins be put on the sites and browsers that choose to do that, rather than be placed on everyone else.
- geofft 8y ago
  How would that have improved the current situation? The videos that Metastream wants to play would still have been DRM'd and would still be playable in the mainstream browsers. What would the benefit have been? What burden is being placed on people now that wouldn't be placed on people in that scenario?
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    Making the user experience of DRM worse is better because then fewer people will use it. If the platforms all made it so that you have to solder a new chip into your phone before you can play DRM content, there would be a lot less DRM. The argument that platforms have to do this for competitive reasons is doublethink. If the experience is worse and that will cause customers to flee, how is it that they would only flee from the platforms that don't have DRM but not the content providers that require it? Wouldn't that create a huge market opportunity for new DRM-free studios, who would then out-compete the traditional ones by being available on all platforms instead of only on Insecure Expensive Proprietary Slow Cableco Platform Nobody Likes?
    - gsnedders 8y ago
      Would it have made the user experience of DRM any worse than it currently is, though? The DRM module would still ship with Chrome and Edge (and likely Safari too, given Apple became involved pretty quickly), you'd still need multiple different streaming formats (in the form of different DRM formats) as you do today, and maybe you'd need slightly different JS codepath per-browser too (but that's not a big difference to today with the different DRM formats). It's very unclear to me that the W3C refusing to be involved from day one would've led to any outcome very more than subtly different than the one we ended at. At the point that the specification went to Recommendation, there were already multiple interoperable implementations, so objecting at that point was purely a matter of principle, it literally wouldn't have affected the outcome in any way.
      - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        If the W3C making the right decision would make them irrelevant then what has actually happened is that they're already irrelevant, and becoming a rubber stamp on bad ideas only serves to prove that and erode their credibility. Moreover, such organizations are made up of their members, and it's up to the members to do the right thing as well. Nobody had to volunteer to be the first to add this gunk to their browser. It can't be a competitive disadvantage if nobody else has it either, and it can't be a competitive advantage if everybody else has it, and those are the two options so why not choose the first?
        kbenson 8y ago
        This is just the age old discussion of whether it's better to capitulate in small ways so you can steer a group away from bad behavior/decisions later or to make a stand on principle to draw attention to the current bad decisions. As much as some people like to say one is better than the other, I think the answer is always "it depends". Unfortunately, it depends not only on the relative power and momentum behind the current problem when deciding, but also on unknowns such as what will happen in the future. It's hard for me to find too much fault in them deciding that they would rather stay somewhat relevant to the process than become obviously irrelevant (if that was indeed the thought process), as there's still a lot they can affect in the future. Armchair quarterbacking about what they should have done isn't too useful in my eyes.
  - Touche 8y ago
    The existence of features in any piece of software is a burden on further development of said software. Every time we go to add some other new feature to the spec we have to take into account how it will affect EME. That's just how software works.
- skybrian 8y ago
  It's funny how people try to make "standard" mean something magical when it's not. An Internet standard is just a document written by a committee of people who intend to do what it says. They then publicize it and try to get people to go along with it. You can't keep people from getting together to write a document or from doing what the document says. You can just choose whether to participate. If W3C chose not to help write the DRM standard, the browser vendors could easily create a new organization and write a standard anyway (as happened with WHATWG). Browser vendors and website authors could then read that document just as easily as anything published on the W3C website, so there is no "burden" for them. There would be no difference to the end user. The only burden we're talking about is the inconvenience of setting up an organization to do the writing. It's a minor speedbump at best. The upshot is that there is no way to prevent browser vendors from standardizing anything they want. It only gets blocked if they disagree.
  - Touche 8y ago
    No one is implying that not infecting W3C with DRM is going to kill DRM. Of course anyone can agree to things in whatever organized way they want to. The reason to keep it out of W3C is because it violates their core mission: https://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission#principles https://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission#principles . Other organizations with a different mission are free to do as they wish, obviously.
adl 8y ago
Welcome to the 21st

No, if the Director had overridden the majority of the membership, the browser vendors would've shipped something anyway, and the YouTubes and Netflixes of the world would be using it anyway.

fixermark 8y ago

Essentially. The money gated behind a closed DRM solution is so large that the w3c ran the risk of becoming an irrelevant standards body for this space if they didn't comply with what their members wanted to do. It's sub-optimal, but I don't think an optimal solution actually existed. A standards board divorced from reality is no better than no standard at all.

Touche 8y ago

> No, if the Director had overridden the majority of the membership, the browser vendors would've shipped something anyway That's fine. It's better that the burden for maintaining non-standard plugins be put on the sites and browsers that choose to do that, rather than be placed on everyone else.

geofft 8y ago
How would that have improved the current situation? The videos that Metastream wants to play would still have been DRM'd and would still be playable in the mainstream browsers. What would the benefit have been? What burden is being placed on people now that wouldn't be placed on people in that scenario?
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  Making the user experience of DRM worse is better because then fewer people will use it. If the platforms all made it so that you have to solder a new chip into your phone before you can play DRM content, there would be a lot less DRM. The argument that platforms have to do this for competitive reasons is doublethink. If the experience is worse and that will cause customers to flee, how is it that they would only flee from the platforms that don't have DRM but not the content providers that require it? Wouldn't that create a huge market opportunity for new DRM-free studios, who would then out-compete the traditional ones by being available on all platforms instead of only on Insecure Expensive Proprietary Slow Cableco Platform Nobody Likes?
  - gsnedders 8y ago
    Would it have made the user experience of DRM any worse than it currently is, though? The DRM module would still ship with Chrome and Edge (and likely Safari too, given Apple became involved pretty quickly), you'd still need multiple different streaming formats (in the form of different DRM formats) as you do today, and maybe you'd need slightly different JS codepath per-browser too (but that's not a big difference to today with the different DRM formats). It's very unclear to me that the W3C refusing to be involved from day one would've led to any outcome very more than subtly different than the one we ended at. At the point that the specification went to Recommendation, there were already multiple interoperable implementations, so objecting at that point was purely a matter of principle, it literally wouldn't have affected the outcome in any way.
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      If the W3C making the right decision would make them irrelevant then what has actually happened is that they're already irrelevant, and becoming a rubber stamp on bad ideas only serves to prove that and erode their credibility. Moreover, such organizations are made up of their members, and it's up to the members to do the right thing as well. Nobody had to volunteer to be the first to add this gunk to their browser. It can't be a competitive disadvantage if nobody else has it either, and it can't be a competitive advantage if everybody else has it, and those are the two options so why not choose the first?
      - kbenson 8y ago
        This is just the age old discussion of whether it's better to capitulate in small ways so you can steer a group away from bad behavior/decisions later or to make a stand on principle to draw attention to the current bad decisions. As much as some people like to say one is better than the other, I think the answer is always "it depends". Unfortunately, it depends not only on the relative power and momentum behind the current problem when deciding, but also on unknowns such as what will happen in the future. It's hard for me to find too much fault in them deciding that they would rather stay somewhat relevant to the process than become obviously irrelevant (if that was indeed the thought process), as there's still a lot they can affect in the future. Armchair quarterbacking about what they should have done isn't too useful in my eyes.
- Touche 8y ago
  The existence of features in any piece of software is a burden on further development of said software. Every time we go to add some other new feature to the spec we have to take into account how it will affect EME. That's just how software works.
skybrian 8y ago
It's funny how people try to make "standard" mean something magical when it's not. An Internet standard is just a document written by a committee of people who intend to do what it says. They then publicize it and try to get people to go along with it. You can't keep people from getting together to write a document or from doing what the document says. You can just choose whether to participate. If W3C chose not to help write the DRM standard, the browser vendors could easily create a new organization and write a standard anyway (as happened with WHATWG). Browser vendors and website authors could then read that document just as easily as anything published on the W3C website, so there is no "burden" for them. There would be no difference to the end user. The only burden we're talking about is the inconvenience of setting up an organization to do the writing. It's a minor speedbump at best. The upshot is that there is no way to prevent browser vendors from standardizing anything they want. It only gets blocked if they disagree.
- Touche 8y ago
  No one is implying that not infecting W3C with DRM is going to kill DRM. Of course anyone can agree to things in whatever organized way they want to. The reason to keep it out of W3C is because it violates their core mission: https://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission#principles https://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission#principles . Other organizations with a different mission are free to do as they wish, obviously.

adl 8y ago

Welcome to the 21st