4 ms·

> 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. I mean, ye

by geofft 8y ago

> 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. I mean, yes, but why would they do that? > 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? You're assuming that content is fungible. If I want to watch Game of Thrones, I want to watch Game of Thrones, not "Winter Dragon," and "Winter Dragon" being DRM-free won't incentivize me to watch it. Furthermore, development of media content is expensive and requires a bunch of up-front capital / investment. So while there is a market opportunity, it isn't obvious that taking advantage of it without connections to the existing industry is a profitable strategy.

whatusername 8y ago
Is that a reference to the travesty of a wheel of time pilot episode? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4450372/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4450372/
- geofft 8y ago
  Yeah, I was trying to think of the most awful thing that superficially seems like a substitute good for Game of Thrones :)
AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> I mean, yes, but why would they do that? So that they're not beholden to adversarial corporations. > You're assuming that content is fungible. If I want to watch Game of Thrones, I want to watch Game of Thrones, not "Winter Dragon," and "Winter Dragon" being DRM-free won't incentivize me to watch it. Except that it is fungible, it's just not universally fungible. The reason Winter Dragon isn't fungible with Game of Thrones is that you don't like it as much. You'd rather watch Game of Thrones. But there are thousands of shows, and out of those there are hundreds you might want to watch, yet there is only time to watch dozens or fewer. Nobody can actually watch all of the shows they might want to watch. Letting "lack of DRM" be the thing that chooses between the ones of equal desirability to you is as good a way of pruning the list as any. > Furthermore, development of media content is expensive and requires a bunch of up-front capital / investment. So while there is a market opportunity, it isn't obvious that taking advantage of it without connections to the existing industry is a profitable strategy. Who says it has to be someone without connections to the existing industry? New independent studios form all the time as existing talent strikes out on their own. All it takes is for one of them to prove the market before everybody is doing it.
- geofft 8y ago
  > So that they're not beholden to adversarial corporations. What is so adversarial about these corporations to the browser makers? What benefit, concretely, do Microsoft or Google or Apple get from being free of the shackles of Disney or CBS? One concrete benefit I see is less risk of the third-party code destabilizing your code because it has bugs and is running within your address space, but there's an easy solution there: sandbox the EME blob like Firefox (and other browsers too, I assume) does. Then its crashes and buffer overflows don't become your crashes and memory corruptions.
  - gsnedders 8y ago
    Only in the case of Firefox is it really third-party code; both Chrome, Edge, and Safari ship with the EME modules developed by the respective companies, but they still sandbox it. Plugins like Flash, which are the historic answer for DRM on the web, have a huge surface space and can interact in the browser in all kinds of odd ways. These EME modules are much smaller, they are much less powerful (AFAIK they either return a frame to the browser to composite or directly to the OS compositor, so you don't need to worry about how they change layout and then change layout again as you reflow), and as a result of that can be put in stricter sandboxes. That's a clear win from a browser security and stability point-of-view, which is a concrete benefit for browser vendors in making it viable to drop Flash (and dropping Flash without providing a replacement for encumbered video isn't an option: breaking websites like Netflix will cause users to use other/older browsers that do support Flash).
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      > Only in the case of Firefox is it really third-party code; both Chrome, Edge, and Safari ship with the EME modules developed by the respective companies, but they still sandbox it. They still sandbox it because from the user's perspective it's still an unauditable black box, so at least the user can verify the sandbox. But that doesn't actually solve the problem, because the black box code is interacting with black box hardware. If there is a bug, you've done the opposite of sandboxing it -- you've prevented it from being traced and given it direct access to hardware. > and dropping Flash without providing a replacement for encumbered video isn't an option: breaking websites like Netflix will cause users to use other/older browsers that do support Flash The solution to Flash should have been to have someone reverse engineer it and publish a 100% open source implementation, including the DRM. Then let them keep publishing using Flash format as long as they like, but no more black box.

by geofft 8y ago

whatusername 8y ago

Is that a reference to the travesty of a wheel of time pilot episode? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4450372/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4450372/

geofft 8y ago
Yeah, I was trying to think of the most awful thing that superficially seems like a substitute good for Game of Thrones :)

AnthonyMouse 8y ago

> I mean, yes, but why would they do that? So that they're not beholden to adversarial corporations. > You're assuming that content is fungible. If I want to watch Game of Thrones, I want to watch Game of Thrones, not "Winter Dragon," and "Winter Dragon" being DRM-free won't incentivize me to watch it. Except that it is fungible, it's just not universally fungible. The reason Winter Dragon isn't fungible with Game of Thrones is that you don't like it as much. You'd rather watch Game of Thrones. But there are thousands of shows, and out of those there are hundreds you might want to watch, yet there is only time to watch dozens or fewer. Nobody can actually watch all of the shows they might want to watch. Letting "lack of DRM" be the thing that chooses between the ones of equal desirability to you is as good a way of pruning the list as any. > Furthermore, development of media content is expensive and requires a bunch of up-front capital / investment. So while there is a market opportunity, it isn't obvious that taking advantage of it without connections to the existing industry is a profitable strategy. Who says it has to be someone without connections to the existing industry? New independent studios form all the time as existing talent strikes out on their own. All it takes is for one of them to prove the market before everybody is doing it.

geofft 8y ago
> So that they're not beholden to adversarial corporations. What is so adversarial about these corporations to the browser makers? What benefit, concretely, do Microsoft or Google or Apple get from being free of the shackles of Disney or CBS? One concrete benefit I see is less risk of the third-party code destabilizing your code because it has bugs and is running within your address space, but there's an easy solution there: sandbox the EME blob like Firefox (and other browsers too, I assume) does. Then its crashes and buffer overflows don't become your crashes and memory corruptions.
- gsnedders 8y ago
  Only in the case of Firefox is it really third-party code; both Chrome, Edge, and Safari ship with the EME modules developed by the respective companies, but they still sandbox it. Plugins like Flash, which are the historic answer for DRM on the web, have a huge surface space and can interact in the browser in all kinds of odd ways. These EME modules are much smaller, they are much less powerful (AFAIK they either return a frame to the browser to composite or directly to the OS compositor, so you don't need to worry about how they change layout and then change layout again as you reflow), and as a result of that can be put in stricter sandboxes. That's a clear win from a browser security and stability point-of-view, which is a concrete benefit for browser vendors in making it viable to drop Flash (and dropping Flash without providing a replacement for encumbered video isn't an option: breaking websites like Netflix will cause users to use other/older browsers that do support Flash).
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > Only in the case of Firefox is it really third-party code; both Chrome, Edge, and Safari ship with the EME modules developed by the respective companies, but they still sandbox it. They still sandbox it because from the user's perspective it's still an unauditable black box, so at least the user can verify the sandbox. But that doesn't actually solve the problem, because the black box code is interacting with black box hardware. If there is a bug, you've done the opposite of sandboxing it -- you've prevented it from being traced and given it direct access to hardware. > and dropping Flash without providing a replacement for encumbered video isn't an option: breaking websites like Netflix will cause users to use other/older browsers that do support Flash The solution to Flash should have been to have someone reverse engineer it and publish a 100% open source implementation, including the DRM. Then let them keep publishing using Flash format as long as they like, but no more black box.