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Clearly. Just to expand on why you're right, it's the client that's in charge of restricting the rights of the user -> enforcing "play once", "stream only", "24
by trotsky 16y ago
Clearly. Just to expand on why you're right, it's the client that's in charge of restricting the rights of the user -> enforcing "play once", "stream only", "24 hour pass" etc. If anyone can write a client based on the open standard, obviously anyone can write a client that ignores the granted rights.
If you need to rely on API keys and pre-approved platforms there isn't much open about it. At that point you're just trying to get 3rd party developers to build your proprietary clients for you.
- lukifer 16y ago> Anyone can write a client that ignores the granted rights. Not necessarily; the server providing the video can look at your authentication cookie and the current timestamp, and decide whether to send you video or not. The harder thing is preventing clients from stealing the data. If the player uses an open standard, someone could easily write a version that plays by all the authentication rules, but then pipes the playback bits to the hard drive and then torrent sites. And then suits get nervous about signing over their content, and we're right back to the status quo of digital media. I hope Netflix has a clever solution for this, but it's hard to see how it's possible.
- trotsky 16y agoSaving the data for later play is one of the rights you manage with DRM - if you're not supposed to be able to play it later and the client allows you to, it's ignoring the granted rights. Sharing the data with friends is another "right" in DRM. What you're describing is authentication - something that you can clearly do within HTML5 as is.
- rmc 16y agoNot necessarily; the server providing the video can look at your authentication cookie and the current timestamp, and decide whether to send you video or not. Although that's true. It would be trivial for someone to publish, say, a Firefox extension that saves all the video to your harddisk as you watch it. If that happens the suits and lawyers will get very upset. They'd almost certainly change it from the open web standard. This means it'd be impossible to have a web standard with DRM.