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HTML itself is a fundamentally open standard on which the entire op web is built. Adding DRM to that ends that. Period. No hysterics. The attempt to add DRM t

HTML itself is a fundamentally open standard on which the entire op web is built. Adding DRM to that ends that. Period. No hysterics. The attempt to add DRM to HTML is a full frontal attack on the open web. This is not subject to interpretation or nuance, that is equivalent to being "a little bit pregnant".

jiggy2011 14y ago
It does not necessarily stop the web being an open standard in that sense. An open standard is really just a way of saying "if you want to do X in a way that is compatible with Y then your implementation must follow these rules and these rules are published in such a way that any person will be equally able to produce an implementation". You can propose an open standard for DRM that everyone is free to implement or not. If you want to have a DRM free browsing experience you can simply use a browser that implements every part of the standard apart from the DRM part. The only thing that changes is that stuff that is built to require the DRM component will not work. It would be just like disabling <canvas> support in your browser or something like that.
- michaelt 14y ago
  You can propose an open standard for DRM that everyone is free to implement or not. At the core of DRM is this: The video is encrypted, and you only give the decryption key to trusted software that promises not to let the user save anything. Unfortunately open source software cannot make that promise - because anyone can modify it, anyone can modify it to let the user save things. So you either let open source implementations have the decryption key, in which case the DRM is ineffective; or you refuse to let open source implementations have the decryption key, in which case there's no video on Firefox or Chromium. Perhaps you ask "Why can't the open source software check itself for modifications any only decrypt the video if no modifications were present?" - unfortunately, the check could be modified just as easily as the rest of the software. Perhaps you ask "Surely we could have a little bit of closed source software as a plugin, like flash player?" - but the whole point of HTML5 video is to get away from shitty closed-source plugins like flash. If you want flash, stick with flash. Perhaps you ask "What's the big deal with open source anyway? Firefox only has 20% market share" - but Chrome, Safari and (recently) Opera are all based on the open source Webkit rendering engine. That leaves IE and nothing else. Before open source browsers became popular, Internet Explorer 6 had 90%+ market share and went 5 years without a substantive upgrade due to lack of competition. A return to the bad old days would not be a net win, even for the likes of Netflix, Google and the BBC. The fact of the matter, as I understand it, is DRM barely works when it's closed source and if it was open source it wouldn't work at all. If you think there's some way to implement open source DRM I'd love to hear how.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    Not sure of the specifics of implementation proposed but I imagine that the actual DRM decryption would have to happen somewhere in the guts of the kernel and the HTML part would mainly be metadata. DRM only implemented at browser level would be laughably bad as screen capture software would defeat it. Fundamentally though this isn't really any different from current Silverlight based DRM. Things like netflix don't work on Linux (without hacks) as it stands. Other non-drm video (which constitutes the overwhelming majority of web video) would continue to work as it does today. Besides even closed source DRM enforcement mechanisms can be defeated by someone with strong asm skills and enough time.
  - acdha 14y ago
    > The fact of the matter, as I understand it, is DRM barely works when it's closed source and if it was open source it wouldn't work at all. If you think there's some way to implement open source DRM I'd love to hear how. Fundamentally, the problem has nothing to do with open or closed software: it's all about access to the decryption key. Open source doesn't really change this dynamic much as hackers have routinely retrieved keys from anything which they can access. You could implement something like HDCP where the content is encrypted all the way to the display device, at which point it's easy to have a completely OSS stack since it's just copying bytes to a specific location. I'd like to think that at some point people will realize that making digital data uncopyable is, as Bruce Schneier famously quipped, like trying to make water unwet. In the meantime, I'd prefer that the software millions of people depend on be standardized and developed by conscientious security-minded professionals – i.e. not Flash.
gwright 14y ago
Slow down there. The proposal adds DRM options to the HTMLMediaElement. It doesn't change HTML in its entirety. It doesn't require DRM. It doesn't break non-DRM implementations. Getting hysterical and propogating inaccurate information isn't helpful. The proposed changes are described here https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-media/encrypted-media-fpwd.html https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-med....
gph 14y ago
>HTML itself is a fundamentally open standard on which the entire op web is built. Adding DRM to that ends that. Period. No hysterics. Nothing about adding DRM will make HTML any less of an open standard. It will just be an open standard that allows those who use it to implement DRM on their content. You can throw around as much rhetoric as you want and say it isn't open to interpretation, you're still not right.
- Joeboy 14y ago
  > It will just be an open standard that allows those who use it to implement DRM on their content. As somebody who's made quite a lot of websites for quite a lot of people, I suspect that equates to "the internet will eventually be almost entirely DRMed".
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    Flash and silverlight have offered DRM capabilities for years and only a small minority of websites have used them.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    So what? People who want to produce open content will still be able to use the internet to reach those who want to consume it. I'd actually love to have viable DRM. I'd love a youtube where I could pay a monthly subscription instead of watching annoying ads. If DRM gave me that option it'd be great.
    - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
      >I'd love a youtube where I could pay a monthly subscription instead of watching annoying ads. If DRM gave me that option it'd be great. Can you explain how DRM could actually accomplish that? I don't see any existing barrier to them offering an option to pay a monthly fee to get access to ad-free YouTube along side the ad supported free version, other than that probably not enough people would prefer paying vs. watching ads for it to be worth offering it.
acdha 14y ago
> Adding DRM to that ends that. Period. No hysterics. Your post is nothing but hysterics. Adding DRM support allows browsers to decide what to do in their UI in a standard way. It doesn't force unwilling content providers to use it and claiming that it closes the web is like claiming that HTTP should not support passwords because someone could use them to prevent open access to a page.
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago
  >It doesn't force unwilling content providers to use it This is like claiming there is nothing wrong with Microsoft's traditional efforts to promote developer tools that can't produce software for non-Microsoft operating systems because "it doesn't force unwilling software developers to use it." The problem isn't for Microsoft or those who develop for Microsoft platforms, it's for those who want to use or develop non-Microsoft platforms. It's not about Hollywood, it's about everyone else. If you put DRM in HTML then I as a user can't use it from an open source web browser on an open source operating system. If you put DRM in HTML then I as a software developer can't write a competitive web browser or operating system without permission from Hollywood. It's not about "protecting content" -- all the content is already on The Pirate Bay and Hollywood is doing fine -- what it's about is creating gatekeepers. It's about leveraging the dominant position the studios have over the market for video production into a gatekeeper position in content distribution, so that they can use it to make sure smaller content producers can't get access to customers without using their approved devices with their approved software, which ultimately allows them to collect a toll even for things they didn't create, and choose what message gets seen by the people and use that to frame the public debate as they've traditionally been able to do. Even if you don't think that's what it's about or that's what their goals are, that's still what it enables and why it needs to be stopped.
  - acdha 14y ago
    > If you put DRM in HTML then I as a software developer can't write a competitive web browser or operating system without permission from Hollywood Look, I dislike DRM at least as much as you do but whether or not we like it, DRM is not going away any time soon. When you protest HTML5 gaining a standard way to specify this, you're saying “I would prefer most of the internet run on close binary plugins controlled by a single vendor until the rest of the world adopts my political views”. Since most people are going to stop using Netflix, Hulu, etc. I would at least like the system to be standard, competitive and well-secured. Finally, it's a canard to make this an open source issue: it's really about control of the underlying platform: if the decryption key is extractable, it's game-over – and so the studios desperately want to end general purpose computing. Neither Windows nor WinDVD were OSS and yet the first DVD key extraction happened there shortly after release.
rayiner 14y ago
You just repeated an assertion. HTML is an open standard. The DRM spec will presumably be open. How does that make the web not open? Any more than the fact you can use a paywall already?
- mikeryan 14y ago
  The DRM spec will presumably be open Isn't actually true, as I understand it, the integration points to DRM will be standard and "open" but the DRM implementation can be a black box as currently proposed.

jiggy2011 14y ago

It does not necessarily stop the web being an open standard in that sense. An open standard is really just a way of saying "if you want to do X in a way that is compatible with Y then your implementation must follow these rules and these rules are published in such a way that any person will be equally able to produce an implementation". You can propose an open standard for DRM that everyone is free to implement or not. If you want to have a DRM free browsing experience you can simply use a browser that implements every part of the standard apart from the DRM part. The only thing that changes is that stuff that is built to require the DRM component will not work. It would be just like disabling <canvas> support in your browser or something like that.

michaelt 14y ago
You can propose an open standard for DRM that everyone is free to implement or not. At the core of DRM is this: The video is encrypted, and you only give the decryption key to trusted software that promises not to let the user save anything. Unfortunately open source software cannot make that promise - because anyone can modify it, anyone can modify it to let the user save things. So you either let open source implementations have the decryption key, in which case the DRM is ineffective; or you refuse to let open source implementations have the decryption key, in which case there's no video on Firefox or Chromium. Perhaps you ask "Why can't the open source software check itself for modifications any only decrypt the video if no modifications were present?" - unfortunately, the check could be modified just as easily as the rest of the software. Perhaps you ask "Surely we could have a little bit of closed source software as a plugin, like flash player?" - but the whole point of HTML5 video is to get away from shitty closed-source plugins like flash. If you want flash, stick with flash. Perhaps you ask "What's the big deal with open source anyway? Firefox only has 20% market share" - but Chrome, Safari and (recently) Opera are all based on the open source Webkit rendering engine. That leaves IE and nothing else. Before open source browsers became popular, Internet Explorer 6 had 90%+ market share and went 5 years without a substantive upgrade due to lack of competition. A return to the bad old days would not be a net win, even for the likes of Netflix, Google and the BBC. The fact of the matter, as I understand it, is DRM barely works when it's closed source and if it was open source it wouldn't work at all. If you think there's some way to implement open source DRM I'd love to hear how.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Not sure of the specifics of implementation proposed but I imagine that the actual DRM decryption would have to happen somewhere in the guts of the kernel and the HTML part would mainly be metadata. DRM only implemented at browser level would be laughably bad as screen capture software would defeat it. Fundamentally though this isn't really any different from current Silverlight based DRM. Things like netflix don't work on Linux (without hacks) as it stands. Other non-drm video (which constitutes the overwhelming majority of web video) would continue to work as it does today. Besides even closed source DRM enforcement mechanisms can be defeated by someone with strong asm skills and enough time.
- acdha 14y ago
  > The fact of the matter, as I understand it, is DRM barely works when it's closed source and if it was open source it wouldn't work at all. If you think there's some way to implement open source DRM I'd love to hear how. Fundamentally, the problem has nothing to do with open or closed software: it's all about access to the decryption key. Open source doesn't really change this dynamic much as hackers have routinely retrieved keys from anything which they can access. You could implement something like HDCP where the content is encrypted all the way to the display device, at which point it's easy to have a completely OSS stack since it's just copying bytes to a specific location. I'd like to think that at some point people will realize that making digital data uncopyable is, as Bruce Schneier famously quipped, like trying to make water unwet. In the meantime, I'd prefer that the software millions of people depend on be standardized and developed by conscientious security-minded professionals – i.e. not Flash.

gwright 14y ago

Slow down there. The proposal adds DRM options to the HTMLMediaElement. It doesn't change HTML in its entirety. It doesn't require DRM. It doesn't break non-DRM implementations. Getting hysterical and propogating inaccurate information isn't helpful. The proposed changes are described here https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-media/encrypted-media-fpwd.html https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-med....

gph 14y ago

>HTML itself is a fundamentally open standard on which the entire op web is built. Adding DRM to that ends that. Period. No hysterics. Nothing about adding DRM will make HTML any less of an open standard. It will just be an open standard that allows those who use it to implement DRM on their content. You can throw around as much rhetoric as you want and say it isn't open to interpretation, you're still not right.

Joeboy 14y ago
> It will just be an open standard that allows those who use it to implement DRM on their content. As somebody who's made quite a lot of websites for quite a lot of people, I suspect that equates to "the internet will eventually be almost entirely DRMed".
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Flash and silverlight have offered DRM capabilities for years and only a small minority of websites have used them.
- rayiner 14y ago
  So what? People who want to produce open content will still be able to use the internet to reach those who want to consume it. I'd actually love to have viable DRM. I'd love a youtube where I could pay a monthly subscription instead of watching annoying ads. If DRM gave me that option it'd be great.
  - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
    >I'd love a youtube where I could pay a monthly subscription instead of watching annoying ads. If DRM gave me that option it'd be great. Can you explain how DRM could actually accomplish that? I don't see any existing barrier to them offering an option to pay a monthly fee to get access to ad-free YouTube along side the ad supported free version, other than that probably not enough people would prefer paying vs. watching ads for it to be worth offering it.

acdha 14y ago

> Adding DRM to that ends that. Period. No hysterics. Your post is nothing but hysterics. Adding DRM support allows browsers to decide what to do in their UI in a standard way. It doesn't force unwilling content providers to use it and claiming that it closes the web is like claiming that HTTP should not support passwords because someone could use them to prevent open access to a page.

AnthonyMouse 14y ago
>It doesn't force unwilling content providers to use it This is like claiming there is nothing wrong with Microsoft's traditional efforts to promote developer tools that can't produce software for non-Microsoft operating systems because "it doesn't force unwilling software developers to use it." The problem isn't for Microsoft or those who develop for Microsoft platforms, it's for those who want to use or develop non-Microsoft platforms. It's not about Hollywood, it's about everyone else. If you put DRM in HTML then I as a user can't use it from an open source web browser on an open source operating system. If you put DRM in HTML then I as a software developer can't write a competitive web browser or operating system without permission from Hollywood. It's not about "protecting content" -- all the content is already on The Pirate Bay and Hollywood is doing fine -- what it's about is creating gatekeepers. It's about leveraging the dominant position the studios have over the market for video production into a gatekeeper position in content distribution, so that they can use it to make sure smaller content producers can't get access to customers without using their approved devices with their approved software, which ultimately allows them to collect a toll even for things they didn't create, and choose what message gets seen by the people and use that to frame the public debate as they've traditionally been able to do. Even if you don't think that's what it's about or that's what their goals are, that's still what it enables and why it needs to be stopped.
- acdha 14y ago
  > If you put DRM in HTML then I as a software developer can't write a competitive web browser or operating system without permission from Hollywood Look, I dislike DRM at least as much as you do but whether or not we like it, DRM is not going away any time soon. When you protest HTML5 gaining a standard way to specify this, you're saying “I would prefer most of the internet run on close binary plugins controlled by a single vendor until the rest of the world adopts my political views”. Since most people are going to stop using Netflix, Hulu, etc. I would at least like the system to be standard, competitive and well-secured. Finally, it's a canard to make this an open source issue: it's really about control of the underlying platform: if the decryption key is extractable, it's game-over – and so the studios desperately want to end general purpose computing. Neither Windows nor WinDVD were OSS and yet the first DVD key extraction happened there shortly after release.

rayiner 14y ago

You just repeated an assertion. HTML is an open standard. The DRM spec will presumably be open. How does that make the web not open? Any more than the fact you can use a paywall already?

mikeryan 14y ago
The DRM spec will presumably be open Isn't actually true, as I understand it, the integration points to DRM will be standard and "open" but the DRM implementation can be a black box as currently proposed.