11 ms·

I'm actually a bit conflicted about support for DRM schemes in HTML5. I absolute loathe DRM and I wish every damn publisher of every damn type would come to th

by Daiz 14y ago

I'm actually a bit conflicted about support for DRM schemes in HTML5. I absolute loathe DRM and I wish every damn publisher of every damn type would come to their senses and actually sell DRM-free digital products. However, there is one case where some form of "DRM" does make sense, and that's actual renting - or more specifically, the popular case of "catalog subscription" (ala Spotify, Netflix and so on). You're clearly renting access to a catalog of goods in this kind of model, and therefore it makes sense that you'd want to stop people from permanently acquiring copies in such a scenario, especially if you're selling actual DRM-free downloads at the same time (in my ideal digital store where it makes sense they would offer both of these side-by-side). The catalog subscription model has some clear value to it, and I'd hate for it to disappear due to "technical unfeasibility". As such, I would at least prefer for most of the tech / architecture to be based on HTML5 stuff instead of closed plugins like Flash, Silverlight, Widevine and so on. I can't really think of a good solution to this, unless you got the big wigs at various publishing outlets to accept that to do HTML5 streaming, you can only make downloading the rentable versions inconvenient for regular versions (instead of being able to use a heavy-weight closed DRM plugin), but I'm afraid that could be quite challenging. It has worked for Adobe and webfonts, though[1], so maybe there's hope. Forcing HTML5 to be DRM-free could eventually lead to this direction. [1] http://blog.typekit.com/2009/07/21/serving-and-protecting-fonts-on-the-web/ http://blog.typekit.com/2009/07/21/serving-and-protecting-fo...

yarrel 14y ago
Renting infinitely copyable goods doesn't make sense. Subscriptions to channels containing them does. DRM doesn't increase the convenience of those channels. It reduces them.
- Daiz 14y ago
  The problem I have is that I can't really imagine the catalog subscription model to be feasible if any and all catalog entries were available to download without DRM. Someone with a fat pipe could just spend a month downloading absolutely everything, cutting the subscription and enjoying the goods for a long time to come, whereas the idea is that the user remains as a subscriber because of the limited time they have for consuming all the content. And while DRM is generally very inconvenient, there are also places where it's mostly "invisible" - Spotify and Netflix are pretty damn convenient on the whole, with pretty much the only major downside being the inability to watch stuff without an internet connection (though Spotify offers limited offline downloads for this reason too). The DRM in Steam is also generally quite invisible to the end-users, which is why people generally do not mind it - and also because Steam offers a lot more convenience with its service than what it takes away with its DRM. As I said, ideally I'd like to see digital stores that combine the catalog subscription model as well as individual DRM-free purchases. Think Netflix, except you could also buy the really good stuff that you like. This would allow you to download DRM-free copies in many formats whenever you want, they could also bundle purchases with stuff like extras, and best of all: since they have a streaming infrastructure in place already they could also offer unlimited streaming for bought titles, even if you don't have a subscription. I imagine it would make for quite the killer service. But if everything could be downloaded DRM-free with just the catalog subscription, the individual sales would not work, and subscriptions would probably have a terrible retention rate. Again, I just can't see the catalog subscription model working without at least some sort of "download prevention". I guess the biggest question is: Can we achieve that without the need for heavyweight black-box DRM schemes? I mean, you'd really just need to stop "casual" downloading - pirates will always find a way around protections, so they can't be stopped, but you'd just have to make sure a regular customer sees value in both the catalog subscription (which would be essentially renting) and individual title purchasing (actual buying).
  - TheCoelacanth 14y ago
    Even with DRM, I wouldn't be subscribed to a service for long if it wasn't continually adding new content.
  - fzzzy 14y ago
    "Download prevention" is impossible. The analog hole cannot be closed. If it can be delivered to our senses, then it can be copied.
  - mtrimpe 14y ago
    The problem is that you'd need a fully locked-down chain, all the way from server to monitor, to be able to pull that off. Every single one of the devices in that chain has to be reduced to a black box which we're not allowed to tamper with. Hollywoord is trying hard to actually achieve that, and that is the scary part.
    - recoiledsnake 14y ago
      Not really true, Hollywood just needs to make it inconvenient for casual users to make copies and give to their friends etc.
      - pdonis 14y ago
        Tell that to Hollywood. This may be all they actually need, but it's not all they're asking for, not by a long way.
  - incongruity 14y ago
    Are you looking for a 100% solution? If so, you'll never find it. Instead, you need to think about how you make offerings cheap enough and compelling enough that a sufficient number of users will choose them over pirating. There will always be pirated content. However, thankfully, most people are also more or less honest and well-inentioned. The two balance out to a great degree. So what tips the balance is how you treat your customers – does it become painful to deal with your product because of all of the DRM? Do you treat consumers like criminals? Is it significantly less hassle to pirate than it is to buy/rent/view legally (and likely pay for)? If any of those are true, you will tip the balance away from a completely successful business model. Every business model has inefficiencies in the supply chain. Much of it falls under what's called "shrinkage". Sometimes it's from theft, other times it's from spoilage, weather, etc. The truth is, just like in heating, cooling, power production, engine design or anything else, you can never achieve 100% efficiency and in the case of consumer-facing products and services, I suggest you re-evaluate such pursuits before they ruin what otherwise would have been a profitable business model because you've alienated your customers.
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
> As such, I would at least prefer for most of the tech / architecture to be based on HTML5 stuff instead of closed plugins like Flash, Silverlight, Widevine and so on. It's not really based on open stuff. EME isn't DRM, it provides a way to talk to a DRM service (probably a hardware DRM in most cases). They are creating a false-sense of "open standards" when this thing still won't work in Linux and most not-locked-down platforms.
- Daiz 14y ago
  Yeah, that's the impression I've got as well, which is why I don't ultimately like EME. It would be a slight improvement compared to the current situation (since you could at least move stuff like video playback to HTML5), but would probably just make the situation of "closed binary blob DRM" more persistent and thus worse in the long run.
- bzbarsky 14y ago
  It provides a way for script to talk to a DRM service. Assuming the browser has a way to talk to one already. It doesn't do anything towards providing a way for _browsers_ to talk to DRM services; that's up to the browser manufacturers to license or whatnot.
- eridius 14y ago
  Unfortunately, this sort of problem is basically unsolvable for Linux (and other such "open" platforms). Either you get a proprietary blob that implements a protection scheme, or you simply don't get the functionality being promised. Objecting to efforts to make the situation better for HTML5 experiences on other platforms because it won't work on Linux is, honestly, pretty selfish. It can't work on Linux, so you're basically saying since it can't work for you, it shouldn't work for anyone else too. And that's just dragging down the state of the web to the lowest common denominator.
  - summerdown2 14y ago
    > And that's just dragging down the state of the web to the lowest common denominator. Or up to the state of most openness?
webreac 14y ago
Watermarking makes a lot more sense than DRM. If your name is on the film you just bought, you will not want to publish it on p2p.
- Daiz 14y ago
  It wouldn't really be a feasible solution for video, though. You'd have to re-encode the whole thing for every individual user, which would be incredibly inefficient. Even if you're showing the watermark in just a few places, it'd still require a damn lot of resources. There's also quite a few things out there for removing video watermarks[1], so unless the watermarks were incredibly obtrusive, they'd probably be quite easy to get rid of. And of course you couldn't really put the watermark outside the actual video stream either, since then the user could just strip it out. [1] Like various Avisynth plugins for example: http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/External_filters#Logo_Removal http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/External_filters#Logo_Removal
  - benologist 14y ago
    Is it really true that they can't do it on the fly? Live streaming is creating the video on the fly completely isn't it?
    - Daiz 14y ago
      In case of live streaming, the video is only encoded once and then distributed to a whole bunch of users. If you were doing unique watermarks, you'd have to encode an individual stream for every single user. Encoding is much more taxing than decoding. The end result would be that you'd need a metric crapton of additional processing power, and the quality would be worse since you'd have to use sufficiently fast encoding settings to be able to do it in realtime (as opposed to being able to use a lot more expensive options when the encoding is done just once and separately from the actual streaming process).
      - benologist 14y ago
        What about onlive, they stream(ed) cpu/gpu intensive games in real time on a one-to-one basis?
bsimpson 14y ago
Is anyone here familiar with the proposed spec? Would the DRM be a private binary included with the OS, or an open part of the browser? Unless they're just specifying an API, and all the actual work is done in a private binary, I don't understand how you can have effective DRM in a publicly specified project.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  Could be a private binary, could be a hardware component, but yeah, the actual DRM part is not in this spec.

by Daiz 14y ago

yarrel 14y ago

Renting infinitely copyable goods doesn't make sense. Subscriptions to channels containing them does. DRM doesn't increase the convenience of those channels. It reduces them.

Daiz 14y ago
The problem I have is that I can't really imagine the catalog subscription model to be feasible if any and all catalog entries were available to download without DRM. Someone with a fat pipe could just spend a month downloading absolutely everything, cutting the subscription and enjoying the goods for a long time to come, whereas the idea is that the user remains as a subscriber because of the limited time they have for consuming all the content. And while DRM is generally very inconvenient, there are also places where it's mostly "invisible" - Spotify and Netflix are pretty damn convenient on the whole, with pretty much the only major downside being the inability to watch stuff without an internet connection (though Spotify offers limited offline downloads for this reason too). The DRM in Steam is also generally quite invisible to the end-users, which is why people generally do not mind it - and also because Steam offers a lot more convenience with its service than what it takes away with its DRM. As I said, ideally I'd like to see digital stores that combine the catalog subscription model as well as individual DRM-free purchases. Think Netflix, except you could also buy the really good stuff that you like. This would allow you to download DRM-free copies in many formats whenever you want, they could also bundle purchases with stuff like extras, and best of all: since they have a streaming infrastructure in place already they could also offer unlimited streaming for bought titles, even if you don't have a subscription. I imagine it would make for quite the killer service. But if everything could be downloaded DRM-free with just the catalog subscription, the individual sales would not work, and subscriptions would probably have a terrible retention rate. Again, I just can't see the catalog subscription model working without at least some sort of "download prevention". I guess the biggest question is: Can we achieve that without the need for heavyweight black-box DRM schemes? I mean, you'd really just need to stop "casual" downloading - pirates will always find a way around protections, so they can't be stopped, but you'd just have to make sure a regular customer sees value in both the catalog subscription (which would be essentially renting) and individual title purchasing (actual buying).
- TheCoelacanth 14y ago
  Even with DRM, I wouldn't be subscribed to a service for long if it wasn't continually adding new content.
- fzzzy 14y ago
  "Download prevention" is impossible. The analog hole cannot be closed. If it can be delivered to our senses, then it can be copied.
- mtrimpe 14y ago
  The problem is that you'd need a fully locked-down chain, all the way from server to monitor, to be able to pull that off. Every single one of the devices in that chain has to be reduced to a black box which we're not allowed to tamper with. Hollywoord is trying hard to actually achieve that, and that is the scary part.
  - recoiledsnake 14y ago
    Not really true, Hollywood just needs to make it inconvenient for casual users to make copies and give to their friends etc.
    - pdonis 14y ago
      Tell that to Hollywood. This may be all they actually need, but it's not all they're asking for, not by a long way.
- incongruity 14y ago
  Are you looking for a 100% solution? If so, you'll never find it. Instead, you need to think about how you make offerings cheap enough and compelling enough that a sufficient number of users will choose them over pirating. There will always be pirated content. However, thankfully, most people are also more or less honest and well-inentioned. The two balance out to a great degree. So what tips the balance is how you treat your customers – does it become painful to deal with your product because of all of the DRM? Do you treat consumers like criminals? Is it significantly less hassle to pirate than it is to buy/rent/view legally (and likely pay for)? If any of those are true, you will tip the balance away from a completely successful business model. Every business model has inefficiencies in the supply chain. Much of it falls under what's called "shrinkage". Sometimes it's from theft, other times it's from spoilage, weather, etc. The truth is, just like in heating, cooling, power production, engine design or anything else, you can never achieve 100% efficiency and in the case of consumer-facing products and services, I suggest you re-evaluate such pursuits before they ruin what otherwise would have been a profitable business model because you've alienated your customers.

MatthewPhillips 14y ago

> As such, I would at least prefer for most of the tech / architecture to be based on HTML5 stuff instead of closed plugins like Flash, Silverlight, Widevine and so on. It's not really based on open stuff. EME isn't DRM, it provides a way to talk to a DRM service (probably a hardware DRM in most cases). They are creating a false-sense of "open standards" when this thing still won't work in Linux and most not-locked-down platforms.

Daiz 14y ago
Yeah, that's the impression I've got as well, which is why I don't ultimately like EME. It would be a slight improvement compared to the current situation (since you could at least move stuff like video playback to HTML5), but would probably just make the situation of "closed binary blob DRM" more persistent and thus worse in the long run.
bzbarsky 14y ago
It provides a way for script to talk to a DRM service. Assuming the browser has a way to talk to one already. It doesn't do anything towards providing a way for _browsers_ to talk to DRM services; that's up to the browser manufacturers to license or whatnot.
eridius 14y ago
Unfortunately, this sort of problem is basically unsolvable for Linux (and other such "open" platforms). Either you get a proprietary blob that implements a protection scheme, or you simply don't get the functionality being promised. Objecting to efforts to make the situation better for HTML5 experiences on other platforms because it won't work on Linux is, honestly, pretty selfish. It can't work on Linux, so you're basically saying since it can't work for you, it shouldn't work for anyone else too. And that's just dragging down the state of the web to the lowest common denominator.
- summerdown2 14y ago
  > And that's just dragging down the state of the web to the lowest common denominator. Or up to the state of most openness?

webreac 14y ago

Watermarking makes a lot more sense than DRM. If your name is on the film you just bought, you will not want to publish it on p2p.

Daiz 14y ago
It wouldn't really be a feasible solution for video, though. You'd have to re-encode the whole thing for every individual user, which would be incredibly inefficient. Even if you're showing the watermark in just a few places, it'd still require a damn lot of resources. There's also quite a few things out there for removing video watermarks[1], so unless the watermarks were incredibly obtrusive, they'd probably be quite easy to get rid of. And of course you couldn't really put the watermark outside the actual video stream either, since then the user could just strip it out. [1] Like various Avisynth plugins for example: http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/External_filters#Logo_Removal http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/External_filters#Logo_Removal
- benologist 14y ago
  Is it really true that they can't do it on the fly? Live streaming is creating the video on the fly completely isn't it?
  - Daiz 14y ago
    In case of live streaming, the video is only encoded once and then distributed to a whole bunch of users. If you were doing unique watermarks, you'd have to encode an individual stream for every single user. Encoding is much more taxing than decoding. The end result would be that you'd need a metric crapton of additional processing power, and the quality would be worse since you'd have to use sufficiently fast encoding settings to be able to do it in realtime (as opposed to being able to use a lot more expensive options when the encoding is done just once and separately from the actual streaming process).
    - benologist 14y ago
      What about onlive, they stream(ed) cpu/gpu intensive games in real time on a one-to-one basis?

bsimpson 14y ago

Is anyone here familiar with the proposed spec? Would the DRM be a private binary included with the OS, or an open part of the browser? Unless they're just specifying an API, and all the actual work is done in a private binary, I don't understand how you can have effective DRM in a publicly specified project.

MatthewPhillips 14y ago
Could be a private binary, could be a hardware component, but yeah, the actual DRM part is not in this spec.