7 ms·

Perspectives on Encrypted Media Extension Reaching First Public Working Draft

33 points by throwaway2048 14y ago

throwaway2048 14y ago
Be sure to read the comments, a lot of valuable points and discussions.
- qznc 14y ago
  Kudos to Jeff Jaffe for staying calm and professional while replying to all the arguments.
  - Daiz 14y ago
    "Calm and professional" while dodging basically all and every argument presented to him.
    - qznc 14y ago
      That comment section certainly is not the place to discuss these issues. Just like Hacker News is not the right place. He repeatedly pointed to the working group. "If anyone strongly disagrees with the content of the decision and would like to raise a Formal Objection[5], they may do so at this time. Formal Objections are reviewed by the Director in consultation with the Team. Ordinarily, Formal Objections are only reviewed as part of a transition request[6]." [0] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-admin/2013May/0030.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-admin/2013Ma... [5] http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/policies.html#WGAppeals http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/policies.html#WGA... [6] http://www.w3.org/2005/08/01-transitions.html http://www.w3.org/2005/08/01-transitions.html
  - josteink 14y ago
    His every reply is dismissing very real concerns, (deliberately?) mistaking free as in speak for free as in beer when it is convenient and saying "Yeah. I'm sure this will work with open-source. They'll make open-source implementations of this DRM for all platforms evar. Really. Nothing to see here." It's a big "fuck you peons" repeated again and again. If you can't see that, you're clearly not looking.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Yaa101 14y ago
It took a decade to have some html draft, and this one goes through with a breeze, makes you think...
- Ygg2 14y ago
  Former required a lot of thought and consideration, synchronizing various actors of W3C, while the latter didn't. Also latter group has more money. I'm sad really. This makes any open source Web Browser a second class citizen of the WWW.(@W3C) Great job, guys, great job. Seems like a big step on the road to fragmentation.
- pornel 14y ago
  Indeed. Usually publication of FPWD is done when there is consensus in the group. In this case HTML WG Charis decided to ignore protests of group's members and publish despite objections on both technical and ideological grounds.
AaronFriel 14y ago
The mistake being made here is that large content industries need the web more than the web needs them. The following assertion simply doesn't hold, as seen by other industries that have had magnificent success despite piracy or despite DRM: > Without content protection, owners of premium video content - driven by both their economic goals and their responsibilities to others - will simply deprive the Open Web of key content. From whence does this assertion come? Of course, the content industries that lobbied for this. But if there is no HTML support for DRM, does anyone think content industries will give up on distributing content online?
- rainforest 14y ago
  Isn't this already the case? Netflix forces users to use Silverlight; YouTube won't serve HTML5 videos if ads are enabled. The "Open Web" is already lacking their content because they rely on DRM already. Content industries won't give up on publishing, they'll just pursue the current status quo of terrible plugins for the imaginary protection DRM gives them. In an ideal world the executives concerned about piracy would realise their errors, but from my perspective, DRM'd HTML5 videos natively decoded are a world better than those reluctantly vomited out using Flash.
  - AaronFriel 14y ago
    It's the case for some industries, but it's a fallacious example. You're citing cases where businesses have been successful, I would say, in spite of DRM, in industries where the status quo is accepting DRM or having no content. Amazon distributes MP3s via "the open web" - sure, it's via MP3 files over HTTP, but an <audio> tag can pull that, Amazon could (and perhaps does) implement their cloud player in that manner anyway. Valve's Steam distributes a great deal of games without DRM - games are high margin products compared to music singles or DVDs, yet they seem quite successful. I try, or often only buy DRM-free games on Steam to support them. Apple's iTunes switched in the past few years to distributing music without DRM that encumbered their files and locked in consumers to their iEcosystem. Those files can be uploaded, trivially, to any file sharing network. The Gordian knot of the problem of piracy and DRM is that only one dedicated person needs to leak it, and as long as I can listen to, look at or sense content, the analog hole will exist. Content industries have tried the approach of treating all of their customers like criminals, and it's been awful for consumers and the amount of content available trivially on peer to peer networks hasn't decreased or even decelerated, as far as I can tell. This treating everyone like a criminal to prevent one dedicated attacker is insane in the colloquial sense, wherein content companies try DRM over and over again and expect different results. I say, let Hollywood and the video content industry squirm until it realizes it needs the internet more than the internet needs it.
JonSkeptic 14y ago
>By putting hooks for DRM into your standards you are not protecting the open web, you are destroying it. >Please stop before you betray your founding principles any further. Reposted from the comments of the draft. I couldn't agree more. Don't turn your back on your principles.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
pasbesoin 14y ago
Remember when Flash was becoming ubiquitous? Here's a primary concern of mine: Many people think this means Netflix will continue to be DRM-ed, YouTube will gain DRM-ed for-pay channels, etc. AKA premium video. (Oh, and audio -- nearly forgot that.) Once the tool is available, baked in, I fear a wholesale run to DRM-ed content. This will certainly be at least tried as the solution to the revenue problem. I'll add that, aside from the implications for an "open Net", I also worry about the security implications: We'll be forced to take without inspection whatever an encrypted provider sees fit to deliver or falls prey to. No, thanks.
- rainforest 14y ago
  None of the nightmare scenarios are enabled by this proposal that aren't already possible though. Flash is available and baked in, providers can already run to DRM-ed content since the ubiquitous platform enables it. It's currently used in part as the solution to the revenue problem. All these problems already exist, mostly because of Flash. We still have to accept without inspection whatever Adobe sees fit to deliver (which leads to terrible results). All this proposal really represents is an opportunity to unseat Flash and replace it with a more accountable party to complain to when a device you own can't play the content you buy.
  - pornel 14y ago
    EME is worse than the current situation, because it removes Adobe and Microsoft standing between MPAA's desires and your computer. At least Microsoft and Adobe would refuse to implement DRM that is too user-hostile in order to save their eroding reputation and install base. But with EME you have to run whatever binary Netflix tells you to install, and that will do whatever people who pull the strings on Netflix want.
    - rainforest 14y ago
      That is a valid point, but I think some power is still retained by the consumer in the sense that they can reject individual DRM implementations and accept others, while with Flash they're forced to install it if one provider they wish to use requires it. The point of user-hostility is the only point that is an obvious problem to me; if the CDM was sandboxed and had a very limited set of access beyond it - pretty much the same environment provided by Flash - I'd be happy.
Tinned_Tuna 14y ago
Why not just fork the W3C's specifications, and pressure FireFox and the makers of other browsers & rendering engines to never incorporate DRM? My personal issue here is that it seems that W3C is going against it's own founding principles, running a committee that's biased towards the content-industry.
- gwillen 14y ago
  Because you can't pressure Google not to include EME in Chrome, because Google knows which side its bread is buttered on.
- nullc 14y ago
  The Pro-DRM side has netflix and a bunch of other DRMed media sites which will work if people switch to Google's Chrome browser or MSIE. Whats your leverage?
  - josteink 14y ago
    If you are willing to install various random black-box binaries from random pages on the internet. We saw how well that played out with ActiveX. This is pretty much the same, just even less open-source friendly, since the intent is the deprive the machine running the code of access to the content. Let's not make a rerun of that. The second this goers mainstream expect a bunch of free "porn sites" saying you need to install their "DRM plugin" to view the content. And voila you have browser-assisted trojan installations. Firefox and other browsers supporting the open-web, without DRM, will have leverage that it doesn't ship with a gaping open door for spyware, malware and viruses to enter. It will be the only browser with the user's interest in mind. We've already seen how Google is abandoning that in Chrome. This will only make it more apparent.
zimbatm 14y ago
In the current spec[1], CDM might either return the decrypted frame to the browser or forward it to the system. In practice it would be way too easy to patch say Firefox if they implemented the spec to intercept the decoded frames. It means that either the CDM wouldn't work with any open-source browser, or that they will only directly render to the OS. But in that latter case I don't see how it would play well with the rendering of the page, it would be the same problem we had with old version of flash where you couldn't overlap elements. Does anyone know if Chromium implements that feature (since Chromebooks already do) ? [1]: 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...
- zimbatm 14y ago
  If you want to have a look, here's Chromium's implementation of the spec: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#search/&q=MediaKey&sq=package:chromium&type=cs https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#search/&q=... Update: here is an interface that decrypts a frame and returns the clear version: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/webkit/media/crypto/ppapi/cdm/content_decryption_module.h&sq=package:chromium&dr=C&l=344 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/w...
surrealize 14y ago
> Without content protection, owners of premium video content - driven by both their economic goals and their responsibilities to others - will simply deprive the Open Web of key content. False. That's what they say, but that's not what they do. When digital broadcast TV was getting standardized, content owners insisted that there be a "broadcast flag" that would prevent receivers from copying broadcast data. There was a bunch of push-back against that proposal, and it died. And what happened? They go ahead and broadcast everything anyway. It turns out that the broadcast flag wasn't actually necessary. Without the flag, content owner business models work just as well as they did before. Flash is going away. Silverlight is going away. The presence or absence of DRM in HTML isn't going to change that. Some people remember the frustrations of flash and silverlight and think that the W3C EME proposal will solve those problems. But those problems were solving themselves just fine! Now we get to look forward to a bunch more pain with proprietary, non-interoperable CDMs.
josteink 14y ago
What this proposal is saying, just not straight out, is that from now on the internet should no longer be fully accessible from Linux. Only "first class" proprietary OSes (Windows, OSX, possibly ChromeOS) with proper DRM-hooks from boot-loader to video-driver to OS-APIs will have "sanctioned browsers" for which the content-industry will bother implementing compatible CDMs, and only they will be able to access so called "premium content". The W3C is saying they are fine with standardizing a fragmented, closed down web. They have clearly lost their mind and should lose their mandate.

33 points by throwaway2048 14y ago

throwaway2048 14y ago

Be sure to read the comments, a lot of valuable points and discussions.

qznc 14y ago
Kudos to Jeff Jaffe for staying calm and professional while replying to all the arguments.
- Daiz 14y ago
  "Calm and professional" while dodging basically all and every argument presented to him.
  - qznc 14y ago
    That comment section certainly is not the place to discuss these issues. Just like Hacker News is not the right place. He repeatedly pointed to the working group. "If anyone strongly disagrees with the content of the decision and would like to raise a Formal Objection[5], they may do so at this time. Formal Objections are reviewed by the Director in consultation with the Team. Ordinarily, Formal Objections are only reviewed as part of a transition request[6]." [0] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-admin/2013May/0030.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-admin/2013Ma... [5] http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/policies.html#WGAppeals http://www.w3.org/2005/10/Process-20051014/policies.html#WGA... [6] http://www.w3.org/2005/08/01-transitions.html http://www.w3.org/2005/08/01-transitions.html
- josteink 14y ago
  His every reply is dismissing very real concerns, (deliberately?) mistaking free as in speak for free as in beer when it is convenient and saying "Yeah. I'm sure this will work with open-source. They'll make open-source implementations of this DRM for all platforms evar. Really. Nothing to see here." It's a big "fuck you peons" repeated again and again. If you can't see that, you're clearly not looking.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Yaa101 14y ago

It took a decade to have some html draft, and this one goes through with a breeze, makes you think...

Ygg2 14y ago
Former required a lot of thought and consideration, synchronizing various actors of W3C, while the latter didn't. Also latter group has more money. I'm sad really. This makes any open source Web Browser a second class citizen of the WWW.(@W3C) Great job, guys, great job. Seems like a big step on the road to fragmentation.
pornel 14y ago
Indeed. Usually publication of FPWD is done when there is consensus in the group. In this case HTML WG Charis decided to ignore protests of group's members and publish despite objections on both technical and ideological grounds.

AaronFriel 14y ago

The mistake being made here is that large content industries need the web more than the web needs them. The following assertion simply doesn't hold, as seen by other industries that have had magnificent success despite piracy or despite DRM: > Without content protection, owners of premium video content - driven by both their economic goals and their responsibilities to others - will simply deprive the Open Web of key content. From whence does this assertion come? Of course, the content industries that lobbied for this. But if there is no HTML support for DRM, does anyone think content industries will give up on distributing content online?

rainforest 14y ago
Isn't this already the case? Netflix forces users to use Silverlight; YouTube won't serve HTML5 videos if ads are enabled. The "Open Web" is already lacking their content because they rely on DRM already. Content industries won't give up on publishing, they'll just pursue the current status quo of terrible plugins for the imaginary protection DRM gives them. In an ideal world the executives concerned about piracy would realise their errors, but from my perspective, DRM'd HTML5 videos natively decoded are a world better than those reluctantly vomited out using Flash.
- AaronFriel 14y ago
  It's the case for some industries, but it's a fallacious example. You're citing cases where businesses have been successful, I would say, in spite of DRM, in industries where the status quo is accepting DRM or having no content. Amazon distributes MP3s via "the open web" - sure, it's via MP3 files over HTTP, but an <audio> tag can pull that, Amazon could (and perhaps does) implement their cloud player in that manner anyway. Valve's Steam distributes a great deal of games without DRM - games are high margin products compared to music singles or DVDs, yet they seem quite successful. I try, or often only buy DRM-free games on Steam to support them. Apple's iTunes switched in the past few years to distributing music without DRM that encumbered their files and locked in consumers to their iEcosystem. Those files can be uploaded, trivially, to any file sharing network. The Gordian knot of the problem of piracy and DRM is that only one dedicated person needs to leak it, and as long as I can listen to, look at or sense content, the analog hole will exist. Content industries have tried the approach of treating all of their customers like criminals, and it's been awful for consumers and the amount of content available trivially on peer to peer networks hasn't decreased or even decelerated, as far as I can tell. This treating everyone like a criminal to prevent one dedicated attacker is insane in the colloquial sense, wherein content companies try DRM over and over again and expect different results. I say, let Hollywood and the video content industry squirm until it realizes it needs the internet more than the internet needs it.

JonSkeptic 14y ago

>By putting hooks for DRM into your standards you are not protecting the open web, you are destroying it. >Please stop before you betray your founding principles any further. Reposted from the comments of the draft. I couldn't agree more. Don't turn your back on your principles.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

pasbesoin 14y ago

Remember when Flash was becoming ubiquitous? Here's a primary concern of mine: Many people think this means Netflix will continue to be DRM-ed, YouTube will gain DRM-ed for-pay channels, etc. AKA premium video. (Oh, and audio -- nearly forgot that.) Once the tool is available, baked in, I fear a wholesale run to DRM-ed content. This will certainly be at least tried as the solution to the revenue problem. I'll add that, aside from the implications for an "open Net", I also worry about the security implications: We'll be forced to take without inspection whatever an encrypted provider sees fit to deliver or falls prey to. No, thanks.

rainforest 14y ago
None of the nightmare scenarios are enabled by this proposal that aren't already possible though. Flash is available and baked in, providers can already run to DRM-ed content since the ubiquitous platform enables it. It's currently used in part as the solution to the revenue problem. All these problems already exist, mostly because of Flash. We still have to accept without inspection whatever Adobe sees fit to deliver (which leads to terrible results). All this proposal really represents is an opportunity to unseat Flash and replace it with a more accountable party to complain to when a device you own can't play the content you buy.
- pornel 14y ago
  EME is worse than the current situation, because it removes Adobe and Microsoft standing between MPAA's desires and your computer. At least Microsoft and Adobe would refuse to implement DRM that is too user-hostile in order to save their eroding reputation and install base. But with EME you have to run whatever binary Netflix tells you to install, and that will do whatever people who pull the strings on Netflix want.
  - rainforest 14y ago
    That is a valid point, but I think some power is still retained by the consumer in the sense that they can reject individual DRM implementations and accept others, while with Flash they're forced to install it if one provider they wish to use requires it. The point of user-hostility is the only point that is an obvious problem to me; if the CDM was sandboxed and had a very limited set of access beyond it - pretty much the same environment provided by Flash - I'd be happy.

Tinned_Tuna 14y ago

Why not just fork the W3C's specifications, and pressure FireFox and the makers of other browsers & rendering engines to never incorporate DRM? My personal issue here is that it seems that W3C is going against it's own founding principles, running a committee that's biased towards the content-industry.

gwillen 14y ago
Because you can't pressure Google not to include EME in Chrome, because Google knows which side its bread is buttered on.
nullc 14y ago
The Pro-DRM side has netflix and a bunch of other DRMed media sites which will work if people switch to Google's Chrome browser or MSIE. Whats your leverage?
- josteink 14y ago
  If you are willing to install various random black-box binaries from random pages on the internet. We saw how well that played out with ActiveX. This is pretty much the same, just even less open-source friendly, since the intent is the deprive the machine running the code of access to the content. Let's not make a rerun of that. The second this goers mainstream expect a bunch of free "porn sites" saying you need to install their "DRM plugin" to view the content. And voila you have browser-assisted trojan installations. Firefox and other browsers supporting the open-web, without DRM, will have leverage that it doesn't ship with a gaping open door for spyware, malware and viruses to enter. It will be the only browser with the user's interest in mind. We've already seen how Google is abandoning that in Chrome. This will only make it more apparent.

zimbatm 14y ago

In the current spec[1], CDM might either return the decrypted frame to the browser or forward it to the system. In practice it would be way too easy to patch say Firefox if they implemented the spec to intercept the decoded frames. It means that either the CDM wouldn't work with any open-source browser, or that they will only directly render to the OS. But in that latter case I don't see how it would play well with the rendering of the page, it would be the same problem we had with old version of flash where you couldn't overlap elements. Does anyone know if Chromium implements that feature (since Chromebooks already do) ? [1]: 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...

zimbatm 14y ago
If you want to have a look, here's Chromium's implementation of the spec: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#search/&q=MediaKey&sq=package:chromium&type=cs https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#search/&q=... Update: here is an interface that decrypts a frame and returns the clear version: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/webkit/media/crypto/ppapi/cdm/content_decryption_module.h&sq=package:chromium&dr=C&l=344 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/codesearch#chromium/src/w...

surrealize 14y ago

> Without content protection, owners of premium video content - driven by both their economic goals and their responsibilities to others - will simply deprive the Open Web of key content. False. That's what they say, but that's not what they do. When digital broadcast TV was getting standardized, content owners insisted that there be a "broadcast flag" that would prevent receivers from copying broadcast data. There was a bunch of push-back against that proposal, and it died. And what happened? They go ahead and broadcast everything anyway. It turns out that the broadcast flag wasn't actually necessary. Without the flag, content owner business models work just as well as they did before. Flash is going away. Silverlight is going away. The presence or absence of DRM in HTML isn't going to change that. Some people remember the frustrations of flash and silverlight and think that the W3C EME proposal will solve those problems. But those problems were solving themselves just fine! Now we get to look forward to a bunch more pain with proprietary, non-interoperable CDMs.

josteink 14y ago

What this proposal is saying, just not straight out, is that from now on the internet should no longer be fully accessible from Linux. Only "first class" proprietary OSes (Windows, OSX, possibly ChromeOS) with proper DRM-hooks from boot-loader to video-driver to OS-APIs will have "sanctioned browsers" for which the content-industry will bother implementing compatible CDMs, and only they will be able to access so called "premium content". The W3C is saying they are fine with standardizing a fragmented, closed down web. They have clearly lost their mind and should lose their mandate.