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The market problem is that people want to consume expensive art. There is billions of dollars of interest in making this market clear. The market will not go aw

The market problem is that people want to consume expensive art. There is billions of dollars of interest in making this market clear. The market will not go away because a bunch of hackers find it unethical. As the war on drugs has demonstrated, the market interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it. I see a lot of opposition to DRM on principle. These principles will go nowhere. The interesting question to me is whether DRM is part of an standard s.t. required permissions are visible and minimizable and the platform is open, opt-in and extensible... or whether it will take over your devices with God-knows-what secret solutions, which is the situation today. I think the W3C standard is problematic (having read it) but represents a small step in the direction that is less wrong. The third option, an imaginary free-information utopia, is directly against the economic will of the people in general.

jobu 13y ago
People hate DRM because it gives the content producers too much power, and then they treat consumers like muppets: http://neosting.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/pirated_vs_legitimate_dvd.jpg http://neosting.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/pirated_vs_le... The Internet has shifted a huge amount of that power back to consumers (especially technically savvy ones), so it's understandable that something needs to change. It's also obvious that producers can't create decent content if they don't get paid, but giving them full control of the pipe will end up harming everyone (producers included).
- dorian-graph 13y ago
  I see people often saying to vote with your wallet and then go illegally download whatever movie, TV show, videogame or piece of software—which I find kind of funny. Why don't people vote with their time? Don't watch something, for example. I suppose the main thing I find funny is how outrageous people become when something isn't provided which seems trivial to life. I live in Australia where it seems we are one of the nations the pirates the most. People here, and elsewhere, act as if having a TV show is a basic human right and necessity. Who cares if you can't watch a TV show? I think both sides are in the wrong. Another thing with the horse-riders yelling at some large fat cats is that they often pretend to speak for the masses; the non-hackers, -geeks, or whatever labels are necessary to delineate these two groups. They say they would buy everything if it was available in a way that jives with them and postulate that the masses will run out and buy everything.. and maybe they will, but as one of the 'computer guys' when most people ask about how to use torrents and you ask them why they want to know usually they just want to get something without paying for it. This goes back to Napster too. This isn't so much directed at you, jobu, these thoughts just came to mind again after looking at the image you posted. I do agree with what's presented in the image in that it is a horrible user-experience.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    Why don't people vote with their time? Don't watch something, for example. I'm not quite sure you understand the idea of voting. It's about making your preference known, and it doesn't quite work when your action has no impact on anyone else.
    - belorn 13y ago
      100% Correct. The only way a boycott works is by people taking a stand, and then letting everyone know about it. Same goes for canceling subscriptions, vegetarians boycotting MC-donalds, people staying home and not voting in elections, or hunger striking in a prison. So the alternative to pay for an movie, TV show or videogame is to organize a movement to let people know about the issue. This happens. Remember people voting down Simcity on Amazon? Remember people producing jailbreaks? Remember people picketing outside studios or shops? All those are the alternatives to buying and supporting a broken businesses model. Pressing or not pressing a download button in silence has in contrast zero impact.
    - dorian-graph 13y ago
      Well, perhaps I don't. The reasoning was similar to that of money. People have indicated that if you stop paying for things (DRM-laded goods and services, for example) the companies will notice the lack of sales and change their behaviour accordingly. Now, for not watching, perhaps if they noticed that torrents that previously had tens of thousands of people downloading only had a handful—or better yet, the different warez groups/whatever stopped their releases—the companies would notice that people are making a stand by not even watching. Popularity of TV show x would go down and what happens when TV shows aren't popular? They're killed. Also, supposedly people pirate things, come to like them, and then buy them so limiting watching also leads to making your preference known. I think that not watching could be even more powerful than not voting with your wallet. It shows greater self-control, dedication, etc. It says "Screw you guys, we won't even watch it!" Though, as mentioned in my previous post, I doubt many people would do that as they simply want something for free nor are they so invested in the whole anti-DRM thing. Even if I don't understand voting, I would still love to hear why the hell people are so up in arms about not being able to watch a TV show especially so when their complaint is that it's released a week later. It would be fantastic to see the pirates look at themselves and what they're doing wrong. A last thing I would like too is an answer to a question: If I create something and will only sell it for $1000 and it is not a human right/basic necessity, if I ask or tell you to not acquire it and use it without paying, would you follow what I've said or ignore it? -- you here isn't meaning you, icebraining.
marshray 13y ago
If you're going to have that username you're not allowed to use terms like "the economic will of the people".
mwcampbell 13y ago
Does this proposed W3C standard really get us any further away from taking over our devices with god-knows-what secret solutions? After all, the CDM plugins themselves are still proprietary.
- cynicalkane 13y ago
  I think it's a case of pushing at the margin; exposing more details of the CDM plugins than would otherwise be exposed. Opening the CDM spec is also a design win for reasons that should be obvious to people who've worked on software. It's been the general trend in web browsers to minimize the permissions you need to give to plugins--I would expect CDM plugins to evolve the same way.
  - mwcampbell 13y ago
    You may be right about minimizing the permissions given to CDM plugins. In the current Chrome dev build, the Widevine CDM plugin is a Pepper plugin, which suggests that it might be sandboxed. However, DRM has sometimes been very over-reaching. Perhaps the most infamous example of this was the content protection introduced in Windows Vista, which went very deep into the OS. [1] After that, can we really expect that DRM proponents would be satisfied with letting their content "protection" system be a well-behaved, harmless little program inside a sandbox? [1] http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
    - greggman 13y ago
      Being a Pepper plugin doesn't help at all. It's still a black box. It still has full access to your machine. It can not be sandboxed because it's up to the CDM to decide how to validate and how deep to connect to the machine. The CDM will want to control the bits from the time they get delivered to the CDM from the browser, all the way to the monitor with whatever tech the CDM author feels like employing. Chrome can not validate the code nor the inputs to the code. It's a giant security hole. For all you know some CDM will just implement the blu-ray standard, Java and all. Yep, unsecured code execution.
ronaldx 13y ago
It's not correct for W3C to enforce policies that are worth billions of dollars to big companies at the average user's expense.
- eridius 13y ago
  That's the thing, though. It's not at the average user's expense. It's only at the technological idealist's expense. The average user is in fact benefited greatly by having an open, standardized approach, because it increases the likelihood that things will Just Work™.
  - duncan_bayne 13y ago
    No, it doesn't. The EME standard as proposed makes no guarantees about the availability of a CDM on any particular browser or operating system.
    - eridius 13y ago
      Well, no standard at all makes any guarantees about the availability of something on a particular operating system. HTML as a whole makes no guarantees that a web browser will even exist for your OS. But a standard makes it a heck of a lot more likely that someone will have written something that works on your platform.
      - duncan_bayne 13y ago
        But this standard - EME - isn't for CDMs, it's for the interface between CDMs and Javascript. So yes, your Linux-based browser might well have EME support. But if the company who makes the DRM CDM doesn't support Linux, you're out of luck. The existence of the EME standard does not in any way increase the likelihood of DRM vendors supporting any more platforms than they do now.
        m_eiman 13y ago
        It does make it easier to add support to new platforms, though. If Linux support is just a recompile with a different compiler away (supposing the browser/plugin interface is a simple C API with no GUI), it's more likely to happen.
shmerl 13y ago
> the market interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it. You said it. DRM is close to censorship in its core idea - it's preemptive policing. The market will find routes around it. > I see a lot of opposition to DRM on principle. These principles will go nowhere. Not true. There is a lot of opposition in principle to the totalitarian approach (which DRM embodies). If there would be no opposition, then it will work as "they take as much as you give them". I.e. if you don't value your own freedom, they for sure won't do that for you.
- cynicalkane 13y ago
  It's true that people are routing around existing DRM solutions. It's not true that this represents any threat to DRM. As the Steam platform has demonstrated, if you make paying the easy solution and piracy the hard one, the target audience (viz. people willing to pay money) will choose the easy one. The average consumer will not try to route around unfree information as long as it shows up when they click play. Policing content is not the sort of "market censorship" they care about.
  - youngerdryas 13y ago
    Exactly. If your time has no value then all is free. Most people value their time, the system does not have to be perfect. People who claim there should be no copyright because the future is inevitable probably still go to the doctor.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      "Copyright not existing" and "concessions to DRM not being included in standards" are wildly different things, as are "copyright not existing" and "DRM not existing". Ten years ago, would you tell people to go to the doctor if they asserted that the music industry could and would survive selling their music without DRM?
      - youngerdryas 13y ago
        Maybe you misunderstood. The current model will die, like everything.
bcoates 13y ago
The enthusiasm against DRM is mostly based on principle because the technological argument is so uninteresting. "DRM is part of an standard s.t. required permissions are visible and minimizable and the platform is open, opt-in and extensible" isn't possible and this is non-controversial among anyone not in the business of trying to sell it to someone who doesn't know that.
- shmerl 13y ago
  > the platform is open Where did you find an open DRM? It sounds oxymoronic.
- cynicalkane 13y ago
  DRM is just a math problem (encryption) coupled with a hardware problem (retaining control of the results). The industry in, say, video games has settled on an equilibrium of making it very hard but not impossible to crack the hardware. But uncrackable encryption hardware already exists, it would just be inconvenient to make it uncrackable inside an XBox. But whether the methods of DRM are open or closed is an implementation detail. Nobody thinks that TLS being open makes it crackable. But if users and programmers know the capabilities and requirements of DRM solutions, they can sequester them from the rest of the computer.
  - tomp 13y ago
    Your post includes a lot of words, but none of these even attempt to justify your claim that there exists open, uncrackable DRM.
    - cynicalkane 13y ago
      The whole reason I started this thread is that it doesn't currently exist but I think it should.
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        And I think invisible pink unicorns should exist, limitations of reality be damned!
femto 13y ago
The real danger, from the W3C's perspective is that people will route around an HTML5 standard that includes DRM. What's the point of writing a standard that is built to fail?
shousper 13y ago
Perhaps we should workd on the economic will of the people..
belorn 13y ago
So the options you are suggesting we have today is either a small number of solutions that take over your devices with God-knows-what but which are using browser plugin system, or solutions that take over your devices with God-knows-what but are using the W3C standard as an API, which leads to a larger number of God-knows-what solutions that do God-knows-what to your computer or has God-knows-what security issues that other form of malware can use. How is that an improvement, and what does this have to do with a open network with cooperating nodes that any standard compliant software can parse and use?
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

jobu 13y ago

People hate DRM because it gives the content producers too much power, and then they treat consumers like muppets: http://neosting.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/pirated_vs_legitimate_dvd.jpg http://neosting.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/pirated_vs_le... The Internet has shifted a huge amount of that power back to consumers (especially technically savvy ones), so it's understandable that something needs to change. It's also obvious that producers can't create decent content if they don't get paid, but giving them full control of the pipe will end up harming everyone (producers included).

dorian-graph 13y ago
I see people often saying to vote with your wallet and then go illegally download whatever movie, TV show, videogame or piece of software—which I find kind of funny. Why don't people vote with their time? Don't watch something, for example. I suppose the main thing I find funny is how outrageous people become when something isn't provided which seems trivial to life. I live in Australia where it seems we are one of the nations the pirates the most. People here, and elsewhere, act as if having a TV show is a basic human right and necessity. Who cares if you can't watch a TV show? I think both sides are in the wrong. Another thing with the horse-riders yelling at some large fat cats is that they often pretend to speak for the masses; the non-hackers, -geeks, or whatever labels are necessary to delineate these two groups. They say they would buy everything if it was available in a way that jives with them and postulate that the masses will run out and buy everything.. and maybe they will, but as one of the 'computer guys' when most people ask about how to use torrents and you ask them why they want to know usually they just want to get something without paying for it. This goes back to Napster too. This isn't so much directed at you, jobu, these thoughts just came to mind again after looking at the image you posted. I do agree with what's presented in the image in that it is a horrible user-experience.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Why don't people vote with their time? Don't watch something, for example. I'm not quite sure you understand the idea of voting. It's about making your preference known, and it doesn't quite work when your action has no impact on anyone else.
  - belorn 13y ago
    100% Correct. The only way a boycott works is by people taking a stand, and then letting everyone know about it. Same goes for canceling subscriptions, vegetarians boycotting MC-donalds, people staying home and not voting in elections, or hunger striking in a prison. So the alternative to pay for an movie, TV show or videogame is to organize a movement to let people know about the issue. This happens. Remember people voting down Simcity on Amazon? Remember people producing jailbreaks? Remember people picketing outside studios or shops? All those are the alternatives to buying and supporting a broken businesses model. Pressing or not pressing a download button in silence has in contrast zero impact.
  - dorian-graph 13y ago
    Well, perhaps I don't. The reasoning was similar to that of money. People have indicated that if you stop paying for things (DRM-laded goods and services, for example) the companies will notice the lack of sales and change their behaviour accordingly. Now, for not watching, perhaps if they noticed that torrents that previously had tens of thousands of people downloading only had a handful—or better yet, the different warez groups/whatever stopped their releases—the companies would notice that people are making a stand by not even watching. Popularity of TV show x would go down and what happens when TV shows aren't popular? They're killed. Also, supposedly people pirate things, come to like them, and then buy them so limiting watching also leads to making your preference known. I think that not watching could be even more powerful than not voting with your wallet. It shows greater self-control, dedication, etc. It says "Screw you guys, we won't even watch it!" Though, as mentioned in my previous post, I doubt many people would do that as they simply want something for free nor are they so invested in the whole anti-DRM thing. Even if I don't understand voting, I would still love to hear why the hell people are so up in arms about not being able to watch a TV show especially so when their complaint is that it's released a week later. It would be fantastic to see the pirates look at themselves and what they're doing wrong. A last thing I would like too is an answer to a question: If I create something and will only sell it for $1000 and it is not a human right/basic necessity, if I ask or tell you to not acquire it and use it without paying, would you follow what I've said or ignore it? -- you here isn't meaning you, icebraining.

marshray 13y ago

If you're going to have that username you're not allowed to use terms like "the economic will of the people".

mwcampbell 13y ago

Does this proposed W3C standard really get us any further away from taking over our devices with god-knows-what secret solutions? After all, the CDM plugins themselves are still proprietary.

cynicalkane 13y ago
I think it's a case of pushing at the margin; exposing more details of the CDM plugins than would otherwise be exposed. Opening the CDM spec is also a design win for reasons that should be obvious to people who've worked on software. It's been the general trend in web browsers to minimize the permissions you need to give to plugins--I would expect CDM plugins to evolve the same way.
- mwcampbell 13y ago
  You may be right about minimizing the permissions given to CDM plugins. In the current Chrome dev build, the Widevine CDM plugin is a Pepper plugin, which suggests that it might be sandboxed. However, DRM has sometimes been very over-reaching. Perhaps the most infamous example of this was the content protection introduced in Windows Vista, which went very deep into the OS. [1] After that, can we really expect that DRM proponents would be satisfied with letting their content "protection" system be a well-behaved, harmless little program inside a sandbox? [1] http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
  - greggman 13y ago
    Being a Pepper plugin doesn't help at all. It's still a black box. It still has full access to your machine. It can not be sandboxed because it's up to the CDM to decide how to validate and how deep to connect to the machine. The CDM will want to control the bits from the time they get delivered to the CDM from the browser, all the way to the monitor with whatever tech the CDM author feels like employing. Chrome can not validate the code nor the inputs to the code. It's a giant security hole. For all you know some CDM will just implement the blu-ray standard, Java and all. Yep, unsecured code execution.

ronaldx 13y ago

It's not correct for W3C to enforce policies that are worth billions of dollars to big companies at the average user's expense.

eridius 13y ago
That's the thing, though. It's not at the average user's expense. It's only at the technological idealist's expense. The average user is in fact benefited greatly by having an open, standardized approach, because it increases the likelihood that things will Just Work™.
- duncan_bayne 13y ago
  No, it doesn't. The EME standard as proposed makes no guarantees about the availability of a CDM on any particular browser or operating system.
  - eridius 13y ago
    Well, no standard at all makes any guarantees about the availability of something on a particular operating system. HTML as a whole makes no guarantees that a web browser will even exist for your OS. But a standard makes it a heck of a lot more likely that someone will have written something that works on your platform.
    - duncan_bayne 13y ago
      But this standard - EME - isn't for CDMs, it's for the interface between CDMs and Javascript. So yes, your Linux-based browser might well have EME support. But if the company who makes the DRM CDM doesn't support Linux, you're out of luck. The existence of the EME standard does not in any way increase the likelihood of DRM vendors supporting any more platforms than they do now.
      - m_eiman 13y ago
        It does make it easier to add support to new platforms, though. If Linux support is just a recompile with a different compiler away (supposing the browser/plugin interface is a simple C API with no GUI), it's more likely to happen.

shmerl 13y ago

> the market interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it. You said it. DRM is close to censorship in its core idea - it's preemptive policing. The market will find routes around it. > I see a lot of opposition to DRM on principle. These principles will go nowhere. Not true. There is a lot of opposition in principle to the totalitarian approach (which DRM embodies). If there would be no opposition, then it will work as "they take as much as you give them". I.e. if you don't value your own freedom, they for sure won't do that for you.

cynicalkane 13y ago
It's true that people are routing around existing DRM solutions. It's not true that this represents any threat to DRM. As the Steam platform has demonstrated, if you make paying the easy solution and piracy the hard one, the target audience (viz. people willing to pay money) will choose the easy one. The average consumer will not try to route around unfree information as long as it shows up when they click play. Policing content is not the sort of "market censorship" they care about.
- youngerdryas 13y ago
  Exactly. If your time has no value then all is free. Most people value their time, the system does not have to be perfect. People who claim there should be no copyright because the future is inevitable probably still go to the doctor.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    "Copyright not existing" and "concessions to DRM not being included in standards" are wildly different things, as are "copyright not existing" and "DRM not existing". Ten years ago, would you tell people to go to the doctor if they asserted that the music industry could and would survive selling their music without DRM?
    - youngerdryas 13y ago
      Maybe you misunderstood. The current model will die, like everything.

bcoates 13y ago

The enthusiasm against DRM is mostly based on principle because the technological argument is so uninteresting. "DRM is part of an standard s.t. required permissions are visible and minimizable and the platform is open, opt-in and extensible" isn't possible and this is non-controversial among anyone not in the business of trying to sell it to someone who doesn't know that.

shmerl 13y ago
> the platform is open Where did you find an open DRM? It sounds oxymoronic.
cynicalkane 13y ago
DRM is just a math problem (encryption) coupled with a hardware problem (retaining control of the results). The industry in, say, video games has settled on an equilibrium of making it very hard but not impossible to crack the hardware. But uncrackable encryption hardware already exists, it would just be inconvenient to make it uncrackable inside an XBox. But whether the methods of DRM are open or closed is an implementation detail. Nobody thinks that TLS being open makes it crackable. But if users and programmers know the capabilities and requirements of DRM solutions, they can sequester them from the rest of the computer.
- tomp 13y ago
  Your post includes a lot of words, but none of these even attempt to justify your claim that there exists open, uncrackable DRM.
  - cynicalkane 13y ago
    The whole reason I started this thread is that it doesn't currently exist but I think it should.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      And I think invisible pink unicorns should exist, limitations of reality be damned!

femto 13y ago

The real danger, from the W3C's perspective is that people will route around an HTML5 standard that includes DRM. What's the point of writing a standard that is built to fail?

shousper 13y ago

Perhaps we should workd on the economic will of the people..

belorn 13y ago

So the options you are suggesting we have today is either a small number of solutions that take over your devices with God-knows-what but which are using browser plugin system, or solutions that take over your devices with God-knows-what but are using the W3C standard as an API, which leads to a larger number of God-knows-what solutions that do God-knows-what to your computer or has God-knows-what security issues that other form of malware can use. How is that an improvement, and what does this have to do with a open network with cooperating nodes that any standard compliant software can parse and use?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]