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Comment by nostalgk | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla uses Google Widevine as well, I believe. The path forward is to license Widevine from Google, and they've already shut down other FOSS projects by refusing to give them licenses.

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Wait, Mozilla has a license to a Google product to display video... that they won't give to any other OSS projects?

Like, if you forked FF, you wouldn't be able to display video either?

That is EVIL.

It means effectively there will never be another open source browser that can be display commercial-popular video, Firefox is IT, they have an open source monopoly? Oh geez.

Well, from what I understand, Google insists on any project that uses that solution license it. If Firefox were to trickle this down, they could get their license revoked. The onus is on Google to stop being asshats.

How far does the DMCA reach in europe? It feels like we need some reverse engineering of widevine.

Well, I know that in France, breaking DRM is illegal (law has been aligned to EU's, which itself has aligned itself on DMCA), BUT in practice when a consumer association has tried to force the hand of justice by not only breaking DRM, but posting a detailed tutorial of how to do it (while hiding behind the "private copy" defense), and outing themselves to law enforcement to force a trial, the judge has dismissed the case by considering them as irresponsible due to force majeure : https://www.lesnumeriques.com/loisirs/proces-anti-drm-classe... (fr)

Now might be a good time to do it, considering the lack of love for Google in EU these days ?

an open-source implementation of DRM that is compatible with widevine would be a step in the right direction.

Is it patented ?

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