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Comment by CobrastanJorji | Hacker News Reader

I'm no an expert on DRM, but maybe someone here is. What would open source programs using DRM look like? My understanding is that the whole point of DRM is to prevent the software and the user from having arbitrary control over the data, which is fundamentally opposite of open source.

Say that Google desperately wanted to support any reasonable method to accomplish allowing open source tools access to DRM-protected media. Is there some way to allow that? What would it look like?

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DRM in hardware is about the only other possibility. Make the GPU do the DRM internally. This is actually relatively feasible since most DRM'd video content has hardware acceleration support and GPUs already support HDCP.

Full DRM in hardware would require a much larger coordination across manufacturers than any DRM to date (HDCP), and with AACS's key distribution problems greatly magnified. Specifically, preventing any software fallback would be required to avoid AACS's player key leaks.

Also if the hardware DRM ever gets broken, you've got to choose between breaking the device or getting content ripped.

By contrast with DRM in software and automatic browser updates, you can switch DRM schemes fairly easily. Which is not hypothetical - Google has had to fix Wideview multiple times.

But this needs both streaming and automatic updates. Without automatic updates, you can't depend on devices having the update. Without streaming, something like https://www.redfox.bz/en/anydvdhd.html will eventually emerge and people buying existing content will be able to bypass your control.

Binary blobs (i.e. not open source) ?

DRM is just encryption. It being open source and everyone seeing what math is used is only going to make it stronger.

Sure, and maybe this is my lack of understanding speaking, but if you're free to edit the source, recompile, and then use the DRM software, why couldn't you just edit the source to save the video?

They'll need to implement some kind of signing mechanism, or the users will just plug in a modified blob that pipes the output to a file.

DRM is encryption where you give the end user all information needed to decrypt the data but still want to restrict how that decrypted data is used.

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