Hacker News Reader

Comment by etherealG | Hacker News Reader

I would argue that the problem space reduces to the same thing. Once you hand someone encrypted content along with a way to decode it, you've essentially given them the content and have to trust that they won't copy it. You have no way to protect the content from being copied if you have given out the secret to decoding it.

View on HN

you can logic all you want. the fact is, content providers want certain implementations of DRM. if "web standards" do not allow for these implementations, then they won't use those standards. you're not going to convince content providers not to have DRM just because its not a web standard - content providers never cared about web standards to begin with.

the question is whether you care more about the adoption of the standard or the purity of that standard. if html5 doesn't include methods for DRM, then hulu and netflix will continue to use proprietary extensions. how much do you care about adoption? if only 50% of sites use it, is it still meaningfully a standard?

None of the open source browsers will be able to include the DRM in their source code anyway, so how different is it from downloading a proprietary plugin?

I assume this will be something that is available in Chrome and Safari but not Chromium and WebKit, etc.

I think the penalties associated with using plugins is simply the price DRM advocates should have to pay. I don't think it's the job of the W3C to make it easier on them to maintain this practice. The short-term gain of getting large media players on-board is outweighed by the long-term prolonging of the life of DRM and delaying the advancement of social norms and business practices for media distribution, consumption and ownership.

Looking at the companies that control media today and trying to mold the environment of the web so that they survive is exactly backwards. Instead, I think the W3C should focus on creating the best environment for an open web possible, and let the companies that exist now adapt to it or be replaced by those who can.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com