The Web is going to get DRM one way or another.
Now we can do this the easy way, with standards that are agreed upon across vendors -- or the hard way, with proprietary plug-ins that only work in Windows and Internet Explorer.
Now we can do this the easy way, with standards that are agreed upon across vendors -- or the hard way, with proprietary plug-ins that only work in Windows and Internet Explorer.
And this proposal involves DRM implemented with proprietary plugins (known as CDMs). There is no requirement that CDMs be available across platforms, on open operating systems, available to license by any vendor. The CDMs are the new proprietary plugins, they just happen to do less than Flash, leaving more of it up to the browser.
Is it really so much better to trade one proprietary form of DRM for another? What does that actually get us? More crappy services, where Hollywood decides on a month by month basis which particular services get to offer its content, so you need to sign up for 5 different services just to watch all of the content that you watch? And each one of them supports different set-top boxes, doesn't work on open platforms, and restricts you from backing up media that you have bought?
This isn't improvement; this is just wanting to get browser vendors to implement anti-features that users object to, instead of getting Adobe to do it.
Wrong. The Web already has DRM - Silverlight and other junk. The subject is about not dragging this garbage into the HTML standard.
> Now we can do this the easy way, with standards that are agreed upon across vendors -- or the hard way, with proprietary plug-ins that only work in Windows and Internet Explorer.
EME won't make DRM "easier" for users - it will still require closed source black box modules which will never work with open source browsers. It might make it easier for Netflix and co. who push this idiocy onto the web. But it's their problem, users and the Web should not oblige them with comfortable proliferation of unethical approaches. If anything it should be made harder, to give more incentives to avoid it.
There may be rationalizations for DRM by certain individuals or companies, just as there are "reasons" from warlords to expand their empires, but none of them necessarily benefit everyone justly. For that matter, there are straight-forward arguments that DRM cannot benefit everyone justly (for example, DRM prevents users from controlling their equipment, or it prevents innovation thereby distorting the market), and if it can't: why on earth is it worth promoting?
Saying DRM should be in HTML 5 is like saying the freedom to murder should be a human right. IMHO, both cross a line that make them (clearly) no longer objectively in the public interest.
The ability to embed plugins is as close to that line as necessary - and that has already been standardized. There is no reason to go farther than that and to proliferate a tool that is not in the public interest (for all intents and purposes a "weapon" against the public).
For DRM to work, someone needs to control that DRM (which means plugins) - preferably as few people as possible. You can't really have "open DRM" or anything like that, which means "HTML5 DRM5" is completely inconsistent and conflictual with the values of the web, and what W3C is supposed to stand for.
The reason there even seems to be a side that is "pro HTML5 DRM" is because they think:
1) it will make Netflix and such really cross-platform
2) you won't have to use "nasty plugins" like Flash or Silverlight
But none of the two is really true. You will have plugins, they will just be at the OS level, and good luck getting Netflix to work on new operating systems such as Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish, FF OS, Tizen, and so on - unless the company behind them can make partnerships with the content companies or content distributors like Netflix.
Honest question.
In other words, no.
This proposal is turning HTML5 into "New Flash" because the CDM will have to do the decoding and rendering of frames. This is not only dangerous to freedom but this is dangerous to all the achievements and advances in HTML5 and the web stack.
https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-med...
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Dwight: Okay, I’m going to need to search your car. Give me your keys.
Ryan: I am not giving you my keys.
Dwight: Don’t make me do this the hard way.
Ryan: What’s the hard way?
Dwight: I go down to the police station on my lunch break. I tell the police officer — I know several — what I suspect you may have in your car. He requests a hearing from a judge and obtains a search warrant. Once he has said warrant, he will drive over here and make you give him the keys to your car, and you will have to obey him.
Ryan: Yeah, let’s do it that way.
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Note to Hollywood: Yeah, let's do it the hard way.
Sorry but there is nothing intrinsic valuable about DRM in the web, in the exact same way that any other form of malware is not intrinsic valuable to the web. Just because its current legal to offer media products with malware embedded, doesn't make it a logical choice to include in a web standard that describes an open web of cooperating nodes.
"The cost to all computing simply isn't worth the tiny perceived benefit to a very few" So morally it's wrong. That pragmatism comes from the moral imperative or the perceived masses.
"...it is the very practical lesson that people don't want it." Why? Because it affects their perceived freedoms, ergo moral reasoning.
To glibly dismiss the moral imperative of F/LOSS simply wrong. Heck, Stallman, the EFF and the FSF rely heavily on argumentum ad consequentiam, argumentum ad metum and argumentum ad passiones in a not-insignificant amount of their literature and all of those to varing extent rely on moralising.
The moral (or, at least, subjective; whether the particular subjective distinction is "moral" or something else is somewhat of a an arbitrary distinction) part is "B is widely undesirable". Desirability is not a factual premise.
> If that's a moral argument, then by your definition, there's no such thing as pragmatism or logic.
Well, no; that is a moral argument (or at least, an argument that rests on a subjective premise), and it is also an application of logic. Logic doesn't provide premises, it applies based on premises which are either sensory observations (which are inherently subjective) or a priori postulates (which are often subjective moral/aesthetic/etc. value propositions.)
Logic exists, it just doesn't get you to any kind of conclusions about the way things should be or what things you should do without starting with premises that are about the way things should be or what you should do.
It implies no such thing. It merely implies that DRM is a net loss for the industry, and that the music industry has already learned this but the movie industry has not.
Says who?
One of the primary sponsors of the EME proposal is Netflix, who are already building exactly what you describe.
I've addressed this issue - a misconception that at least some on the W3C hold - in detail here:
http://www.w3.org/QA/2013/05/perspectives_on_encrypted_medi....
Why should it have to?
I want that second way to hurt, alot. Alot alot.
I want the way DRM gets onto the web to be the same vector malware gets onto computers. I want this to suck for DRM, it should suck. It should be painful to give up your rights. It SHOULD hurt.
If you want your content to be protected, fine, you can go back to using third party plugins. Then users will have a clear choice on whether to consume your content.
The CDM will in almost all cases be a platform-specific, proprietary, closed-source binary blob.
_Please_ do not buy in to the idea that including EME in HTML5 will reduce the platform dependence of DRM solutions.