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Comment by stackcollision | Hacker News Reader

I don't see it taking too long for someone to make an open source DRM-free browser that just ignores the HTML 5 DRM functionality.

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The problem is MPAA & friends will already see this as an "entitlement" and say those other browsers are "facilitating piracy", while the major ones from Google, Microsoft and Apple aren't. Something like that will sound very good to government and authorities.

I really think allowing this to happen in the first place is just like opening the Pandora box. You give these guys an inch, they never stop demanding for more censorship.

Read the spec. This wouldn't work, specifically because EME is a set of interfaces to proprietary blobs which do the actual content decryption and optional rendering.

Building a browser that ignores EME would be functionally equivalent to building a browser that can't use Flash.

A browser can save the data after it's been rendered. A DRM plugin can't tell the difference between an "approved" browser that doesn't do that versus a modified browser that just pretends to be an approved browser.

The CDM may render directly to the underlying platform; it doesn't have to pass decrypted content back to the browser for rendering.

Seriously though, everyone should go just read the spec. Or at the least, take a looksee at this: https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-med...

Yes, and the underlying platform (OS) can cooperate with the browser to allow easy one-click saving of the rendered data after it's been rendered. Unless the whole stack from hardware through to the DRM plugin is locked down.

Certainly, but that's always true of every non-trusted computing platform. You can do that with Flash or Silverlight or any other video DRM system today. I rather suspect it's a very big part of the reason that CDMs don't get published for Linux, because it would be trivial to modify the system to just jack the content on its way out to the display.

> Unless the whole stack from hardware through to the DRM plugin is locked down.

Which is why you have TPM and the various Microsoft/Apple/Google DRM schemes: Hollywood wants to lock down the full stack, and they're getting there one piece at the time.

For TPM, their enabler was Microsoft and their desire to lock down the boot process to enforce licensing. For this spec, it's Google and Netflix because they think it's the only way their media services will survive in the long run.

Insert here smart quote about expert frog-boiling.

Would that be possible? Then can this still be called DRM?

Edit: How can it be DRM if the algorithms/formats/protocols are open? Or aren't they open?

No, not unless the browser found a way to give false positives when EME asks for DRM validation.

>How can it be DRM if the algorithms/formats/protocols are open? Or aren't they open?

They're not. IIRC, the only open parts are the hooks the actual DRM plugin (but we're not calling it a plugin!) will utilize.

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