Yes, the world was better when Flash and Silverlight were the media of choice for delivering video.
DRM should have stayed second-class, leaving the way open for competitors to offer a first-class web experience as long as they left DRM behind.
Competitors already exist in this area. Here is GoG's listening of DRM-free movies: https://www.gog.com/movies?sort=bestselling&page=1
It is very rare that I find something I want to watch here, where as the content I generally want to watch, sadly, exists behind a DRM-wall.
Services/competitors are a dime a dozen, but the issue is driving users to your service, and I don't believe users will run to watch content they don't want to watch just because it is DRM free. I also don't feel like we will force content creators to go DRM free since, as we're seeing, everyone is releasing their own streaming service, which would include DRM.
Hollywood has no desire to enter an open platform. They're completely happy if none of their movies are online, ever. Really. They already have a massively profitable distribution system in the theaters.
The problem is that people want to watch Hollywood movies on their computer, including people that use Linux. So what do you tell those people to do? Tell them run Windows? Have them go watch it in the theater? And they have copyright controls that can force offline sites that host copyrighted content in various countries.
So DRM is the tech industry's way to kiss these people ass. It may be flawed or may not work, but it's still ass-kissing. They're the artists, they get to decide what they do with their art. The consumer has no right to an artists creation. Their only choice is to pay up or ignore it.
And you'll find that this happens to other art mediums as well. There are many, many art galleries that won't sell certain works of art if they deem your ownership as insufficient. Literally - the customer is wrong.
They can pirate it too, which is often a superior user experience in that the user can keep the file, move it to a different device, watch without arcane restrictions, etc.
>We are facing a very new and a very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the video cassette recorder and its necessary companion called the blank tape. And it is like a great tidal wave just off the shore. This video cassette recorder and the blank tape threaten profoundly the life-sustaining protection, I guess you would call it, on which copyright owners depend, on which film people depend, on which television people depend and it is called copyright.
But hey if Hollywood wants to refund every purchase I made adjusting for inflation and with interest of VCRs, LaserDisc Players, DVD Players, BluRay players and all the titles I bought on them over and over then fine let's go back to you can only ever see a movie in a theatre.
Yes I realize DVD and BluRay have DRM but there was just as much wailing and gnashing of teeth over those media when introduced and each one was more profitable than the last and remain so even though their DRM is now broken. Contrast that with the failed DIVX platform and you can see what consumers want versus what Hollywood does are very much out of sync.
Look at Netflix and others who are starting to build alternatives to that ecosystem (in addition to working with it for existing content). If DRM remained second-class, maybe the next such alternative would loosen its stranglehold a bit to gain a broader audience and reduce friction.
Far outside the scope of providing authorized access to protected content.
What's terrible is Netflix could have used it's considerable influence to tell _that_ _Industry_ that we won't walk this walk anymore. EME - as I understand it - allows them to create a closed-source program that runs in a sandbox to authorize and reproduce content we've paid to view. It should have very limited ability to do this - but breaking out of sandboxes is what some software engineers are employed to figure out. We're trusting those companies with the ability to run their programs on our computer so we can watch Paul Blart: Mall Cop. We hope it works as it's defined, but it's not a guarantee.
It's not worth it and pirates don't rip from Netflix anyway. They usually work for the industry as some part of the distribution/theater network.
This hurts the customer. Our computers are not our own.
Why do you think Netflix et al invests so much in original content ? Because they have zero leverage and are beholden to the whims of Hollywood.
Why do you assume they didn't? And if they did and the industry said no, what should they have done? Walk away, lose access to all its content, see a large part of their subscriber base move to different services that do support DRM and therefor get the content and eventually have to start firing employees as their income drops?
Just about any streaming service has this exact same problem. They don't love DRM nor want to support it, it's annoying and cumbersome. But it's how you get access to the content. And unless you can survive purely on your own content you don't really have the option to walk away over your ideals.
If you want DRM out of the system, convince the content/rights holders that DRM isn't in their best interests, i.e they can make more money without it or at the very least won't lose money over not having it. If you're hoping that somehow a significant enough size of the population will boycott it for the industry to change, based on the ideals of the open web and open access, you'll be waiting a long time.
the issue itself is not a "free market problem" because copyright only exists because of government interference. Government created the "right" DRM is protecting against.
In a pure free market, there is no copyright, thus no need for DRM to protect a right that does not exist
So company like Slysoft, Replay, the devs of DeCSS, etc get sued out of existence when they create software that circumvents DRM
the cat and mouse game of DRM only works if you have government legal backing hamstringing the anti-drm crowd.
With out Anti-Circumvention laws there would be software on the open market to bypass every known DRM about 48 hours after it is release if not sooner
Distribute industry content with DRM, distribute their own content without, and see what the results are.
Somebody's going to have to perform the experiment to see what the outcome will be. Since Netflix produces tons of content now, they are in an excellent position to try this.
The industry content will show up on the Pirate Bay, and Netflix original content will show up on the Pirate Bay.
Were you expecting another outcome?
The only other possibility that I can come up with is if Netflix's original content has multi-party rightsholder situations with contacts that legally require them to apply DRM even to "their own" content (IANAL and don't know much about how these things work, but it wouldn't surprise me).
You've already given those two companies pretty broad permission to run binaries on your computer (unless you use Firefox on Linux) so I'm not sure what the incremental security issue really is.
I see the general theory of the argument for Opera and especially Firefox but even so, why trust a CDM blob less than any other commercial binary?
I can't decide whether this is bad or a sign of progress towards training people that DRMed content is not worth much.
Tell that to the 4k webrips on the private torrent trackers; I'm sure they'll be surprised both by the fact that they exist, and have apparently gained sentience.
They knew the adoption rates for out-of-browser proprietary content viewers were awful. That is why they dedicated resources to usurp the open web.
If Mozilla had fought back, we might have progressed towards the death of the obsolete content model big media wants to keep in place and prevent change in the market. It would have at least been a step in the right direction - instead, the promise of the open Internet was sabotaged, and big media gets to be more "convenient" at its sacrifice.
It comes from two ideological positions. One believes that content creators need complete systemic control of what they make - at all costs (that the creator maintains full control no matter how the content is interacted with) - and the other is that content shouldn't be controlled (or that I, as a buyer of content, should control the content I bought), and all real world implementations fall between those extremes.
But when it comes to DRM, it should be understandable that plenty of people (myself included) are not willing to allow third party companies to run proprietary code (the drm) on my hardware for the exclusive purpose of preventing me from interacting with data on my own computer (the streamed movie / music). When web browsers start baking in this proprietary functionality, it forces me to look for alternatives to the established open source browsers.
If you are content with that relationship with content (heh) providers, then this is not your fight. But at least accept that a lot of us want to own our computers, and proprietary software takes away that right, and DRM is just one of the more visceral forms proprietary software takes where its entire purpose is to impede the users ability to control their computers.
your never bought content. you only rented it. this is especially true on netflix & co
How should content creators protect against people who access their content without buying it?
It's pointless for them to bother trying to stop piracy, especially of analog content using technical means.
Seems to me the only ultimate solution is to have some kind of guaranteed basic income, at least for all people that aren't involved in the creation of tangible goods (that can't be copied at zero cost).
DRM is not about being perfect against a dedicated pirate. Just like locks on doors, it's about putting up a few barriers that serve to keep the vast majority of people honest. No one is under any illusions that DRM will stop movies and games from showing up on torrent trackers.
It doesn't "keep honest people honest" when piracy is so damn easy regardless of what they do with DRM. The point of that phrase is to increase the effort and motivation necessary to commit a crime - in this case, DRM doesn't do that. With or without DRM any idiot can download the latest Popcorn Time fork and stream movies with 1 click. DRM doesn't hinder the most casual of pirates at all, it only hinders honest customers.
None of these are exactly out-of-the-way high-effort options. There's no increased effort - you just don't bother trying to do so via Netflix. Any of these can be Googled in a few minutes. DRM does nothing to prevent them.
The legal risk you're talking about is just that though - nothing to do with DRM, everything to do with a legal threat. Note that it's more effective than DRM.
Even those who do go out of their way somewhat to improve the piracy experience don't go that far. I wouldn't compare configuring a typical Usenet+Sonarr+CouchPotato+Plex rig to breaking down a door, and that's pretty much the most advanced sort of setup you can get. It may require slightly specialized knowledge, but it doesn't require specialized intent usually. The intent is still the same as that of the casual pirate, it's just a tradeoff of upfront effort for later ease.
This question got downvoted. What did you read into it, or which insinuation do you think it makes that you find offensive?
Why didn't Mozilla work harder to catch up with Chrome and counter Google? Was it a case of "My enemy's enemy is my friend?"
And why did Opera slip away into the mists of obscurity? I remember it being pretty good and it was actually my main browser for a year or so.
I'd argue that this "catching up to Google" was more their problem than their solution.
In making Firefox more and more Chrome-like they took away many unique and important Firefox features and they keep moving further and further in that direction. They now want to trash XUL and move to an extension framework that exactly matches Chrome's, removing the deep flexibility and customization that Firefox users have enjoyed. Several of my favorite extension authors have already announced they're giving up when that change happens.
If your browser just plays catch up without differentiating itself in any significant way, why would anyone use it?
Mozilla came up with some cool UI ideas, but never implemented them, or quickly did so, got them to a tiny percentage of their full potential and then abandoned them. That's the kind of thing they should be focusing on - that's the kind of thing that made Firefox gain market share in the first place. Instead they keep playing catch up. And playing catch up with a massive codebase against a giant company is incredibly hard.
Right now Brave is doing a better job differentiating itself and it's built on top of Electron - on Chrome's core codebase. If it were a little more active I think it'd have a shot at something.
Users should have a lot more faith in the protections of a browser over the free-for-all security and privacy nightmare that is desktop computing.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1021232
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1021235
The spec talks about both securing the CDM with Sandboxing and preventing fingerprinting, amongst other security + privacy issues that should be addressed:
https://w3c.github.io/encrypted-media/#cdm-security
https://w3c.github.io/encrypted-media/#privacy-fingerprintin...
the spec also says if the CDN isn't sandboxed then the user needs to be warned and prompted to allow exec:
> if a user agent chooses to support a Key System implementation that cannot be sufficiently sandboxed or otherwise secured, the user agent should ensure that users are fully informed and/or give explicit consent before loading or invoking it.
So instead they lobbied for it to be built in, the day will come when view source won't work anymore because everything fed down will protected by DRM and we moved another step closer to turning the web into a gigantic walled garden for whoever the incumbents are at that point in time.
this is a false statement, Flash was ubiquitous. Still today every chrome user on desktop has a flash player. Obviously, this isn't true for mobile, but before the mobile era flash was basically on every Windows and Mac computer with a browser.
By that metric notepad would be the most adopted programmer text editor in the world..
Yes, with WebAssembly. (With ASM.js, the predecessor it was still JS, but hard to read as human.) that's why WebAssembly is bad for the open web. In near future we will see binary blob SaaS like full Office running in browser. So the 1990s vision of vendor lock-in come to a full circle.
We've arguably replaced an insecure and general purpose open interface to proprietary blobs with more narrow and single purpose open interfaces to proprietary blobs.
Actually, ECE is a plugin. The only difference is that it helps web-designers switch plugin providers.
That's it. No more security. No more standardization.
As a user, you still depend on the goodwill of the ECE provider throw you a bone. If you use a slightly niche OS (say, OpenBSD on ARM), you're out of luck.
If Adobe decides that it's not worth their time to develop a plugin for PaleMoon, they won't and you're out of luck (or will MS let their ECE plugin run on Linux, or Google's run on FF?). You (as a user) won't be able to switch to another provider. It all depends on the provider.
"If you use a slightly niche OS (say, OpenBSD on ARM)"
Is rather hilarious - calling OpenBSD on ARM a 'slightly niche' OS in the context of 'operating systems people use to watch video on the web' is rather ambitious, don't you think? OpenBSD on ARM would have to increase it's user base in this arena by a couple orders of magnitude to elevate itself to 'slightly niche'....
The bigger issue will be when these providers will start holding OS's hostage (well, you want to view half the web? You've got to have a locked bootloader and only I have the key. You want to index our sites? Google has permission (the unlocking key) but not you).
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch_system_softwar...
Do you mean GNU running the FreeBSD kernel? Linux is only a kernel.
I wonder whether it would be feasible to run the CDM within QEMU on a platform like OpenBSD/ARM? At the end of the day it's just ordinary code that runs in the Gecko Media Plugin sandbox.
(Ok, I guess on Linux it's a blob from a Google-owned company.)