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Comment by hrrsn | Hacker News Reader

Not trolling, just genuinely curious: what about this is so awful then? This sounds like a step in the right direction?

What's awful is that I, or you, or anyone else, cannot take the web specs and implement a browser that correctly displays websites that are following those standards. To correctly display every website I have to make backroom deals for big $ with companies.

Isn't that basically the same? In the past, you could use the W3C standards to build a browser which would display everything except plugin/ActiveX content. Now you can build a browser which can display a higher percentage of content, including audio and video, except DRM restricted material.

This seems like an exceedingly fine distinction between the web as it works in theory and as it has actually worked at any point in its history since the number of browsers exceeded 1.

I also don't understand the big deal. I'd be happy for someone to point out the obvious thing I'm missing. I believe content creators/owners should be able to do whatever they want with what they create/own, just like I can do whatever I want with what I create/own.

DRM makes it hard for me to make backup copies of media that I've bought and own, so you can see how DRM goes against your stated belief. That's just one for starters. The article itself goes into a few more reasons.

But that doesn't go against my stated belief. If someone wants to offer you a time-limited or location-limited video they can do that. You don't have to pay for it. And I say this as an Australian who doesn't pay for Netflix because of stupid regional restrictions. Vote with your wallet and let people do as they please.

It isn't. Every time one of these articles hit a bunch of people get outraged but none of them have figured out how to a) convince the average person buying DRMed content why they should care or b) how calling for the W3C (or before that, Mozilla) to make a token symbolic gesture would in any way change the dynamic when three of the four major browsers are made by DRM vendors.

This makes DRM easy. Very easy.

So easy that Twitter and Facebook are considering to implement it for all videos. So easy that YouTube is starting to implement it.

This kills the web.

The web as you knew it is dead and buried.

So, just like the web until ~2014, when Flash video was the default and sites could very easily add DRM to their players?

And building DRM was so complicated close to no sites had it? Yes, exactly that.

Right now, YouTube is working on adding EME based DRM, as are Twitter and Facebook.

Even with their Flash based video, you could always easily download it.

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