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Comment by featherverse | Hacker News Reader

I would suggest not underestimating Mozilla's market influence.

It would be possible to create a browser that displays DRM content and ignores DRM. The only thing that content publishers could do is ban that browser. And then it would adapt to disguise itself as other browsers.

DRM on the web can only happen if all of the major players (that is, browser publishers) agree to play along.

I am very excited about this news, this is probably the most important news in weeks, and could impact the Internet for years to come.

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> I would suggest not underestimating Mozilla's market influence.

They have no market influence. They have maybe ~10% of the market globally (I've seen figures between 5-15%), and that's primarily desktop - which is decreasing daily. On mobile it's even worse (probably less than 1%).

Any influence they have solely extends to the desktop, and that's not the primary way people are interacting with the internet nowadays.

Market share isn't immutable! Market share changes based on capabilities. I dropped IE for FF when I got a basic understanding of computers, I dropped FF when it became clear it was a memory hog, and now I kind of toggle between Chrome and FF. I think that, with killer features like breaking out of DRM, the market share could change.

> I think that, with killer features like breaking out of DRM, the market share could change.

That's not a killer feature to the market: I bet 99/100 people don't know what DRM is or what it stands for. They just care that they can watch videos or not.

For better or the worse the overwhelming majority of browser users don't know, care, or have any idea about how the internet is standardized, how DRM works, and why it matters to them.

Of course for the worse. As usual worst things in the world come with a silent agreement of majority.

Ignorance != agreement

I actually don't see how using the browser would provide any practical value. If you pay for a streaming service you might as well just watch the legit DRM'd version. If you're watching a pirate stream you might as well stream from a pirate who cracked the DRM on their side.

> I think that, with killer features like breaking out of DRM, the market share could change.

Indeed, that would kill Firefox once and for all.

Indeed. People who want nothing to do with DRM will want alternatives. Once DRM-integrated browsers are compromised at scale, more people will want alternatives.

Unless you value the fact that Firefox comes from an organisation which values the freedom of the user and are willing to tolerate a dip in quality (as perceived by the typical user, not a techie) compared to a product from an organisation which has far greater resources at its disposal, and unless a lot of other people are going to do the same, it'll never work.

I use Firefox and almost never use another browser but I'm afraid over time, it's share of the market will fall. This news makes me fear so even more. I do hope I am proven wrong though. I've seen one monopolist fall. I do hope I see many more.

If what the above says is true (Though Im not sure it is possible), and Mozilla can provide a way to display DRM content without adopting DRM standard, I would think that would increase its marketshare.

You nailed it.

The user cares about access to content. The user does not care about DRM. The user does not care about corporate interests. Ad blockers are proof of this. The user wants what they want, and the people who provide that to them with the fewest hassles are the ones who win.

Everyone needs to appreciate that "cost" is a gigantic hassle to most people, no matter how much money they have. The concept of owning their content is another big consideration for people, which is why we saw "rental" models for video streaming fail in the past compared to "ownership" models.

> They have no market influence.

In other words you have no idea what you're talking about, and why should anything else you say be treated any differently?

> It would be possible to create a browser that displays DRM content and ignores DRM.

The DMCA makes this illegal. No browser vendor is going to take that risk. Maybe some anonymous developers will release a firefox fork or similar, but that's a big risk. Not to mention, most groups who pirate content tend to keep their methods secret and only release the content.

DMCA has no reach outside of USA.

Well, it didn't until TPP, and what's to stop more agreements pushed through closed channels to make it truly global?

But multiple regional equivalents exist.

The only people who give a @!#$ about the DMCA are lawyers. It's going to be repealed eventually.

So hopefully Firefox will simply display DRM content and ignore any restriction DRM imposes.

EME plugins will use whatever user-hostile platform-specific opaque techniques necessary to communicate with the host OS in their attempt to ensure compliance.

If the browser interferes with them, or the OS can't promise a "secure" chain from plugin-output > display, they can just refuse to stream the content.

You can bet EME plugins will be highly platform specific, and poorly supported, if at all, on platforms that respect their users.

Firefox will heavily sandbox their EME plugins. They get no direct access to the host OS.

Anyone taking bets on how long it will be before CDMs start requiring extensions that allow access to platform Output Protection/HDCP mechanisms?

If nothing else, the standard already allows for the CDM to access the network (albeit managed by the user-agent) which means, for example, it could ping Microsoft to ask about this particular Win10 computer (as identified by user agent, IP address, and/or user account data from the content provider).

Netflix/Microsoft/Hollywood/etc. aren't going to stop until they can close the loop as much as possible, with MS and hardware manufacturers already working to tighten things from the other end (see HDCP and the various frameworks for "protected content" that MS has been working towards).

Either providers will push to integrate those platform-level frameworks, or they'll just stop offering content to web browsers entirely.

Apple and Google also have platform-level frameworks on their OSes.

> with MS and hardware manufacturers already working to tighten things from the other end (see HDCP and the various frameworks for "protected content" that MS has been working towards).

HN users would do well to keep this in mind the next time they are singing MS's praises about how MS are embracing open source and becoming the savior of all things programming.

Probably not while Mozilla Foundation is a US organization.

Wouldn't publishers just refuse to distribute keys to said browser?

You build a plugin framework that lets users pirate keys without exposing the author to excessive DMCA risk.

I think the author of such a plugin would be at considerable legal risk.

That sounds like a strong case for anonymous authorship.

If they where in the US.

Lots of this stuff is so US focused. Any European nation for one will let you reverse engineer stuff you buy or download to your own heart's content in the safety of your own home. I expect many countries in the world are civilized like that.

Almost every country, with the exception of Israel, has implemented the anti-DRM provisions of the WIPO Copyright Treaty using similar language to the United States, or worse. In the European countries, it's embodied in the European Copyright Directive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Directive#Technologi...

That's one of the reason why we argued so strongly that the W3C should include a covenant. Even if EFF continues to successfully obtain temporary exemptions from the DMCA in the tri-annual review, we can't do that for security researchers or lobby for similar fair use exemptions in every country.

You're right. I've done some digging, and some similar language has been implemented at least in the Netherlands (for the Dutch, this is article 29a of our Auteurswet). Although it's somewhat vague, it does bum me out. It seems the Dutch implementation has not been enforced all that often (mostly to combat game console mod chips), but it has been used to fight security researchers publishing stuff on security weaknesses in our public transport RFID cards... Thought we were better than that.

It's a terrain, some points are higher than others.

Not convinced any country isn't underwater though.

New Zealand isn't a party to that WIPO treaties [1], but it does have a law implementing restrictions on circumventing Technological protection measures (TPM) [2]. But unlike the DMCA, the NZ law lists lots of exceptions that allow you to circumvent TPMs. In fact it says "Nothing in this Act prevents any person from using a TPM circumvention device to exercise a permitted act under Part 3." Part 3 of the Copyright 1994 [3] is the (very long) part that lists everything you can do with a copyrighted work, including the NZ equivalent of fair use, research, education, archiving, backup, decompiling software, etc, etc.

[1] http://www.copyright.org.nz/international.php

[2] http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2008/0027/latest/D...

[3] http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1994/0143/latest/D...

> download to your own heart's content in the safety of your own home

Nein.

> I think the author of such a plugin would be at considerable legal risk.

If they are caught... ;-)

So are all major piracy operations in existence today and yet most of them operate without any real penalties. Look at The Pirate Bay and Giganews, both of those have been operating under enormous "legal risk" for over a decade.

Piracy is never going away and this re-run of corporations trying to control content created by people (corporations are not people) will fail the same way that every single previous effort has failed. Piracy will outlive the old fools pushing for these programs.

I'm not saying piracy is the answer, but once these troublesome corporate fools have all died sanity will return to the market and piracy will be replaced by pro-consumer models.

> displays DRM content and ignores DRM

Nothing says "attempting to survive as a legitimate corporate entity" like "let's flagrantly violate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO_Copyright_and_Performance... ..."

Who needs to "survive as a legitimate corporate entity"? All you need is to publish a browser. And basic browsers aren't that hard. Just be anonymous.

Edit: If oligarchs create unworkable rules, why not create a new game?

I don't believe this formal standardization will affect end-user web browser features.

All major browsers (Firefox, Chrome, IE, Edge, Safari) have already included HTML EME DRM support for years, so it is a de-facto standard already.

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