The media groups want DRM and they will get it. This doesn't mean that we are going to lose all freedom on the Web. It's a step in that direction, certainly, but we're sure as heck not there yet.
I agree that it's "only" a step in that direction, but this can snowball and get ugly pretty fast.
Power! Unlimited Power! -Darth Sidious
But I think it's still a possibility. Never underestimate companies that want to "innovate".
I mean, standardizing a DRM API on browsers is probably going to bring us a lot of new "tools" which people will try to use for a lot of different things, and I can very easily imagine they will explore the possibility of paywalls and such.
Not saying you are wrong, just saying that sometimes layers don't seem to be as separate as we engineers would like them to be.
I'm going to need some citations that this is even remotely in the plan (and requiring HTTPS isn't the same as refusing to load unsigned content, since that's on the transport level).
However in the future this DRM will be an freedom-of-speech issue. The goverment could use it as means to silence people. North-Korea is currently ahead of us. Any videos you take could be automatically signed and later on pulled by the gov. by revoking the signature. Now extending this to basic text, images, VR?, and whatever new mediaformats there will be in the future.
I highly recommend watching video where a tablet from North-Korea gets inspected. It explains how NK keeps control of its citizens.
And please provide some example of any browser vendor making moves to block/delist unsigned videos/photos for _any_ reason.
I think they will instead include this tech and make it usable for those who want it and continue supporting non-DRM media for those who don't want it. They're not going to block your ability to share your content without DRM.
Of course not. Then they would block all of YouTube, Twitch, Vimeo along with all other video sharing platforms, not to mention adult ones.
It would hit home too hard to require DRM be installed right away. But on the long run?
I would love to see how that's working out for them, but even to wonder about the experiment borders on paedophilia. This is a tough nut to crack. (punintended...)
This statement is SO RIDICULOUS it just broke my brain. How?! Why?!
Even the evil movie companies don't want to prevent you from sharing your home video online.
and it _is_ a slippery slope.
are you really going to _not_ use gmail and google maps because you can't see the source code? of course you're not. but is it beneficial for google to lock their code up behind a DRM blob? of course it is.
so there is every incentive in the world for web pages to be made proprietary, and no incentive at all for users to put up a fight (which is why this first step is so important: because it's being made at the level of technologists, who supposably have the insight to know why it's important).
but after this, the progression will be slow, but relentless, toward a closed web. Even if a subset of ideological wackos decide to fight... they're just ideological wackos.
Stallman was right, and this is the exact same thing playing out again on a distributed medium.
No, it's not. Their code is locked behind… uh… A SERVER. You could never see the server side code, and it's always been that way.
They do not give a flying fuck about people looking at their JavaScript UI code! That code is really, really NOT where the value is. The value is in the service — the databases full of data, the user accounts.