Stealing content was never easier than with HTML5 | Hacker News Reader

Stealing content was never easier than with HTML5

webkitchen.be

10 pointsZeroGravitas11 comments

Alright here's an idea, why don't you protect your content server side?

If user is logged in and user payed for music: stream, otherwise don't.

Simple isn't it? Few lines of code.

If you however want to cripple access to the music even after purchased, then simply pick your favorite already existing DRM technology, that is probably already cracked anyway, or invent your own that will be probably cracked anyway. I think I'm beginning to see a pattern here.

And here is even more material on this matter: http://xkcd.com/488/

sorry, how is flash content save from being copied? As soon as, I can display it on my screen I can record it. It can be even easily scripted (a friend of mine did sth. like that for a streaming page a while back). Also flash or any proprietary plugin solution won't help you. As soon as it gains any traction, there will be "save video" plugins for firefox, chrome etc.

Is this really a problem? If you are scared about smb. stealing your content, you probably shouldn't put it on the Internet ;)

Well, one can hardly expect the OP to attend to that. After all his by-line is:

"SERGE JESPERS - Life as an Adobe platform evangelist"

Agreed: if you can watch it, you can save it. Also, as a point of interest:

Last I checked, Netflix (Silverlight based streaming) serves up its videos in a series of tiny chunks (you can look at this with e.g. Safari's Activity window). I don't know if this is done with security in mind or just for practical/bandwidth reasons, but it seems like it would at least add a little hassle to the task of saving the video.

If you are scared about smb. stealing your content, you probably shouldn't put it on the Internet ;)

Tell that to the big broadcasting sites like NBC or The Daily Show.

Even though its technically possible to save their videos right now, they would be extremely reluctant to switch to a mechanism that would make it downright trivial.

Finally, it could end up being the iOS and Android mobile devices that push content providers towards HTML 5, figuring the benefits of streaming to mobiles offsets the perceived downside of making video easy to save to disk.

Protect static content behind authentication? Hosting static files naked is almost _asking_ for them to be hotlinked.

Just like this one and that guy who wanted to block Firefox because of Adblock hurting ads revenue, people don't realize that as soon as you download a web page, you can do whatever you want with it.

So? The web grew to the size it is partly because people could look at how other people were doing things and, well, learn from it.

Worthless flamebait.

You can embed other people's images, css and other files, the world still turns.

The article's rubbish but some of the comments are amazing though.

Like the fact that the guy in charge of HTML(5) closed a feature request for DRM as WONTFIX with the blunt comment "DRM is evil".

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10902#c8

And the guy (from Opera?) explaining how to do basic server side obfuscation of HTML video/audio file links to equal basic Flash obfuscation.

http://www.webkitchen.be/2011/01/26/stealing-content-was-nev...

Worth pointing out that per his byline, this guy is a "Adobe platform evangelist".

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