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Comment by dlitz | Hacker News Reader

> Wow, Cory's article is totally over the top...

What makes you think it's over the top? We have a public-interest organization pushing DRM, a technology that is decidedly against the public interest.

I'm surprised that this is upvoted to the top of the thread, when you haven't done anything except say "this is over the top" and given us a link that explains what DRM is---as if the DRM's detractors don't already know what it is or how it works.

> Sure, it'd be nice if the big media companies stopped insisting on using encryption to distribute their videos. But that's not likely to happen anytime soon.

That's only true because technologists continue to lie to media companies, telling them that DRM is feasible and not harmful to their interests (even though, in addition to being against the public interest, it tends to cause monopolization of their distribution chains---just ask the music industry happened with iTunes).

Look, these media companies are looking to us for advice; We're doing both them an ourselves a disservice by continuing to sell them DRM snake oil.

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> you haven't done anything except say "this is over the top" and given us a link that explains what DRM is

The link is the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) spec. EME is not DRM. It allows access to a decryption system outside of the browser.

That is different than what Cory and others are claiming.

It is precisely DRM. The entire point of it is to protect media streams from copying, and the BBC has specifically demanded that it be robust enough DRM enough to trigger anti-circumvention laws and allow them to have anyone who does manage to copy the decrypted streams arrested and jailed.

EME merely allows access to a DRM system. I know this distinction sounds overly precise, but the fact that EME does not mandate a DRM system makes a big difference if you want to implement this spec in a browser.

Were EME to actually specify the DRM then this spec would never have been jointly proposed by Google, Microsoft, and Netflix.

It is an effective but incorrect bit of rhetoric when Cory equates EME to DRM in the article.

It's all just an empty demagogy in lawyers style. EME is about DRM, but the language was made generic to avoid mentioning DRM. So to make things fair and clear - EME is intended to serve the cause of those who push DRM on the Web. And it's enough of a reason to oppose EME.

Look at ABC as an example. You can watch their video content via a Flash plugin, or via a native app for IOS. They do not let you watch their content via a browser without Flash. This is fairly common for media companies.

Now think of the implications of not having EME. It creates a situation that pushes users away from the open web and onto native apps and proprietary plugins. EME is needed so that users don't move away from browsers to native apps. Users will go where the content is, no matter how vigorously you shout your ideology.

Aren't those plugins used already by those who rely on DRM? So what do you prefer, to make DRM (a dying unethical trend) part of the HTML5, or to retain its area of influence to plugins? Users know that plugins should be better avoided. They represent external, not very trustworthy entities for the web experience. This goes along with DRM which should be avoided for similar reasons. Pushing DRM into the browsers would only obscure this matter. EME is therefore not serving any good purpose for the open web and should be opposed. It's not like users who use DRM will suddenly get pushed into plugins or external applications. They already use them! And those who don't use and don't want to use DRM don't need that junk in the browser.

And for publishers it should be a lesson to stop using all that DRM for good if they want to be part of the open web.

Users will get pushed into native apps. Normal users don't know or care what DRM is. They click on a link to some video they want to watch from ABC, and if they are on a mobile device they are told they have to download the free app to watch it. They do, cause they want to want to watch, and we just helped push users off the open web!

> Users will get pushed into native apps.

I don't see why it is a problem, if we are talking about DRM. DRM free distributors will use HTML, embracing the open web. Obsessed with DRM ones will use shady plugins and malware-like non browser applications. I'm fine with that - it also clearly marks this distinction for the user. Pushing off the Web here relates to DRM and distributors who insist on using it, not to the users who you claim have no idea what's going on.

Maybe, but I think users will go where the content is that they want to watch. I don't think a normal user will associate it with DRM.

Users won't stop using the Web. If some will want to use DRMed content, they'll use those external applications and / or plugins. And users will figure out the difference - between those publishers who respect them and use DRM free channels (including the Web), and those who don't repsect them and insist on stupid DRM and malware prone tools to distribute their content. So this "pushing" IMHO serves only the good purpose to isolate DRM from the normal technologies.

So the bottom line - W3C being the designers of the future Web concepts should focus on pushing distributors off DRM for the sake of open Web by refusing to be associated with it in any fashion, instead of obliging this insulting preemptive policing by pushing DRM onto the users as a "Web standard".

It's unclear if the world will move towards native apps or stay on the open web. Preventing anyone from having a DRM solution for the web makes it more likely the world will move to native apps. That would be a bad outcome in my opinion.

I also fail to understand your ideology. Anyone who creates content should have the ability to decide how they wish to sell and distribute that content. I think DRM is futile, but I don't think it is bad as you seem to believe.

There are applications which are used outside the browsers. And DRM is a perfect example - DRM has no place in the open Web. I don't see a problem with pushing bad technologies off the Web (or altogether off for that matter). Good riddance!

Idea here is rather straightforward. Publishers indeed have a choice to treat their users with respect, or to insult them with DRM. But we aren't talking about them making this choice - it's up to them. We are talking about W3C putting an unethical technology in a Web standard, to oblige some publishers who made that unethical choice. It's unacceptable! It's not different from saying that since malware creators want an ability to affect their users, W3C should standardize malware methods for the Web.

your ideology makes no sense to me.

What exactly? You have hard time understanding that DRM is unethical, or that open Web doesn't need it?

If I'm a musician, and I want to sell my music in a way that prevents the buyer from redistributing it, then I don't think that is unethical. I think the musician has the right to make that choice. You have a right not to buy it in that form.

Can a musician come to your house and start monitoring you to prevent redistribution? No, it's invasive and unethical to do it. It's along the lines of invasive surveillance in a totalitarian police state for the sake of "security". Treating your paying customers in such way is a gross disrespect. DRM does exactly that - it's preemptive policing which violates privacy and treats users as potential criminals by default. It's insulting and unethical to do so.

I'm not even saying that it's pointless, since it doesn't prevent piracy. DRM punishes and insults paying customers who care to buy the content, and does nothing to stop illegal redistribution and doesn't affect those who don't care to buy and pirate the stuff. So what is the point in using it? To upset paying customers by limiting usability of the content and by increasing security and malware risks in shady DRM programs?

Distributors should start treating users with respect if they want any respect back. And it always pays off. In general I get the feeling that actual creators (musicians, authors and etc.) don't care about all this DRM idiocy. Those who push it are publishers/distributors, who can't comprehend a simple thing - DRM has no useful application at all, all it does - it degrades the user experience and punishes paying customers.

I'm sorry, DRM is not like a musician coming to your house and monitoring you. That is where you lose me and probably most people. I also disagree with the idea that protecting content you create is unethical. If I own a store, and put a lock on the door, it is not unethical because I am assuming that someone might try to break in and take stuff. That is roughly what you are saying. Or you know how most pharmacies and grocery stores keep some things behind a locked display? I do not find that to be unethical, yet by your logic we should.

I'm a customer, and I don't find DRM insulting to me. I see it as content creators attempting to find a way to continue getting paid for content they create in this new world. I think it is pointless, but that is very different from what you are saying.

I see absolutely no harm in adding the ability to use DRM in html5 video. It has absolutely no affect on the rest of the open web. There is still the ability to put non-DRMed content on the web. If you truly believed that customers would reject DRM, and you seem to think so, then you shouldn't have a problem with giving people the choice and letting consumers vote with their feet.

> I'm sorry, DRM is not like a musician coming to your house and monitoring you. That is where you lose me and probably most people.

Oh really? Should I remind you of this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

>I also disagree with the idea that protecting content you create is unethical. If I own a store, and put a lock on the door, it is not unethical because I am assuming that someone might try to break in and take stuff.

Your analogy is wrong. People buying content is analogous to going to the store, buying something and bringing it home. Protecting the store is all fine with me - it's analogous to creating authentication, allowing only registered users to buy and so on. DRM goes much further than that. If you want to use the store analogy, it would mean that after buying a product, the store sends their police bot with you, which comes to your house and watches what you do, preventing you from potential illegal activity. I find it completely unethical and unacceptable practice. Another analogy would be placing a police camera right in your house, for the sake of preventing situations when you decide to do something illegal. Do you think it's acceptable?

DRM is running on your computer, in your house on your device in your private network. It's a closed black box which you suddenly are supposed to trust? Why so? One shouldn't trust it, especially given the history of abusing these things. Trust always depends on mutuality. DRM means they don't trust you by default assuming you are going to use the content illegally. Why after that you suddenly are supposed to trust them? They should be treated in the same fashion and not trusted by default!

We disagree on the core principle here. You don't consider DRM unethical, so you don't see a problem to put it in the HTML standard. I consider the whole approach unethical and therefore putting it in the standard as unacceptable.

However I brought several arguments why it's pointless even according to your view. One of them - it's a dying trend which is impractical altogether (i.e. it achieves no useful purpose and on the contrary only degrades usability and ignores the issues of fair use and accessibility). Therefore making it a standard is wrong, since it means promoting dying pointless trends on the Web.

That's a giant non sequitur. Sony put a root kit in some software, therefore DRM is unethical.

My original point stands.

> Sony put a root kit in some software, therefore DRM is unethical.

It's not because of Sony's case DRM is unethical. Just the opposite - because DRM is unethical, cases like Sony's are to be expected from it. I.e. Sony's case just demonstrates how easy it is to abuse preemptive policing, and that most users won't even notice it right away.

> My original point stands.

It stands not on the principles of the open Web though. I already explained above that DRM stands on the concepts of Orwellian police state and big brother approach, and that your analogy with protecting the store was incorrect. You didn't answer on the essence of the question so far.

Ok, it wasn't a non sequitur, it's an egregious circular argument. DRM is unethical because Sony put a root it on people's systems, and Sony put a root kit on people's systems because DRM is unethical.

I'm done here, have a nice day.

So far you didn't argue again with the fact that DRM is intrusive, violates privacy and is analogous to police bot in your house, rather than to fence around the store. Dwell on it more, and it'll be pretty clear why DRM should be strongly opposed. Have a nice day too.

For a change, here is my favorite story about pitfalls of intrusive preemptive policing:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29579/29579-h/29579-h.htm

>Look, these media companies are looking to us for advice; We're doing both them an ourselves a disservice by continuing to sell them DRM snake oil.

Seems to be working out pretty well for Hulu/Netflix. Or is releasing your $100 million budget film DRM-Free onto the internet now profitable??

Netflix requires a subscription to stream. DRM is irrelevant.

Care to elucidate that point?

So if netflix streamed their content with no-DRM (which none of the content companies they license from would allow, but we'll skip that fact) you assume no one would just get a subscription, copy their entire catalouge, and freely distribute it? Doesn't sound like a very sustainable business model to me...

The point is, that it is possible for someone who is technically savvy and who has a subscription to copy the streams right now. The reason they can't download the entire catalogue is probably because netflix/hulu have(or at least I hope they do) a system in place which prevents a single subscriber from accessing streams at a speed above what would be reasonably necessary for watching things one movie at a time. Which means that downloading the entire catalogue would take as long as it would take to watch everything which is probably prohibitively too much time.

However, if, say, there's a particular movie that is available on netflix/hulu which you want to distribute freely for whatever reason and you are technically savvy, no DRM(short of netflix/hulu controlling the actual hardware you're watching from) will prevent you from doing so.

Therefore, DRM offers no additional protection beyond what a regular login cookie-based system with rate limiting would offer.

DRM didn't stop House of Cards from appearing on PB:

http://thepiratebay.se/search/house%20of%20cards/0/99/0

I don't see Netflix going out of business because of this.

Yea, but my point is different than a cracked version leaking into bittorrent. That doesn't have a drastically large footprint.

If they streamed videos with no-DRM, everyone with a subscription would easily grab a copy of whatever they want. And all it would take is copying a file and sharing it with friends/family to have it spread. This might not seem like a huge difference, but honestly I think it would be. It would lower the barriers of sharing to the point that everyone could do it. Only those who hold onto a moral belief in not committing copyright infringement wouldn't participate. I think the past has shown that these people are in the vast minority.

How would they? Even ripping DRM-free YouTube videos is beyond most people. I don't see YouTube piracy as a big world problem.

What DRM-free Youtube videos? Youtube uses DRM-enabled flash player and locks down the ability of people to copy videos.

Besides Youtube is a free service, that everyone basically assumes will continuously be there. You're bringing up non-related factors.

YouTube DL works from the command-line. YouTube videos are not DRM-encumbered. They are just harder to get because they can no longer be requested by a simple HTTP call.

http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/

I don't believe that someone would cancel Netflix because they happened to have ripped all of the things they are interested in. The value of Netflix is accessing an enormous library, vastly bigger than you could store (changing all the time!) and watching an item that you feel like watching at this time. A Netflix subscriber can't exactly predict every single item they'll be interested in until the end of time, rip them, then cancel.

Even if there were a few people that did this, they would make up an incredibly tiny proportion of paying users, and they'd likely be akin to the digital hoarders that have TB of movies downloaded.

>I don't see YouTube piracy as a big world problem.

That's because YouTube content can be trivially shared with other people.

Stop the sharing and pretty sure you would start to see piracy.

It's easy enough to copy a stream with DRM. Point your camcorder at your laptop stream, press record on your camcorder, press play on your laptop.

It takes ~2 hours to play the film, you can't make any noise in the room during that time, and the resulting picture and sound quality will be terrible unless you've got very expensive recording equipment. Content producers would love to get to the point where that's the only way to 'copy' films.

You're right about the time it takes to copy. Whenever I've encoded video it's always been a time-consuming process so I wouldn't see this as a major obstacle.

As for picture and sound quality being terrible, simply not true. Recording from a projected image is one way to do telecine, and it works fine if you can set it up properly. [1] A half-decent telecine is very different from surreptitiously recording a film in a cinema.

The stream will be re-compressed but this isn't such an issue as many people think. Back when TV was recorded on analog tape in the 90s, you were allowed 8 generations of copying and it would still be considered acceptable for broadcast (for news).

[1] "The quality of a good telecine is generally comparable to a DVD without any post-processing." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecine_(copying)

I could copy their entire catalog now, if I wanted to. It would only be very slightly harder because of the DRM.

Yea, you could. But, you aren't going to first of all. And secondly you are a drop in the bucket. Even if you put it on all the bittorrent trackers it's still not a dent in their overall market share.

But if every subscriber could simply right-click on download because they have ZERO DRM that would be very different. I won't drone on because I already stated my case to another comment. I don't see why you guys keep pressing this point about some tech savvy people being able to get through DRM.

YouTube videos are trivial to copy, but you can't right-click on them to download. The thing is, you are holding a mathematically untenable position here.

In order to allow someone to consume your encrypted content, you must give them a valid decryption key, in some form. If you can view the content, it is literally impossible to prevent a determined user from copying it, either digitally or through the analog hole. In current computer systems there is no way to prevent making a high-quality digital copy of an encrypted media stream.

Also, since we've developed a network to propagate information around the planet at a terrific rate, that one determined user's ability to share that content is limited only by the number of people who [a] are interested in the content and [b] have the (lesser) technological skill required to obtain a copy, via file sharing networks or sneakernet.

DRM is pure snake oil. It does not and can not do anything to prevent content distribution. The only possible outcome is to inconvenience legitimate use -- thus degrading the value of your product versus the pirated media. You're already competing with "free", you might want to avoid stacking the deck further against yourself.

The ultimate conclusion here is that enforcing copyrights on digital works is impossible. It's not practical to close the digital hole, and impossible to close the analog one. I'm sorry if that impacts your business model.

Of course someone would do that; even with DRM, people have done that. What content is available on Netflix that is not available on The Pirate Bay?

DRM has completely failed at preventing people from pirating content; and yet, companies selling content seem to be doing plenty well at it. Why do we keep insisting that DRM is necessary or else people will pirate all of the content, and thus making our software and standards more complex, more flaky, and work against the interests of users, when the existence of piracy is obviously not destroying the content providers now?

You know what's preventing them from making more money? The fact that because of complex licensing schemes, DRM, and the like, I can't be guaranteed that if I buy content I can play it on the devices that I choose to use. If I pirate a video, I can play it anywhere. Content producers are shooting themselves in the foot because of their fear of piracy; piracy works better than buying the content directly, and will continue to do so as long as they insist on DRM.

I'm confused why anyone would think it would make it more profitable. You do understand that any content which is unencrypted is mind-numbingly simple to copy, right? That's how bits work. If you think DRM stops any copying or piracy for digital media, you're very confused on how technology works.

> a technology that is decidedly against the public interest.

Hey, not all of us believe that. I'm perfectly fine with putting DRM on streaming video; I certainly don't expect to be able to download all of netflix to my computer for one month's subscription. It's much more of an issue when I pay full price for a movie (after pressing the "Purchase" button) and I find I don't actually own it.

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