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Comment by ProNoob13 | Hacker News Reader

First of all, making a bug-ticket for something that doesn't exists yet isn't going to solve anything. Second of all, why do you oppose DRM? It's been around for years. Games, DVDs... Nobody really had troubles with it until the bad (not so user-friendly) implementations came around. But, with W3 standardizing the spec for it, we get a win-win: We can watch all our (streaming) video without Flash (which was previously used for DRM), and content providers can be sure that the content we're watching is payed for.

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> why do you oppose DRM? It's been around for years.

So has syphilis.

coffee laugh-barfed all over keyboard, thanks :)

Haha, good point. But my idea behind that argument was that it won't hurt anything more than it does already.

And it already hurts things enough.

By making it a part of a "standard", you help spreading the disease. Right now, the fact that DRM is implemented via Flash paints it as 'painful-to-use'. Once you implement it without the pain that is Flash, you have removed the barrier that is slowing the spread of DRM.

Yes. Because heaven forfend anyone should get paid. One cannot serve both God and Mammon.

Right. Because without DRM, people don't get paid?

Your argument (here) is not better than the STD comparison: Apples, oranges, no relevant content.

Isn't most of the (digital!) music market DRM free by now? How does that EVEN WORK?

Actually, DRM systems prevent me from seeing content I'm willing to purchase. I tried to buy the Dragon Book on Kindle some time ago, but I couldn't because I live in Australia.

What was that about getting paid again?

Or any active content! Why would Amazon sell apps in only North America?!

It's called geoblocking. The Australian Senate held hearings into it. Fun fact: I was looking to buy Cowboy Bebop and Star Trek: The Next Generation on iTunes. Not available, but definitely available in the U.S. App Store.

Even before streaming, the media publishing industries have been into segmenting the world into different markets for the same product: For example: books separately published in the US and the UK, DVDs and Blu-Ray disks with region codes that prevent playing on the other region players (providing they're players which obey this flag.)

Time to disrupt these arseholes.

But unlike most other media there's no other way to purchase them. I can't buy DVDs of Kindle active content, I can't get it off ebay.

I guess they mustn't consider the international market worth the trouble of solving whatever legal issue is stopping them from selling them to other countries.

My publisher pays me and all their other authors and uses no DRM on e-books. They sell more e-book because it isn't a hassle to move them around. They are a big enough publisher that if their sales and revenue significantly diverged from industry norms they would rethink that policy. On the other hand, I don't know of anyone going out of business for lack of DRM.

Except it will hurt things a great deal. DRM already causes a great deal of harm, helping to propagate it into a standard to make it more widespread will cause a great deal of harm.

Well, hey, if you don't have an argument...

The argument that as something has been around for long time makes it acceptable was neatly deflated by a counter example of something awful that has been around for ages that is definitely not desirable.

Plus, it was funny. Absurdity often highlights problems in arguments.

Who could disagree that the cavil is the highest form of debate?

Try argumentum ad absurdum.

I had a problem with it years ago when I couldn't watch DVDs on linux (until the DRM was cracked). More recently I had a problem with it when flash DRM broke on linux (if you didn't have HAL installed and tried to use amazon's video for certain DRMed shows).

And in the future I expect more pain with proprietary, closed-source, non-interoperable (and, almost certainly, non-linux-supporting) CDMs, which are where the meat of the DRM will be implemented under the W3C EME proposal but which themselves are not being proposed for standardization.

We can only watch the streaming video if the DRM provider wants to provide a plugin (following the EME spec) for your platform.

That will make Firefox on Haiku less functional than Firefox on Windows. (and if the plugin were able to run everywhere, it would be trivial to work around: Just run on a system without a protected AV path)

But if content providers refuse to not use DRM anyways, won't Haiku users still lose out regardless?

If you can't use HTML5 DRM with Netflix your other options are either Silver light or a native app and Haiku has neither.

I'd say HTML5 DRM is the far lesser evil in this case.

They're all equally evil, since they're all equally useless on non-Win/OSX platforms (which are the only ones providing a reliable protected AV path), and since they're all very similar in that they need a plugin.

IMHO If anything EME is more evil than the other options in that it standardizes (and this way implicitely mandates) a special plugin interface for DRM purposes only.

Users still have to install plugins, and now browser vendors get the blame if things fail (since the user will be hard pressed to identify plugin issues in "that website doesn't work").

I fail to see where it's the W3C's, browser vendors' or web users' responsibility to make the DRM vendors' lifes easier. And that's all EME does.

Good point. On the other hand, DRM will come to HTML5 anyway, whatever we try. So, I think it's better to give it a spec, and have one, unified and well-known way for the DRM to operate, instead of 20 different implementations.

Specs are supposed to make things simple. I'd rather have DRM vendors struggle with the problem individually at every step (and that includes browser integration)

For one, because they'll fail in the most hilarious ways (and each one separately), so there will be backdoors, or at least a good laugh or two. But also because it drives up the cost of DRM, hopefully making it less attractive.

Should DRM manage to get hold even despite such problems and Amazon notices that they can reduce the price of their media package by 1$/month if they drop the DRM, the resulting massacre will be great to watch.

I'd say HTML5 DRM is the far lesser evil in this case.

Completely disagree. HTML5 DRM is non-interoptable but disguised as interoptable through its HTML form. That makes it much, much worse.

You have fundamentally misunderstood the proposal: it standardizes only the interface. It promises nothing about forcing interoperability — only a focused, more secure replacement for NPAPI.

It's not entirely reasonable to expect everything to work identically well when you're comparing the most widely installed client OS on the planet with something even most developers on niche-of-a-niche toy OS projects probably haven't heard of.

I was considering replacing Haiku with Linux, which will face the same issues.

This is fundamentally opposed to personal computing. The goal of this DRM plugin is to stop your computer from doing what you tell it to do, in favor of doing what a corporation tells it to do. If this is given to them in the W3C spec, they will demand more in the future, until a PC is nothing more than a cable box that only allows the user to do what has been explicitly outlined as acceptable.

Well I'm not really trying to do personal computing, I'm just watching TV on my screen really. I want to watch a game that there is no chance in hell that the rightsholders will will release on the internet without DRM. They'd rather just not air it and opt for just using the normal outlets like cable/satellite if that was the case. This would mean I couldn't see it at all. You could argue that letting DRM into html is evil, and I agree, but I don't really care about evil if I can get rid of the current crap implementation which is flash on one site and silverlight on the next.

DRM has shackled the content and the industry for years. Who know where we would be without it? Who knows what cool, innovative solutions never saw the light? Who knows all they ways they could have made money had they taken another attitude..

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