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Comment by surrealize | Hacker News Reader

> Is this just a crusade agains DRM as a whole (good luck with that)

Like the crusade against DRM in mp3s? Which succeeded.

Or the crusade against DRM in ebooks? Which is making progress.

Or the crusade against DRM in broadcast TV (the broadcast flag)? Which succeeded.

The history of crusades against DRM is that they succeed. It's baffling why some people are giving up on fighting web DRM so easily.

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I have never heard about those actually. I'm only interested in live stereaming sports, which are ridiculously expansive for the rightsholders but worthless once the broadcast is over. I can't see a future where they'll switch from their current platform unless the new platform offers something similar. If I was them I'd rather skip the browser completely and settle for apps (e.g in smarttv/win8/Mac/iOS/consoles). I'm not saying its stupid to be resisting drm in HTML, but it will mean some services won't exist in the browser.

Live streaming sports are actually a perfect case for non-DRM web video. Video takes time to pirate; it has to be captured, transcoded, and distributed. So the pirated version will most likely come out after the end of the broadcast. If the rights really are worth so much less after the event, then the pirated version appearing afterward won't affect the rights value very much at all.

With no DRM, someone would almost certainly find a way to mirror the live stream and put their own ads with it, or charge people much less than the official source to view it. It's all just data, right? What stops you sending it on wherever you please?

The point of DRM is precisely to make sure that it does take time and effort to capture and redistribute video. So live events are actually a perfect example of where DRM is useful.

That's the kind of situation that watermarking handles well. With no time to remove the watermark, it would be straightforward for the stream source to find the offending stream consumer and shut down their stream.

But the stream source would then have to be very active in hunting for unauthorised mirrors, because there would be nothing to find after the event has ended.

If the piracy is happening on a large scale, it should be easy to find the unauthorized stream. If the piracy is happening on a small scale, then it's not a big problem for the stream source.

What if it's happening on a small scale many times over? Thousands of links, posted to forums in all kinds of languages.

And we're both assuming that the people running those mirrors won't work out a way to disable the watermarks in real time. I've not read up on digital watermarking technology, but it's hard to imagine that it's bulletproof.

Fair point. I think detecting and booting some fraction of those streams would have a deterrent effect on the rest, but who knows for sure unless it gets tried?

And yes, I'm assuming that robust-enough watermarking methodology is possible. I don't think it has to be bulletproof, I just think it has to be good enough to enable cancelling enough stream consumer accounts to deter casual mirror-ers. DRM isn't bulletproof either; watermarking is preferable for users because it doesn't require that the stream producer take control over your machine.

It's already transcoded live and re-streamed. That isn't technologically different. Finding European football is trivial whereas some other rightsholders have cracked down on streaming sites and people posting their screencast urls in forums effectively removing it from the visible web (Swedish ice hockey is one such example). Games are expensive ($20-30) and unlike movies it's often ok to watch in a low quality stream that is easy to distribute with modest hw/bandwidth.

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