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Comment by flavor8 | Hacker News Reader

> The content Hollywood produces is already fully available on the Web.

For people willing to pirate, it, yes. However, it's far less convenient to pirate movies and get them to your big screen TV than it was to use napster and listen to songs on your mp3 player. On the flip side, Netflix (i.e. content with DRM) accounts for roughly 1/3 of nightly internet traffic in the US. DRM facilitates consumer access to restricted content.

> Besides, for the w3c, where is the business incentive, where is the money involved?

The w3c is primarily an industry group. The players pushing DRM in HTML5 are Google, Netflix and Microsoft, all of whom have a business interest in being able to stream content via browsers.

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> For people willing to pirate, it, yes.

What good is protection against piracy from people not willing to pirate?

And no, pirated content is far more convenient than DRMed content. DRM can only reduce the conveninence, not increase.

> What good is protection against piracy from people not willing to pirate?

It's about business. Protection that works for 99.5% of the population is good enough for the old content industries. Netflix couldn't exist in its current form without DRM -- Netflix does not succeed because of novel technologies, but rather because of successful content licensing.

To be clear I'm not a fan of DRM, especially not when it's baked into the HTML standard.

> And no, pirated content is far more convenient than DRMed content.

I didn't say that - you're arguing against a position I didn't state.

I don't think it's the DRM that facilitate anything. DRM is a tradeoff between pirated stuff and going to the theater. Netflix is a legal Napster while Hollywood are content with DRM as good enough protection.

It does, in that it allows business agreements to be signed. Without DRM, old content industries aren't interested in playing.

and we aren't interested in the old content industries. they are "considered harmful" at best

If you're interested in their content, then you are interested in the old content industries. If you aren't interested in their content, then what they do will have little effect on you personally.

I require a definition of how they are "considered harmful" because I seriously doubt that.

EME is a good example of harm.

But how is it harmful to you personally exactly? How is it harmful to anyone?

It corrupts the Open Web, meaning that one cannot simply decide to write a web client that will be able to display any standards-compliant content. It corrupts the W3C, in that it weakens their position in maintaining the Open Web, and lessens their value in the eyes of everyone except for the MPAA and its ilk. It harms culture, in that valuable cultural artifacts will be locked up in a way that will render them inaccessible to future generations, or people on non-blessed hardware.

I'm still waiting for the explanation of how it actually causes harm. Most of what you describe is not exactly harmful and is easily dealt with.

What's to stop someone from creating their own web client that doesn't implement that part of the standard? Where's it written that we have to follow every bit of the standard as it is written? Who gave this select group of people that much power over the open web?

Personally, I think the W3C was approaching being corrupted long before this issue. Maybe not in the terms you are describing right now but I've had issues with the behavior of various standard bodies and browser providers that happen to be a part of these bodies for a while now.

As for artifacts of culture being locked away from future generations, that is a potential problem. But we all know a silly DRM scheme isn't going to stop that. But that kind of thing has been in practice for a long time, way before we had electronics and the human race seems to be moving along in despite.

To me, a better solution is to show that people are willing to move on from these aspects of culture that everyone is so hung up on. If enough people show that these schemes don't work in the long run the content providers are more apt to change their ways. Look at the music industry, it's vastly different than it was just a few years ago and continues to change. Let these people attempt their schemes, in the long run it will matter little.

So, to paraphrase, you think there will be no harm because the W3C isn't doing anything useful as things stand?

Doing nothing useful doesn't necessarily result in harm.

I keep pointing out that people are claiming that this is harmful in some personal way. I keep asking how. The best I've seen is that it creates harm to the standards, which is more about causing harm to the people who control the standards. This decision directly harms the standards body itself, it does not harm the open web. Corrupting the standards with bad decisions hurts the reputation of the standards body, which will eventually importance in the scheme of things. The open web will just move on to something else. The reason I say that is because if the web is truly open, it is free to ignore the "standards" it doesn't like. Meaning, the people who use it can choose to not participate. It's a standard because everyone agrees to use it together. If the people using the open web decide they don't like a browser that implements DRM they don't agree with, then they have the option to choose a browser that doesn't implement the DRM. If there isn't such a browser, the open web allows someone to create and share it with the masses.

If this decision actually causes harm to the open web, then it's not truly open because that implies no one can get around the decisions made by this select group of people. If that's the case, then the web doesn't sound very open as it stands today.

This entire thread was about hollywood. To say that we aren't interested in what hollywood produces is a strange assertion, or a rather narrow definition of "we".

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