Guest post by “Bruce Lawson started a very interesting discussion about the Encrypted Media Extensions to HTML a few months ago, with learned and interesting commentary from John Foliot and others. After devoting some thought to this, I believe that the amount of argument around this subject is at least partially caused by its separation of the web from the spirit of the web.”
I’d love to sit down and have a chat with one of these execs that insist on this kind of DRM, and ask them if they have any idea what the analog hole is. I wonder if they’ve even heard of it. While you wrap up web content with DRM, people will be torenting that same content for free. Because, if it can be seen or heard, it can be copied.
The music industry gave up on DRM a long time ago, and their shit is easier to pirate. Why won’t the movie/TV industry do the same?
John Foliot (one of the active supporters for this proposal on the W3C list) sounds very disingenuous when claiming that EME proposal is not about DRM. It’s is exactly about DRM.
Edited 2013-06-09 04:10 UTC
Indeed.
It is marvelous how much smoke screening the proponents of the spec are prepared to do just in order to hide the goals.
In the comment section of a W3C blog on person went as far as to claim it was about making sure that content right owners are paid and had to weasel out when someone correctly pointed out that it epically failed at that by not containing anything about payment.
Or claiming they don’t know the requirements when people who try to compromise ask about them in order to come up with a univerally implementable DRM mechanism.
Their very goal is it to not have it univerally implementable, otherwise all devices, operating systems and browsers would be at equal footing and they can’t have that.
I tend to choke on notions like “the spirit of the web.”
The web is ultimately defined by its users —
and users are spending much of their time and money on licensed and content protected media services. Amazon. Netflix. Pandora and all the rest.
In an app-oriented world, it becomes easy and plausible to do all your shopping within the Amazon environment. Easy and plausible to keep adding more products and services to the Amazon app to keep users within that environment.
I would much rather see more — many more — web sites offering high-quality protected content then the slow death of the web itself as users migrate to the apps and devices which deliver the media content they want and are willing to pay for.
The problem is that that’s a false choice.
If we cripple the definition of a “fully functional” browser to the point where only the privileged people trusted with the DRM sauce can make one, then that becomes the new “anyone can write a browser, but nobody can replicate IE6 and everyone needs IE6” web we had back in the bad old days.
Your description matches “the spirit of the web” on the service side (the philosophy that led walled gardens like CompuServe and AOL to lose to the open Internet) but it’s important to also have it on the client side.
Keep Flash around for DRM if you must, but don’t put DRM in HTML5.
Edited 2013-06-10 01:03 UTC
The “walled garden” has returned from the dead — and draws strength from the kind of product placement that AOL could only dream about.
Think about the iPad and the Kindle.
The Netflix app that is embedded into damn near every home video player, set top box, mobile device or HDTV that is “Internet enabled.”
Think about non-Kindle devices like Android phones, Desktops PCs, and, to some extent (given Apple’s ability to dictate and change policy), iOS devices.
Would you rather have one app that’s a walled garden for a given provider or have the entire browser get incrementally captured by that same garden because the average person sees their techie friend as “weird” or “silly” for using some other browser when sites’ efforts for ensure compatibility guarantee that the garden’s browser does everything they want plus plays DRMed content?
It was either we have DRM option in HTML video or we had flash vs h264 forever.
There have been concessions made for this sort of thing before it was called the object tag and was for 3rd party plugins.
You have every right not to use it and not to pay for it, like before.
Fundamentalism is bad for everyone and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Let people have a specification that is open (which is in the spirit of the web) and they are free to implement it … and their potential customers are free to decide if they wish to use it.
I don’t see how this is a bad thing?
True, I suppose. It’s mainly a “devil you know” situation.
With Flash, we already know how to make sure a new browser implements NPAPI well enough to get the plugin working. We understand the implications of Adobe’s approach to sandboxing untrusted code. We trust Adobe to not risk the PR nightmare of trying anything funny like the Sony Rootkit fiasco.
Given the current climate regarding DRM and Secure Boot and all the other nonsense, we have neither of those guarantees with whatever replaces it. It could wind up being the new ActiveX.
Not to mention that it is a plugin, it can be plugged into any browser implementing the respective host infrastructure.
It allows a third party like Adobe to provide something that works regardless of the browser being used by the user, leaving it up to the user to choose which browser to use based on the user’s preferences.
The EME spec on the other hand only specifies a JavaScript API that the browser must provide for the content application. All browser will have to implement it again and again.
Tird parties like Adobe will have to reach out to all browser vendors or all operating system vendors or all device vendors (depending on which level the “protection” is implemented in a certain scenario) and ask them to be included.