Defend the Open Web: Keep DRM Out of W3C Standards 351
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by
samzenpus
from the power-to-the-people dept.
from the power-to-the-people dept.
jrepin writes "There's a new front in the battle against digital restrictions management (DRM)technologies. These technologies, which supposedly exist to enforce copyright, have never done anything to get creative people paid. Instead, by design or by accident, their real effect is to interfere with innovation, fair use, competition, interoperability, and our right to own things. That's why we were appalled to learn that there is a proposal currently before the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML5 Working Group to build DRM into the next generation of core Web standards. The proposal is called Encrypted Media Extensions, or EME. Its adoption would be a calamitous development, and must be stopped."
Re:Not putting in DRM isn't going to eliminate DRM (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not putting in DRM isn't going to eliminate DRM (Score:5, Informative)
I am afraid you are confused.
SSL and safely storing bank documents are jobs for encryption and this works very well. Basically you send a lockable chest to your bank but retain the key, they put your documents into it, close the lock, and send it back. Ensuring that only your key can open it. This is absolutely vital to modern society, but isn't a type of DRM.
DRM usually requires encryption, but also something else. The content producers send their content in a locked box and then try and send the key to your computer in a way where the computer can use it open the box and play back the content but you can't use it to open the box and take the content out. This is obviously logically impossible, which is why you are always hearing of DRM schemes being broken just to watch a film (conversely if you could break a modern encryption system you could literally steal all the money in every bank in the world).
So logically you can't actually implement DRM in closed source software, but with sufficient obfuscation you can get close (Intel literally burns some of the key into a special chip on your motherboard which makes finding it extremely hard). If you are open about what you code is and dose, that includes telling people where you hare trying to hide the key, making the game of hide and seek a bit shorter.