W3C Erects DRM As Web Standard (theregister.co.uk) 260
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has formally put forward highly controversial digital rights management as a new web standard. "Dubbed Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), this anti-piracy mechanism was crafted by engineers from Google, Microsoft, and Netflix, and has been in development for some time," reports The Register. "The DRM is supposed to thwart copyright infringement by stopping people from ripping video and other content from encrypted high-quality streams." From the report: The latest draft was published last week and formally put forward as a proposed standard soon after. Under W3C rules, a decision over whether to officially adopt EME will depend on a poll of its members. That survey was sent out yesterday and member organizations, who pay an annual fee that varies from $2,250 for the smallest non-profits to $77,000 for larger corporations, will have until April 19 to register their opinions. If EME gets the consortium's rubber stamp of approval, it will lock down the standard for web browsers and video streamers to implement and roll out. The proposed standard is expected to succeed, especially after web founder and W3C director Sir Tim Berners-Lee personally endorsed the measure, arguing that the standard simply reflects modern realities and would allow for greater interoperability and improve online privacy. But EME still faces considerable opposition. One of its most persistent vocal opponents, Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues that EME "would give corporations the new right to sue people who engaged in legal activity." He is referring to the most recent controversy where the W3C has tried to strike a balance between legitimate security researchers investigating vulnerabilities in digital rights management software, and hackers trying to circumvent content protection. The W3C notes that the EME specification includes sections on security and privacy, but concedes "the lack of consensus to protect security researchers remains an issue." Its proposed solution remains "establishing best practices for responsible vulnerability disclosure." It also notes that issues of accessibility were ruled to be outside the scope of the EME, although there is an entire webpage dedicated to those issues and finding solutions to them.
Digital Rights? (Score:5, Insightful)
Digital rights is an ugly theft of words implying the rights of people, rather than the rights of greed ie digital wrongs. Where is the right to privacy, absent. Where it the right to the truth, absent. Where is the right to freedom from censorship, absent. All that is covered is the digital right to greed and the ability to print money and censor and silence the public, think those digital wrongs tools wont be extended out to mass censorship, how wrong you are.
Re:Digital Rights? (Score:5, Informative)
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If I create some original digital content should I not have the right to set the terms of use and distribution? If someone doesn't agree with the terms they do not have the right to circumvent the terms just because they can.
Re:Digital Rights? (Score:5, Insightful)
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This line of argument is valid for both sides: If you don't want to support DRM, use a browser that doesn't support DRM or deactivate the DRM extensions. But don't complain if you then can't use Netflix et.al.
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The problem here is that you are not the only one with rights, and when your rights intrude on the rights of others, we have a big fucking problem.
Rights to monetary gain don't exist on the Internet, because the Internet's primary purpose is as a communication medium, not monetary.
Monetary gains are a privilege or a luxury at best, and that's how it should stay, since this will force content creators to do their best to please
instead of creating a situation where a saturation of 100 000 random idiots creati
Re:Digital Rights? (Score:5, Informative)
If I create some original digital content should I not have the right to set the terms of use and distribution? If someone doesn't agree with the terms they do not have the right to circumvent the terms just because they can.
Nice thought, but no! The rights of buyers are enshrined in law, just as the rights of content creators are. For example, if you want to prevent a buyer from later selling it, that's not legal. Yet that's what DRM lets you do. You can also use DRM to block copying beyond the life of copyright, which may not be illegal, but is certainly unethical.
I'm not sure if you can sell a product and set terms of use at all. Certainly you can set terms when you provide a service or make an agreement beyond a simple sale, but the grocery store cannot tell me how to use or not use the zuccini I just bought. (Perhaps they could, but they would have absolutely no legal grounds to enforce it.) DRM lets you control your customers in ways the legal system does not.
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The rights of buyers
You're assuming someone buys something. They don't. They license rights to display content. That has been upheld in various courts around the world already.
Consumers have no rights enshrined in law what so ever when discussing media.
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And more and more of them notice it, which results in fewer and fewer of them buying.
Instead of now learning that "Hey, people stop buying our stuff, maybe we have to adjust the contracts to win them back" the train of thought is "Hey, people stop buying our stuff, clearly they must steal it".
An old German proverb goes "The scoundrel thinks others are just the way he is himself". Guess it's applicable here.
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More and more people use streaming services like Spotify and Netfilx. So the numbers show that many people are willing to license rather than buy.
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People are willing to pay for comfort with no bullshit (i.e. ads) getting between them and their entertainment. That's basically the success behind those models.
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Why the hell would I want to stop them? All I said is that people are accepting a "licensing" model if that is offered to them in a comfortable way. Saying that people WANT a licensing model is bullshit if you ask me. What they want is comfort, and for that they're willing to put up with things that are less annoying than the gain in comfort.
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The rights of buyers
You're assuming someone buys something. They don't. They license rights to display content. That has been upheld in various courts around the world already.
Consumers have no rights enshrined in law what so ever when discussing media.
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Stupid phone. I said preview not submit.
You're assuming someone buys something. They don't. They license rights to display content.
That's why all the commercials always said "Own it now on DVD!"
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I'm not sure if you can sell a product and set terms of use at all.
Then how can licenses like the GPL work?
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My humble prediction: some people will adopt it, people will avoid it, use will fall off and it will join the dustbunnies under the desk of computer standards.
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Yes, you should. What you should not, though, is be entitled to a whole avalanche of laws protecting you once you notice that your business model fails.
When you set rules to use your content and people reject them and instead decide to forgo your offer, you cannot turn around and claim that clearly they MUST be stealing because they're not buying, so open the flood gates to more insane laws to protect a business model nobody but you wants.
Control distribution : Nope. (Score:4, Insightful)
If I create some original digital content should I not have the right to set the terms of use and distribution?
Nope. You should not.
In the grand scheme of things, what you should have the right to, is to be paid for the act of creation of the content.
(you should get remuneration for your work. not be entitled to use it as a rent)
But for historical reasons, the point at which money got collected was traditionally at the distribution, because back at the time when copyright laws were emerging, duplicating and distributing content was hard (if not the hardest part of the pipeline). And thus it was a happy chance that it could also help finance upstream creation.
But nowadays, once we're out of the dark ages and into the information age, with everything going digital, duplication and distribution is boringly trivial and can't be justified any more. Artists still need to get paid to create (They need to eat, after all), but the point at which the money is collected doesn't make a fucking sense anymore in the modern setting.
(Also note that a few small indie artists are moving out of this business model, and going back to older concepts of patronage. See platforms like Patreon, Tipee, etc.)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Steam's DRM only works because games have a finite shelf life. If my copy of Portal 2 stops working in ten years when Steam shuts down, I won't mind. If I purchase books and they stop working at any point for any reason, I will be upset.
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It works because people don't think about this. Would I be pissed if Steam goes belly up and all the games I bought are gone? Yes. Do I think about that now? No. I still play Civ3 from time to time, and I just recently bought a couple of very old games that I used to have again on Steam for a handful of bucks because, yes, convenience. I just recently noticed by accident that the DVD drive in my computer must have gotten disconnected at some point in the past. I didn't notice. I don't use it.
And that's the
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To be honest, no, I didn't know. Neither did I care. It works. No need to spend time on it. It also keeps the games up to date, patched and compatible. It lets me browse a huge game catalogue from the comfort of my sofa.
Yes, comfort sells. Time is a commodity for me, and time I spend doing stuff I like is valuable to me.
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the ONLY DRM I've seen that doesn't piss people off and actually gets shit right? Steam.
Steam pisses me off, but it does so to a lesser degree than other similar efforts. I refuse to use it nonetheless.
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DRM may be about much, but "balancing" isn't quite what's in mind of its proponents. If you need to be using scale analogies, "tipping" is the word you're looking for.
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As opposed the totally untipped reality that many other posters here keep telling me about, where someone can just go online and download a work illegally without contributing anything at all to the people who did all the hard work to make it?
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That's the other extreme. Hell, am I the only one who doesn't think that having one foot in the freezer and the other one in the frying pan is the only way to have a comfortable warmth on average?
Right now the scales of copyright are tipped WAY over towards the side of rights holders, to the point where they pretty much dictate everything concerning their work. Including and actually especially the time after I hand over money for it.
It used to be simple. You created something, I gave you money so I could e
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I would agree that the scales were tipped too far towards creators if everyone actually played by the rules, but as we're all aware, in a world full of piracy that isn't always the case. The unfortunate result is the kind of polarised extremes you describe. The world would be a much nicer place, IMHO, if we had a culture of respecting creative work and contributing to support it, and a market for that work that operated in some reasonable and transparent way, more like what the original copyright tried to a
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This issue always going to be about balancing the rights of content providers and the rights of content consumers
In my view, that's not the issue at all. "Balancing of rights" is a legal proposition. This is about technical mechanisms that restrict how you use your own machines.
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This is about technical mechanisms that restrict how you use your own machines.
Or it's about technical mechanisms that restrict how you access content someone else provides.
There are always two sides to these issues, but we're only human and naturally tend to see things first from our own point of view.
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Despite the fact that their content is often simply a variation of what's already in the public domain.
Depending on how liberal you are with the word "variation", you could argue that all of their content is variation on what's in the public domain. That doesn't make it public domain. I'm not arguing that the rights should go "forever plus one day", but I'm not sure this argument backs you up much.
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And those rights, per the industry are to go "forever plus one day".
Excessive copyright duration is a real problem, for sure, but it's a completely different issue to DRM. Most works shared illegally online are very recent, and would still have been covered by even the shortest duration of copyright from when the idea first started. Most DRM is disrupting the sharing of those works, not things that were created 50+ years ago.
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Sure it could make ripping streams harder but I never understood how DRM could prevent you from reproducing a stream since you have to be able to see and hear it ultimately. Replace ears and eyes with sensors or tap into display and speakers and there you go.
Re:Digital Rights? (Score:4, Insightful)
Most DRM isn't expected to prevent 100% of copies indefinitely. Usually it's intended to deter and/or delay casual copying, and in that, it is often quite successful these days. This is something that almost invariably gets overlooked in the "DRM never works" posts that will no doubt be filling this Slashdot discussion within minutes.
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>Most DRM isn't expected to prevent 100% of copies indefinitely. Usually it's intended to deter and/or delay casual copying, and in that, it is often quite successful these days.
I can't recall the last time I looked for media that wasn't available in an unencrypted stream within hours of being released in digital format, whatever the DRM.
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Then you're only looking at mainstream, mass market, fixed content. A great deal of content created commercially isn't actually in that category.
Also, it makes a big difference what the "digital format" is. Sure, if you're providing fixed content that someone can play at home, then if nothing else you're vulnerable to the analog hole if you're willing to accept the drop in quality, and for the next Avengers movie or Taylor Swift album or whatever, someone among the millions of interested people is going to
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I can't recall the last time I looked for media that wasn't available in an unencrypted stream within hours of being released in digital format, whatever the DRM.
Well, just checked Amazon now and there's 366 4K BluRays out, as far as I know there's no decrypting those yet. Not that I'm sure how you'd play an UHD HEVC HDR 10 bit Rec. 2020 stream properly anyway. BluRays look pretty good though...
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Which is easier: subscribe to a service and then try to rip its streams yourself, having to play each one out in real-time, re-encode into a better format etc, or just download the .torrent/pirate stream?
People who want to make copies will do so anyway. People who don't want to pay, won't. DRM only punishes your customers.
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That assumes you're talking about the kind of mass market content that is usually available and easy to find on a torrent. There's a huge long tail where that isn't the case, and you're making a big assumption that someone who chooses to pirate will easily be able to find an alternative source.
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Long tail stuff isn't in cinemas and is usually really cheap if it is available though.
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The analogy is flawed in one critical aspect: To make your burglary parallel work, you'd have to break the lock at your door once so every burglar in the world can go in and collect whatever he wants from your home. Repeatedly. Over and over again.
Because that's what DRM locks are. It only has to be broken once. By one single person. Then everyone can get in. There is no "casual" angle. The "casual" copier waits for it to hit TPB.
Re:Digital Rights? (Score:5, Insightful)
Digital rights is an ugly theft of words implying the rights of people
Rubbish. Digital rights is clearly the rights of the rightsholder, in this case the copyright holder.
Where is the right to privacy, absent. Where it the right to the truth, absent. Where is the right to freedom from censorship, absent.
Then get off your soapbox and go do something about it rather than whining that people with an interest in copyright aren't equally interested in what you've listed there. This "oh poor me, won't somebody else act in my interest for me" is getting quite lame.
All that is covered is the digital right to greed and the ability to print money and censor and silence the public, think those digital wrongs tools wont be extended out to mass censorship, how wrong you are.
Don't be such a drama queen, the freedoms you speak of don't come from violating copyrights nor is EME a tool for censorship.
If you don't like it then release your content freely, fund free content and don't support non-free content. Time and time again people like you complain about DRM and freedom whilst clamouring for non-free content, if you steer clear of non-free content then this doesn't affect you in the slightest. EME is a mechanism to access a DRM implementation, if you don't provide one then it does nothing.
Re:Digital Rights? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't be such a drama queen, the freedoms you speak of don't come from violating copyrights nor is EME a tool for censorship.
Don't be so naive. A car isn't a getaway tool, a gun isn't a murder tool. If it can be used or abused, it will be. This won't be the end, merely the beginning. It will creep and grow.
The Internet isn't what it used to be. It has been taken over and changed. Maybe should be called the commercialnet, or spynet or something of the sort. Do a search for stuff these days and more often than not I get sites trying to sell me stuff. Just yesterday I was searching for a how to on taking my laptop apart to clean the fans, and most links were for buying fans. I found what I needed, but it was way down the list.
The net wasn't created for online sales, yet it must be rebuilt at everyone's expense, so a few rich may ensure profit.
It was good while it lasted.
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Our biggest mistake was that we wanted the masses in our garden, thinking that this would actually make it even greater than it was.
Because that's what the internet originally was. Our beautiful garden. Sure, it was more a jungle where you needed a machete and some survival skills to get shit done, because the tools that everyone can use like today didn't exist, but we tamed the jungle and built some beautiful gardens. Most of it hand-planted because, like I said, there weren't many tools.
From time to time
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Says the ANONYMOUS COWARD. Your comment is the epitome of the the mentality we despise, 'All of the power, none of the responsibility'. You are not part of the 'we' that actually did anything.
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The Internet isn't what it used to be. It has been taken over and changed. Maybe should be called the commercialnet, or spynet or something of the sort.
The irony of your comment is that the Web has become dominated by ads and privacy intrusions in large part because people using it weren't willing to pay for stuff but still wanted the stuff. It turns out that people who make good stuff still have rent to pay, and that equivalent content and services don't always magically appear from within the community if no-one pays for them.
I'm sure that has nothing to do with a discussion about copyright, infringement, and alternative business models that become practical with DRM, though. Nope, no parallels there at all.
The thing is, when I was first on the net, everything was free because people created things that they wanted to share. Then others came to this place where people shared their creations, and said "Nice place you have here, but I don't want to share my stuff for free, so I need you to change it for me so it will suit my needs. Your software will need changes. Your hardware will need changes. You will lose rights. You will lose privacy. You will lose security, and we'll probably sue anyone who points out tha
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You don't have to use any of the new stuff, though. The "others" you mention add to what we had before. They don't replace it. You are free not to use e-commerce sites, or to stream music or movies, or to host your stuff in "the cloud". No-one is stopping you from restricting your browsing activity to personal or otherwise freely available websites, just like what you could access before. You are perfectly entitled to run a browser with JS disabled, ads blocked, and no plugins (including anything related to
Re: Digital Rights? (Score:2)
nor is EME a tool for censorship.
Of course it is. Content owners can retract content. To hide and deny proof of wrongdoing, like a video of a copy shooting an innocent person. And more dangerously, putting content owners under pressure to retract such material. There goes freedom of 'speach'
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Content makers have no right to take over my computer.
No they don't, but they will. Even the hardware has been going that way. I hate the thought of the wasted silicon. It Is like buying a truck and finding out that big content that you aren't even going to use will take up one seat and 200 horsepower, and some space in the back too.
PS I tried to look up horsepower for trucks, and chose two that sounded like they could tell me, but they both just wanted to sell me trucks. Wanted my zip code. I don't have one.
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Where is the right to privacy, absent. Where it the right to the truth, absent. Where is the right to freedom from censorship, absent.
Maybe you should ask yourself what you're doing about that. For all the conspiracy theories about how the established order can censor everybody and control everything the reality is the populist vote has been winning out more than ever, we have President Trump, we have Brexit, why didn't they use their powers of censorship to stop those disruptive forces?
But the thing you're worried about is the standardization of an interface to a module that attempts to enforce copyright (and of course many non-standard
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Digital rights is an ugly theft of words implying the rights of people, rather than the rights of greed ie digital wrongs.
It's not theft, it's just digital words management.
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I'm not sure whether you are criticising the way DRM is defined at the moment to only favour the big entertainment producers, or you are against DRM in any form. Given the massive, commercial interests that drive much of the internet, I think it is unrealistic to expect that we can get rid of DRM completely, but I agree that it needs to be rebalanced, probably in a quite radical way. However, I think DRM is only a corner of a much wider problem, namely the problem of what information it should be possible t
Alternative Choices (Score:5, Interesting)
Are there vendors, browsers or developers who have committed to not adopt this standard?
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Re:Alternative Choices (Score:5, Insightful)
Are there vendors, browsers or developers who have committed to not adopt this standard?
Does it matter? EME is just an interface to a DRM module, if you don't have a DRM module then the content won't play. Just like if you want to watch content that requires Adobe Flash to play and you don't have Flash installed the content won't play.
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That's until they get the bright idea that the DRM module being kept on the user's end at all is no longer acceptable, and now you're stuck waiting for whatever proprietary DRM nonsense they've cooked up to load and process inside of your browser.
Huh? What are you talking about? What does that have to do with EME?
To add insult to injury, I can just imagine some fuckups will implement a UI that will sit there and grind your machine until you enter in your credentials and payment info, with a nice fat chance of it crashing with some random error.
So use one of the many open source browsers and make it do what you want. You're being all doom-and-gloom about something completely different to EME that you made up that also has a problem that you also made up. The OP asked about EME, I gave an answer, it's not a generic answer that applies to anything you might invent.
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well actually, he might have not known what he was talking about since.. ...since the EME IS EXACTLY THAT ALREADY.
It absolutely is not that at all. You're wrong on both counts, the DRM module is kept on the user's end and could you link me to the UI that will sit there and grind your machine until you enter in your credentials and payment info [slashdot.org] please?
thats the whole point.. a plugin architecture to provide binary only shit that does something you don't know and you need to pay for to be part of
Not sure where you're getting the "pay" idea from but are you unfamiliar with existing plugin architectures that exist in browsers to provide binary plugins? Because they've been around for a very long time.
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Except I can fork any browser supporting N/PPAPI and expect Flash DRM to work. For EME, the DRM module providers only allow 'trusted' browsers to run their module. The two systems are worlds apart.
Yes but the point was to not use the EME standard and since EME is just an interface to a DRM module then if that DRM module isn't present then EME isn't going to work so whether the browser has it or not results in the same outcome.
I'm not sure what you're driving at here, you want DRM but without EME? Or you want EME and DRM but in a "non-trusted" browser?
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"Trusted" in this case means "trusted by the movie companies to work against the users wishes"
I think you misunderstand what users want: By and large they just want to be able to watch the content. But that's still beside the point, you don't have to use EME or DRM at all if you don't want to.
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The DRM module is a black box that can do anything with your computer
Why are you running your browser with privileges that allow it the scope to do anything with your computer? Yes back in the old Windows days everybody ran everything effectively with administrator privileges but
and is legally protected from reverse enginering attempts, so nobody is allowed to know what it does.
So - assuming you just have to view Hollywood's latest rehashed, "reimagined" crap - run it in a VM, sane people have already been doing that with the various existing DRM mechanisms for years. There is no change here.
Also browsers may just secretly sideload the DRM module for "usability" when it isn't explicitly installed. The Chrome devs were caught patching the open source Chromium repo so it would do just that.
Yes of course, because that's what the majority of people are going to want. For th
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The Pale Moon team have publicly said that they won't be implementing it.
What a load of shit (Score:2, Insightful)
No DRM has ever been effective in its stated purpose.
Stripping A/V from a stream is trivial.
The best way to circumvent it is to simply make iso files from DVD's and Blurays. It is so trivial APK and Hairyfeet could do it!
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As long as we're notified (Score:2)
I don't really care if the support is there as long as I'm notified that content is so crippled so I can avoid it.
The war is not lost (Score:2)
"Standard" is just a label you give to a proposal. Right now all effort has been focussed on preventing to stick that label on EME. I think that effort could have been spent better.
You can for example make browser vendors adopt only DRM plugins that charge money for each visit, that will drive away all the little websites and makes every website owner think twice before they put their video under EME DRM. Really the worst that can happen now is that every video website on the web starts putting all their vi
Follow the money (Score:3, Insightful)
member organizations, who pay an annual fee that varies from $2,250 for the smallest non-profits to $77,000 for larger corporations
Clearly, the W3C created the EME standard to please its "member organizations".
screen capture software (Score:2)
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New Kid, Same Block (Score:2)
So, it looks like the open Web has a new enemy, and its name is EnEME.
A standard (Score:3)
A standard is only as good as it is implemented in the wild. W3C can recommend all it wants but if web masters refuse to implement it or adopt it, it is just so much wasted documentation. This will likely result in a huge fragmentation of the web not seen since the AOL, Prodigy days of the past.
How to destroy it: (Score:3)
If you wish to cause the current system of DRM to implode it's actually really easy, you just need to know how to play by their rules. All you need to do is simulate the CDM plugin environment of Microsoft's Edge browser and package it as a single program that can write the output to an unprotected file. It doesn't even have to output an optimized video file, a raw capture will do. They will be contractually obligated to stop using CDMs because they can no longer meet the standard of the "robustness rules".
With any other browser, it would mean only that specific browser would be unable to use CDMs but Microsoft isn't about to be left out of the game they helped fix.
Content protection isn't going away. (Score:2)
The only question remaining is whether protected content will be accessible through a general purpose web browser. If not, subscribers will abandon the browser for the app.
The app that has already been integrated into their smartphone, tablet, HDTV, video game console, set top box, etc.
The streaming music service I use has 30 million tracks to explore. It would be very tempting to settle in there to stay. If you want me to have a look at what can be found elsewhere, don't make it anymore difficult than it n
Arrrrr (Score:2)
Ye'll nevarrrrr stop me ye scurvy dogs!
DRM is not about rights (Score:2)
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Hubris! (Score:2)
One of my very most favorite old-timey sins! Hubris.
"The DRM is supposed to thwart copyright infringement by stopping people from ripping video and other content from encrypted high-quality streams."
Sounds an awful lot like "The Titanic is Unsinkable" doesn't it?
Re:DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
As with almost all technology, it depends on context.
DRM can be abused to lock up content far in excess of normal copyright protections.
DRM also makes new and useful business models practical, giving us modern replacements for old school rental stores from the likes of Netflix and Spotify, which obvious work out for a lot of people.
Not in this case (Score:4, Insightful)
In this case, because of the method of application, this DRM is bad.
It hijacks YOUR computer because THEY want to control what you do with "their" data. The context that could make DRM fine is if it were in control of the two people on either end of the conversation (so that Alice and Bob can stop Charlie from listening in), but this one has Alice cutting Bob out too because they're "afraid" that Bob might record the conversation.
That just does not work.
But the context of in the HTML standard, when the "DRM" bit isn't actually part of the standard? Fuck no. A train wreck of an idea.
The *ONLY* way this works... (Score:2, Insightful)
Is if your endpoint audio/video devices support HDCP and negotiate a connect with the remote server.
Anything less that that (notably relying on the Intel ME, AMD PSP, Arm Trustzone, or other TPM module implementation) allows the possibility of the stream being intercepted while still in digital form.
Even excluding all of those, all that is required *WITH* all this DRM in place to copy it is analog output of the audio to a capture device, and capture of the video stream from a monitor via a camera of suffici
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In this case, because of the method of application, this DRM is bad.
It hijacks YOUR computer because THEY want to control what you do with "their" data.
You're free to not transmit their data to your PC.
The only time DRM is bad is when it prevents you from doing things like listen to one of your CDs in your car, from making backup copies of delicate media for your kids to use, etc.
These days it's all electronic and modern cars have interfaces for mobile phones so these arguments are disappearing. If you choose to steal, that's your choice. Be a grown-up and admit that that's what you're doing though. Don't try to justify it because of the ev1L DRMs.
Re:DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
As with almost all technology, it depends on context.
The context of EME is the worlds Internet users.
DRM can be abused to lock up content far in excess of normal copyright protections.
DRM also makes new and useful business models practical, giving us modern replacements for old school rental stores from the likes of Netflix and Spotify, which obvious work out for a lot of people.
There is no mystery or question surrounding the result.
Content providers are somewhat limited to means of access and distribution to what people actually have unless willing or able to go out of their way. When you lower the barrier for making DRM viable the practical result is more DRM. This WILL happen.
This means more browsers downloading and executing black boxes from companies like Adobe. An outstanding trustworthy organization with an absolutely out of this world stellar security record.
For those who think restricting access and encouraging proliferation of closed proprietary bullshit is bad widespread EME in browsers does exactly this.
Protocol/standards designers have very little actual power to dictate terms to anyone yet they are hardly powerless. While capacity for mitigating unchecked commercial interests is often severely constrained the capacity to cause damage by letting them run rampant is not so limited.
When organizations like W3C allow themselves to be corrupted ICANN style it's time for those who care to divest themselves and support a competing structure. W3C is VOTING for the legitimacy to go ahead with this knowing full well there is nothing approaching broad consensus on the subject. The procedures they are using to achieve the desired result (DRM) is explicitly against their own stated principals.
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If it's DRM on something that was presented as a permanent sale, I'm inclined to agree.
If it's DRM to enforce temporary access when that was known to be part of the deal up-front (PPV, subscription libraries, and so on) then I think it's a different matter.
makes suing security researchers a feature ... (Score:2)
The security community strongly objected to the W3C terms when they were proposed, but their concerns have explicitkly beeen discarded. Vendors can now criminalize bug reporting and whistle-blowing. See also http://boingboing.net/2017/03/... [boingboing.net]
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Vendors can now criminalize bug reporting and whistle-blowing.
Don't you think that's a problem with a legal system that permits it, rather than with DRM itself, though? After all, the W3C has no legislative power and no authority to say who gets to sue someone or when. Given the nature of EME, it's hard to see how they could incorporate robust protections for anyone even if they wanted to.
As an aside, just because someone calls themselves a security researcher, that doesn't necessarily make them a positive influence or whatever they want to do OK, so I'm not sure some
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The proposal was that W3C should require "its members promise not to use DRM standardization as a way to get new legal rights to sue people for legitimate, legal activities like reporting security defects", close captioning and the like (EFF's wording).
It's the reporting of security holes that's at risk: the researcher can be legit or a crook, but if they publish, they've admitted a DMCA breach and can be sued.
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My point is that the rightsholders have those legal rights already. It's not anything the W3C is doing that provide those rights, it's laws like the DMCA.
And again, just because someone says they are a security researcher, why should they magically be above those laws? If the laws are inappropriate for some reason, they should be changed for everyone. If they are fair and reasonable, security researchers shouldn't get a pass for breaking them just because of their line of work.
In short, I think you raise va
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W3C is a voluntary organization: they can make it a membership requirement that members not sue people who publicize secuity breaches. A company that wants to use the law can resign, at the cost of doing so publicly.
It's called "moral suasion", and is a tradition way of protesting a law. One famous example is from the fight against sla
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Right, but why should any business give up broad legal rights like that? There needs to be a compelling argument that they get something worthwhile in return. From a commercial perspective, I just don't see one here. From the W3C's perspective, it's trying to bring some standardisation to the industry, but it's abundantly clear that major content providers will walk away and implement their own proprietary equivalents if they are backed into a corner, so the W3C has very little bargaining power to try to fo
it doesn't work. (Score:2)
it doesn't work.
but makes the ecosystem for browsers a pay-to-play ecosystem.
it's basically just geared towards monopolization for the players that made this standard.
and microsoft has had it's hands in a bunch of drm solutions all of which it has promptly dropped or just decided to ignore on their products. like... you know... if ms made a video+audio drm solution.. ....and didnt use it on their phones while licensing it out with stupid, stupid licensing restrictions say to nokia say something like 12 yea
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And it would be the first nobody on the internet gives half a shit about.
Re:DRM is necessary to stop piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, these days DRM encourages piracy because it gets in the way of legally purchased media.
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Quite true; Digital Restrictions Management (contrary to what another poster said, smart people do realize and don't allow the reframing of the language away from how most people experience DRM) doesn't affect those who get their copies stripped of the restrictions as is commonplace amongst those who share. DRM chiefly adversely affects those who participate in the process (whether they spend their own money to do it or are given it gratis).
DRM is the excuse publishers use to justify the ongoing control ove
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This mostly seems to be a combination of paranoia and slippery slope fallacies, and for someone who wants to see "proof and lots of it", your own argument is remarkably devoid of any supporting evidence.
I suggest to you that the existence of services like Netflix is beneficial to a great many people, who now get to enjoy more content at lower cost than they otherwise would have. I also suggest that services like Netflix would be much less practical without DRM, since obviously anyone could just sign up for
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You lost me. Why should I "keep paying" to "keep enjoying" something?
Because that was the deal you agreed to when you signed up. Why did you have to return a video to the rental store instead of keeping it? After all, you paid for it.
Not all commercial agreements involve a permanent sale, and sometimes a different model involving temporary access at a lower price might benefit everyone involved.
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That's funny, because we don't seem to see any of those things here. Maybe we're just lucky and Netflix serves our videos without DRM. Or maybe you're just making stuff up. Who knows?
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DRM is the excuse publishers use to justify the ongoing control over one's computer, spying regime modern-day DRM schemes make possible and use, and thus pose genuine risks to everyday computer users. This is not about "balancing" rights as another poster said, this is about copyright holders and their business partners using a mechanism to get more control over your devices, your privacy, and your life than they ought to have.
If you really need the latest rehashed, "reimaged" Hollywood trash then run it in a VM, problem solved.
I want to see proof and lots of it
What proof do you have to back up your statements of them getting control of your life? That sounds like a pretty ominous statement so how about you strip away the hyperbole and give a concrete example of what you mean.
I mean do you really think anybody is going to take you seriously when you say things like that in reference to a piece of software that just enforces end-to-end encryption? Yes I do underst