Boy howdy, this is one subject where I loathe saying "I told you so", but... I sure told you so.[1]
HTML DRM is antithetical to the Open Web itself. It was built on a sham of "plugin-free" media playback, but all we did was change Flash and Silverlight for a whole range of closed black boxes, which in turn are effectively all controlled by Big Media (to make it crystal clear: EME was built with third-party decryption modules in mind, and Big Media was obviously never going to support any sort of decryption modules that they couldn't control, so even if your custom browser supports EME it's completely useless without a Big Media-approved decryption module). And make no mistake: Requiring permission from Big Media to essentially build a fully-fledged browser is a 100% intended and expected outcome of HTML DRM as conceived. Big Media would love nothing more than to turn the entirety of the Open Web into Closed Web that they control, and with HTML DRM they've certainly achieved a great step toward doing so, to the detriment of public at wide. I'm sure they're positively salivating about the thought of eventually reaching The Right to Read![2]
The saddest part is it doesn't even seem to accomplish anything. What would-be pirates are actually being foiled by this? Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime use EME, but all their exclusive content is still readily available on torrent sites. Does it raise the difficulty bar? It's hard to imagine anyone who knows how to rip video from their browser doesn't know how to torrent something.
Iview is the one I'm talking about. YouTube DL basically downloads the unencrypted video direct from the server but the website doesn't work until you enable drm
content is no longer the only draw. the business goal is now monetizing the group experience. consider Fortnite. Companies won't care if a few people watch pirated content alone. They want to control the experience of group content consumption. This does require content, but managing the group experience is the new frontier. consider http://rabb.it Pirates can get ppl in groups to watch premium content, but at some size, authorities will show up to protect their property.
Hear hear. The parent commenter's I-told-you-so attitude frustrates me because it completely misses the point: Google de-facto controls the web, and the W3C is essentially irrelevant. Trying to suggest that the W3C's opposition would have stopped any of this is completely naive, and only serves to shift the blame.
> DRM is the price one must pay to consume BIG MEDIA content.
It's just what big media has happened to get away with.
If they found themselves without a way for their paying customers to access their content via DRM, they'd drop the requirement on the spot, with little to no financial impact except for DRM scheme licensing fees.
While that's true at the moment, I had hoped that the web being such a big market, it would entice content producers to deploy without DRM for fear of losing market share to other content providers who do.
But with the introduction of DRM into the standard, this is no longer possible.
There are still plenty of providers who don't use DRM.
You just want the DRM users content but you want it without DRM.
So what really happened is the content producers enticed the users into DRM with their content. It's the other way around, and the consumers voted with their wallet (and clicks)
The whole discussion revolves around video. You can't imagine a browser today that is "just a reader" (Mosaic? hahaha), no one would use a browser without video support.
Surprisingly to me the author of "down and out in the magic kingdom" and the maintainer of BOINGBOING supports web DRM and he's part of the W3C committee. he's a great author and a good person with an anti-authoritarian bent I don't understand his position on this.
Yeah, I believe Doctorow has multiple characters (from multiple books) say something along the lines of "no lock is there for your protection", and I'm certain I've read his opinions on DRM to be negative multiple times.
Hell, I'm fairly certain he had a deal with Barnes and Noble to publish his book without DRM which was nonstandard at the time.
HTML DRM is antithetical to the Open Web itself. It was built on a sham of "plugin-free" media playback, but all we did was change Flash and Silverlight for a whole range of closed black boxes, which in turn are effectively all controlled by Big Media (to make it crystal clear: EME was built with third-party decryption modules in mind, and Big Media was obviously never going to support any sort of decryption modules that they couldn't control, so even if your custom browser supports EME it's completely useless without a Big Media-approved decryption module). And make no mistake: Requiring permission from Big Media to essentially build a fully-fledged browser is a 100% intended and expected outcome of HTML DRM as conceived. Big Media would love nothing more than to turn the entirety of the Open Web into Closed Web that they control, and with HTML DRM they've certainly achieved a great step toward doing so, to the detriment of public at wide. I'm sure they're positively salivating about the thought of eventually reaching The Right to Read![2]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7747142
[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html