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Will Google Oppose DRM On HTML5 Video?
An anonymous reader let us know that "Mozilla has committed to not implement DRM in Firefox for WebM HTML5 video even though it is theoretically possible. Microsoft has asked Google and the WebM community several other questions that still have not been answered, but this one seems more important: will Google commit to keeping WebM in Chrome DRM-free? Does our community think that is important for the open web and free software?"
There is no way to have standardized DRM... The whole idea of DRM relies entirely on security through obscurity, and if you publish a standard then that obscurity is gone.
Even with an obscured scheme, if it's worth it to anyone (ie there aren't easier ways to get the same content) then someone will reverse engineer the format and work out how to extract the data from it in a usable way. This will _ALWAYS_ be possible, because the player itself has to get the data into a usable format itself in order to display it.
All DRM does is inconvenience legitimate users, pirates will just download media that is not drm encumbered and have a better user experience.
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>>>H.264... is extremely unfriendly to open source.
So then - how do open source programs like WinAmp, MP Classic, Miro, and VLC Player get away with using it? If they can do it, Chrome and Firefox should be able to do it too. (And Opera - since they are not open source at all.)
More importantly, how do I get the WebM video I just downloaded to work in my iPod? Or my TV? They only do Apple and MPEG codecs.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
DRM does not and has not protected video game publishers.
Yes it does. The digital restrictions management on video game consoles protects established video game publishers from competition from smaller indie developers. Console makers have a history of not granting licenses to micro-ISVs, and "homebrew" software relies on fragile jailbreaks that the console maker can and does fix with an update to the console's firmware.
Problem is, there can't really be a standards-based mechanism for delivering DRM anything, at least not in the sense of open standards on the Web.
Right now, if I stick to HTML5 and stuff like WebM, there is the theoretical possibility of me taking nothing but existing open source stuff, or even starting from scratch, and writing software that can consume that media. Pretty much any DRM which allowed me to do that wouldn't really be doing its job as DRM.
The better route is to suck it up and leave the DRM behind.
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