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DRM In HTML5 — Better Than the Alternative?
Underholdning writes "DRM is coming to HTML5. The W3C published a working draft yesterday of the framework that will support the use of DRM-protected media. Ars Technica's Peter Bright reports on it with an article claiming that DRM in HTML5 is a victory for the open web, not a defeat. Bright argues that if HTML5 does not support DRM, then content providers will move their content away from open standards and implement it with native apps — abandoning the web in the process. Quoting: 'Keeping it out of W3C might have been a moral victory, but its practical implications would sit between slim and none. It doesn't matter if browsers implement "W3C EME" or "non-W3C EME" if the technology and its capabilities are identical. ... Deprived of the ability to use browser plugins, protected content distributors are not, in general, switching to unprotected media. Instead, they're switching away from the Web entirely. Want to send DRM-protected video to an iPhone? "There's an app for that." Native applications on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Windows 8 can all implement DRM, with some platforms, such as Android and Windows 8, even offering various APIs and features to assist this.'"
http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-encrypted-media-20130510/#introduction
Pretty much everything in the picture is standardized and can be implemented by any browser, but the Content Decryption Module (CDM) can be anything, and is selected by keySystem from the DOM data. There is a single reference system that merely decrypts blocks of the stream. But you can pretty much just dump the decrypted blocks into a file. I'm sure all this will really accomplish is requiring people to download proprietary CDMs, or only allow browsers that ship with them like IE or Chrome to play content. This is a shit solution.