Free Software Foundation Challenges Tim Berners-Lee On DRM (defectivebydesign.org)

Slashdot reader Atticus Rex writes: On Monday, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) director Tim Berners-Lee released a post defending his decision to allow Netflix, Microsoft, Apple and Google to enshrine DRM in Web standards, arguing that blocking it would be pointless. Zak Rogoff, FSF campaigns manager, writes in the response:

"As Director of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), Berners-Lee has the ability to block [the DRM proposal] from ratification as an official Web standard... Of course, a refusal to ratify could not immediately stop the use of DRM, but it could meaningfully weaken the position of DRM in the court of public opinion, and put EME proponents Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, and Google on notice that a very prominent figure was willing to stand up to them on behalf of users. Changes in society's technological infrastructure require political movements, not just technological arguments, and political movements benefit greatly from the support of prominent figures."
Berners-Lee takes the position that "The web has to be universal, to function at all. It has to be capable of holding crazy ideas of the moment, but also the well polished ideas of the century. It must be able to handle any language and culture. It must be able to include information of all types, and media of many genres. Included in that universality is that it must be able to support free stuff and for-pay stuff, as they are all part of this world.

"This means that it is good for the web to be able to include movies, and so for that, it is better for HTML5 to have EME than to not have it."

Comments

As Much About Advertising as Copyright

[Kunedog]

Saying "universal" in this context seems more like a trick of language, tacitly admitting that DRM has to be EVERYWHERE or sane users would never put up with it.

EME proponents Netflix, Microsoft, Apple, and Google

Hey look, all the major browser makers, except one. Users still have a choice in Firefox.

Except that Youtube-owner Google spent hundreds of millions to obtain considerable financial influence over the browser maker thought most likely to resist (Mozilla). And then (what a coincidence!) Mozilla gave in on DRM, and seems perpetually bent on making dozens of other perplexing decisions that users can't stand, and seem outright designed to cost it market share.

Be assured that the other big (if not the main) reason they want DRM is to thwart adblock for videos. If they can compromise your browser/vidplayer to the degree that they've prevented you from even reading the content stream, then they've necessarily also prevented you from altering it.

It's because of Hollywood

[Solandri]

The studios approve two types of devices if you wish to stream their coopyrighted content. One approval is for a hardware device - a phone, tablet, dedicated player (e.g. Roku), Blu-ray player, etc. You submit a sample of this hardware, they go over it and OK it, and authorize you to stream to it. This is why the iPhones got Netflix before Android phones. Netflix had to submit just a few iPhone models for approval, so that happened pretty quickly. They had to submit hundreds of Android phone models for approval, so that took some time.

The second type of approval is for software players. If you want to stream to a software player running on a general purpose computing device, Hollywood has much more stringent requirements. Their fear is that you'll run another program along-side the streaming video that peeks into the memory containing the decrypted stream, and save stream to disk thus giving you a DRM-free digital copy of the movie. Their "solution" is that the DRM and video decode process has to happen inside an encrypted virtual machine, which then sends each frame directly to the display device. They don't want a native Windows or OS X or Liinux binary which does this because someone could theoretically modify the binary before running to weaken or pierce the encrypted VM. That's why the players are coded in Flash or Silverlight (theoretically you could modify those as well, but it's a lot harder since a new copy of the player is sent when you begin streaming the movie).

This insanity is also why playing streamed movies on PC requires much heftier hardware than mobile devices. Because the entire decode process has to happen inside the encrypted VM, you can't take advantage of dedicated video decode hardware built into every GPU since the late 1990s. The entire thing has to be done in software (moreover, software running in a VM). It's extremely CPU-intensive. That's why until recently you needed an i3 or better (Pentium or Atom wasn't enough) to stream 1080p movies from Netflix, Hulu, etc, while your phone with a low-end ARM processor could stream the same 1080p movie with no problems. Because the phone was approved as a hardware device, it's allowed to use dedicated video decoding hardware.

Re:"universal"

[squiggleslash]

By including DRM in the standard, you allow everyone to implement the exact same thing...

That's possible anyway.

and make it universally available on all devices

...that doesn't follow from the first part of your sentence. It would follow if what you'd written was by standardizing DRM you allow everyone to implement the exact same thing, but as your wording correctly implies, all that was standardized was the method by which DRM is referred to in HTML5, not the DRM itself.

Had the W3C not punted on the DRM scheme itself, Berners-Lee's comments would have been legitimate if not what we necessarily wanted. But in failing to standardize DRM, they basically created another <OBJECT> tag - something that's inherently platform and vendor specific, and will never be anything but.