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FSF Activists Want You To Call Tim Berners-Lee About DRM (boingboing.net)
"The Free Software Foundation is calling on netizens to make calls to the W3C demanding they not include DRM in Web standards," an anonymous reader writes. Cory Doctorow reports:
There's only two weeks left until members of the World Wide Web Consortium vote on whether the web's premier open standards organization will add DRM to the toolkit available to web developers, without effecting any protections for people who discover security vulnerabilities that affect billions of web users, let alone people who adapt web tools for those with disabilities and people who create legitimate, innovative new technologies to improve web video.
Tim Berners-Lee has final say over this change, according to the article, which directs callers to urge him to "keep the web free and open, rather than rescuing DRM from its slow collapse due to the complexity of fielding and supporting it without standards like those the W3C makes."
Tim Berners-Lee has final say over this change, according to the article, which directs callers to urge him to "keep the web free and open, rather than rescuing DRM from its slow collapse due to the complexity of fielding and supporting it without standards like those the W3C makes."
Seriously, he's not a god. He can't stop Google and so on pushing DRM if they want to (which they did, regardless of whether he accepted that he was powerless in this case).
I really don't understand the FSF anymore. "Let's go after the symptoms instead of the disease! Let's divide our own supporters! Let's act like if we just pretend that if DRM isn't an official web-spec, it won't still be a de-facto web-spec!" What difference will any of that make, really? It's a pathetic waste of everyone's time and donation money.
Doctorow wants you to know that he knows the difference between "effect" and "affect" and isn't afraid to show it.
Tim Berners-Lee will do exactly as he is told. Sorry about that.
It starts out with media only.
Then the behavioral tracking companies and advertisers throw hissy fits like the media companies are, to restrict people's ability to locally modify web pages, such as with uMatrix or other tracker blocking technologies. It gets extended to cover the basic presentation of all web page content, not just video, and end users lose control of how they view the web, just as that control is being lost in the mobile space, but worse.
We've seen a constant slow erosion of our own control over personal computing and a transfer of that control to large corporations, who were never happy about this whole "internet" thing. They want a more TV-like model, where THEY control the presentation, as well as the tracking, and the end user has no control.
Make no mistake. You let the DRM camel's nose into the official standard's tent, and that IS what we will end up with. You like your ability to block trackers? To control fonts and colors and other local presentation? Your adblockers? Your ability to locally stop scripts from blocking right mouse clicks or cut&paste? If DRM continues to make inroads, you will lose all of that, and more. It will be nothing less than the end of the open web as we knew it.
Captch: "product".
Apple and Google don't care, they'll do what they want. I don't care because I know every type of DRM gets circumvented in the end so they can play their futile game all they want.
Until it happens to someone in your family. Then it's "ohhhh this is an epidemic we gotta find a way to solve this problem".
Drugs don't give a shit what color you are. How much money you have, or who your family members are. It does not discriminate.
Internet wasn't, isn't and won't be the freedom/privacy respecting place regardless of the DRM's "web standard" status.
HTML5 DRM video is only testing its wings and thanks to the examples provided by Netflix and others is starting to gain enough momentum to let the users of open source operating systems to use the time shifting and replay services from various television channels. Without standards there will be no such video and services besides Flash player for the millions. Discriminating accessibility problems disappear as nobody without the right mobile device or closed source operating system or browser can access the content.
I've posted this before but...
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.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Anti DRM-circumvention laws were originally enacted to penalize copying of audio and video from physical platforms like CDs and DVDs. When audio and video streaming came to the web, those laws still applied.
A video store can legally sell a legal copy of a Hollywood movie full of sex and profanity. But if they pay for the copy, edit out the sex and violence, and sell the edited copy, that's illegal. See https://freedom-to-tinker.com/...
Now let's apply this to the web. A website puts weak HTML-DRM on its entire webpage, including ads. If you block ads, pupups, autoplaying garbage, etc, to get a cleaned-up webpage, you're subject to prosecution, just like the outfit that sold cleaned-up DVDs. If the web doesn't have built-in DRM, that becomes a lot less likely.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Drugs don't give a shit what color you are. How much money you have, or who your family members are. It does not discriminate.
Of course they don't, they are inanimate objects. However, it's the people than can discriminate against the drugs. Educate your family on the problem with opioids so that they never start using them.
Yes, drugs DO discriminate... Between those who use them and those who do not. It's not an "epidemic", it's about choices.
Until it happens to someone in your family. Then it's "ohhhh this is an epidemic we gotta find a way to solve this problem".
You don't know how I feel about drugs. Or my family.
I've been in web development for 20 years. I've dealt with DRM implemented with Active X (limiting sites to Internet Explorer only), Java, Flash, Silverlight, and others. Mostly the effect of this is that users who chose anything but Windows couldn't access the media. For example, for years Linux users couldn't access Netflix - until HTML5 IME came along. (IME is the "drm" that this article complains about). Of course the blessed platforms are now often Apple iOS and Android, rather than Windows.
Columbia and MGM aren't about to release their movies as unprotected mpeg4 files, no matter how much we would like them to do that. The actual effect of IME (aka html5 drm) has been to open up content, such as Netflix, to more people. Hollywood isn't going DRM-free. Our actual options are a) Silverlight DRM or other platform-locked, non-standard DRM, or b) platform neutral, standardized streaming such as we have with HTML5 IME. Given the realistic choices, I prefer (b). I'd prefer Netflix be platform-independent than not.
I ask this question every time Chrome and spying are brought up but no one can ever answer. Can anyone provide packet logs of Chrome supposedly spying? We all have definite proof of Windows 10 but people clam up when I ask for proof of Chrome.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
All Narcan does is encourage junkies to keep on shooting up. When they do overdose and are brought back, what is the first thing they do? Yes, more heroin!
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Ad companies have started putting bas64 encoded images in the html code itself. What is a good way to block stuff like that?
How can you keep your head up with that huge fedora resting on it?
Drugs give plenty of shit about how much money you have: it directly impacts what you can buy.
Initially there was no DRM. And no content, except via usenet.
Then we got Macromedia Flash. Which supported DRM. And content began to appear, along with streaming video.
Eventually lots of content appeared, some protected via Flash and some not. Audio and TV stations began streaming, DRM-protected by Flash.
Then Apple (HLS / Fairplay) and Microsoft (Smoothstreaming / PlayReady, including packaged as Silverlight) wanted a piece of the pie, and DRM fragmented. Apple blocked Flash from iOS devices.
Which brings us to yesterday, when we have quite a few competing DRMs (Flash, Fairplay on Safari/iOS, Playready on Microsoft/Roku/most consoles, Google Widevine Modular on Android and many of the same consoles and in Chrome) and devices can't always play the desired streams.
We still have Flash dominance... something like 15% of websites with media still use Flash and only Flash.
So let's summarize: Without any standard, DRM became required and pervasive, as well as a cause of compatibility matrix and support issues.
What does the proposed HTML5 EME standard do? It doesn't require DRM. It merely provides a standardized mechanism for implementing it. In theory, the CDM was going to be, well, modular so that the same browser could play several DRMs, but we know how that works. But it just doesn't matter, because CMAF helps ensure a lower implementation bar anyhow. One set of HTML5 code (or fairly close, Apple being the outlier right now) and one set of media segments (well, two right now, due to Fairplay using a different AES128 mode than anyone else, and the differences between DASH which Google and Microsoft support and HLS which Apple and Adobe support, but at least it's only two and not four.)
In other words, standardization won't cost anything, it won't restrict you any because DRM already happened even without standardization. What standardization does is raise the likelihood that you can use any device/browser you want to view content that otherwise would be blocked to you.
Why is this a bad thing?
July 2, 2009 was the day that Tim Berners-Lee abandoned a free and open web.
https://www.cnet.com/news/an-epitaph-for-the-web-standard-xhtml-2
That was the day that he announced the termination of his XHTML2 standard, and allowed Apple, Google, and others to dictate the HTML5 "standard". (And I place "standard" in scare quotes because it isn't really a standard. In fact, they acknowledge this fact, and prefer to use the deliberately deceptive term living standard .)
The fight against DRM in the HTML standard is already lost. Tim Berners-Lee gave up 8 years ago, it's just that most people didn't notice until now.
> if consumers gave them a choice: release DRM free, or go out of business
If I had four hooves and a horn, I'd be a unicorn. 99.9% of Hollywood's paying customers (the people they care about) don't know what DRM *is*.
Of the maybe one in a thousand customers who even know what DRM is, maybe half of those will take it unlawfully *regardless*, they aren't going to pay $5 for the movie (their share of the production costs) *no matter what*. So you're left with maybe 0.05% of customers who know and care about DRM, and who will maybe pay for a non-DRM copy. The studios aren't going to make such important decisions based on less than one tenth of one percent of the market.
Seriously, DDOSing a real individual? They've jumped the shark on this one, for sure.
DRM should be on a USB stick device. without it pluged in, the watever file will not decode.
of course this is not desired because instead of just pumping out totally easy copyable electrons and infecting and taking over already paid for computer hardware (of the consumer), the "media producers" would have to get into the business of producing real tangible hardware (and shoulder the blame if it fails).
Instead of one vector for attack (or two if you add silverlight to flash), there will be one for EVERY SINGLE DRM IMPLEMENTED. And they, unlike flash/silverlight, will have super-superuser below-ring-0 access to your computer because this DRM is from people who want you to trust them that what you bought is worth it but WILL NOT *EVER* trust you to pay for it and not copy.
So they will snatch your computer from you because THEY don't trust YOU.
But because there's no DRM actually in the standard, just mandated "you must have one", every pissant publisher will get their own "flash/silverlight" installed, without which you will not be able to see "their" content. And they sure as shit won't trust another publisher's DRM.
So you will need one for Sony, one for BMI, one for ....
It will be WORSE than flash/silverlight.
And, unlike them, mandated as the standard to allow them all in.
With all the shit going on these days, this is what keeps Stallman up at night? What a bunch of privileged dicks.
Just don't adopt or support the new web standards. It won't prevent large companies from doing what they want, the only thing it does provide is a guideline to interoperability. If no one enacts web sites to the new standard it has no effect, but having a published standard guides companies towards smooth interoperability and helps prevent wholesale fracturing of the web.
If everyone's DRM follows a standard, when that is cracked, and it will be, the whole market will fall apart. If every entity arrives at its' own method you will need a hodgepodge of solutions to just navigate and use resources, which leads to a huge effort to maintain and secure from the user side.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
The disease is millions of users who think everything created digitally must be free (as in beer). They believe that the creators of any kind of content (software, video, music, photos, etc.) should somehow only be able to sell a single copy and then everyone else in the world should get it for free. It doesn't matter a bit to them how much it costs to create the content or how popular it might be...if you want any kind of compensation for creating it, you must be just a greedy #$&@.