Mozilla's Route For Implementing W3C EME (HTML5 DRM)

[kaprikawn]

Nobody like Netflix is going to allow it to be trivial to copy their stuff. Anyone thinking that they'd serve an unencrypted stream is living in cloud cuckoo land. You may not like Mozillas methodology, but I for one would like to run Netflix in Linux without a wrapper.

[curaga]

Mozilla sells out on another issue, surprise! The act of supporting this is not justified by the mitigative measures (not included, sandbox). It goes against Mozilla's mission and posted values; they simply chose money.

One, people will just use a different browser that works, and be annoyed that firefox doesn't work. Mozilla wouldn't stand to profit if people did that.
...
One has to understand, a business exists to make money, and that will never change. DRM free will unfortunately never be standard. I'll take a crappy HTML5 binary blob over Silverlight/flash. It'll be progress.

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and lead the open source Mozilla project.
...
The Mozilla Foundation describes itself as "a non-profit organization that promotes openness, innovation and participation on the Internet."

[anda_skoa]

Nobody seems to understand that businesses are there to make money, and they want to protect their money.

I doubt you will find a lot of people who would argue on that.

However, a lot of people detest their rights being reducded or taken away or loopholes in law being used against them so that a few businesses can have the luxury of not having to compete in an open market,

One has to understand, a business exists to make money, and that will never change. DRM free will unfortunately never be standard.

Well, this is actually not true.
You might not know this yourself, but most CDs do not have DRM on their tracks, Amazon, iTunes and very likely others sell digital music without DRM and so on.

We can of course assume that this is only true because neither the recording industry nor Amazon nor Apple are trying to make money, but I don't think that is likely.

Cheers,
_

[dh04000]

An important question

Is it possible that an Adobe html5 plugin would be 100% dependent on browser technology and thus be 100% OS-agnostic? Or will they have a plugin for every single different platform, which is the shitty position we are today.

[anda_skoa]

Anyone thinking that they'd serve an unencrypted stream is living in cloud cuckoo land.

The problem most people have with the current for of DRM is that is designed such that it cannot be implemented in FOSS software.
Which has nothing do to at all with encryption.

FOSS crypto software is routinely used to protect financial, diplomatic and military data and transmissions, because decades of cryptography research have shown that the protection does not come from the secrecy of the algorithm but from the difficulty of the mathematical problem and the secrecy of the encryption key.

Yet, for whatever reason, protecting a media stream seems to require secret algorthms.

If you believe that DRM has anything to do with protecting the content then, as you put it so nicely, are living in cloud cuckoo land

Cheers,
_

[anda_skoa]

Or will they have a plugin for every single different platform, which is the shitty position we are today.

It will be worse.

The shitty position we are in today allows us to load whatever plugin is required by the server sending the content.
The future position we wll be in today is that we will have to use different browser depending in which system the server is using.

Today: if the server supports the Adobe DRM, you use Flash in whatever browser you like. If the server supports Microsoft's DRM, you use Silverlight (directly or through a wrapper) with whatever browser you like.

Future: if the server supports Adobe's DRM, you can use Firefox due to this new alliance. If the server supporst Microsoft's DRM, or Google's or Apple's, you switch to a browser that has that built-in.

The great new world of not having plugins means you switch the actual browser application when you need a different DRM system's client.

Awesome improvment, right?

Cheers,
_

[Luke]

Some of us are using the web for non-business purposes

This is why I can't really hold conversations with other open source advocates.


Nobody seems to understand that businesses are there to make money, and they want to protect their money. .

Not everything ON the web is a business. All of the far-left activist video and news work I do is done without monetization, in fact in ways designed to make tracking users or proving the identity of the source more difficult. This sort of stuff does not even interact with DRM. Nor do fan videos, music uploads by noncommercial bands, etc. If Youtube and Facebook die out, that'd fine by me. I don't use either one. I would he happy with a return to the original "bring your own server" approach with zero cloud service, and all ISP's expected to tolerate webservers if they want customers. I prefer a peer to peer model with centralized servers and the businesses that grew from them OUT of the picture. Hell, 90% of the hardware needed to replace the entire Internet and every server on it with a peer to peer mesh network is already deployed, the only missing things is high powered super-wifi for rural areas.

I would also be very happy to see the Hollywood model of music and movie distribution dead, so that all musicians and movie makers have equal access to distribution, the losers being that .001% who currently get rich, the winners being almost all other musicians and moviemakers. I played in a band from 1991-1993. If we had had today's Internet then, I would have released all content directly over the web and ignored the record contract mirage. Only distro I ever got was live performances and some pirate radio airtime 3,000 miles away.

[dh04000]

Future: if the server supports Adobe's DRM, you can use Firefox due to this new alliance. If the server supporst Microsoft's DRM, or Google's or Apple's, you switch to a browser that has that built-in.

The great new world of not having plugins means you switch the actual browser application when you need a different DRM system's client.

Awesome improvment, right?

Cheers,
_

Let us pray to Tux and hope that they make the sane decision to build these plug-ins with browser/web technology such that the plug-ins are browser and OS-agnostic.

[somini]

Nobody like Netflix is going to allow it to be trivial to copy their stuff. Anyone thinking that they'd serve an unencrypted stream is living in cloud cuckoo land. You may not like Mozillas methodology, but I for one would like to run Netflix in Linux without a wrapper.

Guess what, since this is binary blob, you run Netflix on Linux if Adobe wants it, otherwise you can go pound sand.

[anda_skoa]

Let us pray to Tux and hope that they make the sane decision to build these plug-ins with browser/web technology such that the plug-ins are browser and OS-agnostic.

You mean Mozilla or CDMs in general?

Because for the latter that is not very likely.
What I have read on the W3C mailinglist suggests that there are several ways of providing CDMs that are considered equally valid

1) as part of the browser
2) as a plugin into browsers
3) as a system library or service
4) as part of the hardware

Microsoft and Apple are almost certainly going to go for (3), Google might do (3) for Android but will almost certainly going for (1) for Chrome.
As far as I understand Mozilla's approach they are somewhere between (1) and (2), i.e. the CDM being a 3rd party plugin but currently in a host sandbox specific to that plugin.

Cheers,
_