The DRM is a legal excuse to sue competitors out of existence. The existing EME-compliant DRM implementations don't even work. This whole thing is a farce.
At this point it is just a mechanism for oligopolists to collude with each other to maintain their dominant market positions.
It is funny to watch how something like Web Crypto takes years to implement, even though the technology is ancient, but if Google wants a new feature to spy on users it will be released next week.
This.
With all due respect to the great vision of Tim Berners-Lee, as well as his historical achievements:
The W3C has turned into an anti-pattern of what to expect from a standardization organisation. In some sense, the W3C standards are the opposite of the RFCs by the IETF.
(and ISO is somewhere in between - they do produce over-engineered crap, but their signal-to-noise ratio is still tolerable, even though it hurts)
Would we be better without copyright laws?
I think the concept of copyright law is good in lots of ways, but the current copyright laws in the USA are pretty awful. It was originally 20 years, now it's 90+. Lots of old works are being lost or having access denied because they're still under copyright, but nobody is publishing them.
Also related: "the war on sharing" https://stallman.org/articles/end-war-on-sharing.html
So we are at the pure rent seeking stage.
Work for hire (producing something to begin with) would still be a thing.
For a broader discussion I'd prefer to reference the actual text for the basis of US Copyright.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
With the meaning of those words at the time of their writing:
* limited to scientific works
* and methods of doing things that have direct industrial benefit.
* ONLY by the author/inventor (not corporations)
* LIMITED time, I think 5 years is probably plenty and 10 is a maximum.
* I like the idea of a short default term, and paying (active effort) for longer renewal.
* Consumer protections (trademarks) are a different matter entirely.In many ways it isn't even about copyright - it's about IP, and that's actually a whole other problem.
I don't think they're attempting to stifle competition, and if so they sure are not succeeding at that because there are new streaming services all the time. It's so they can prevent a commercially viable piracy business.
But that's not because DRM works.
Getting a digital copy of some bit of media is still trivial. Netflix forcing its DRM on its customers doesn't mean that you can't illegally download Stranger Things in excellent quality, and their DRM doesn't slow anyone dedicated to doing so down at all.
In fact, Netflix could stream all their stuff without DRM, and nothing would change (with one exception I'll come to in a bit). What's made piracy harder is a combination of factors:
* The legal way is often easier (just pay Netflix a small monthly sum and watch stuff)
* The legal way suffices for a lot of people
* Getting caught infringing copyright has serious consequences in many countries
* Downloading files from shady sources puts your computer at risk (Windows in particular; e.g., ransomware)
If Netflix turned off all their DRM tomorrow, then perhaps some pirates would have a slightly easier way to source their material, but otherwise nothing would change.
Except that the end-user gets a better experience.
At this moment Netflix is refusing to serve 1080p video content to anyone who uses a free operating system and free browser, because 'the DRM isn't good enough'. For 4k the rules are even more stringent; you need Microsoft Windows, Edge, and pre-approved trusted-platform capable hardware (which includes the monitor/TV).
For the rest of us, Netflix and the major content studios begrudgingly allow us to watch 720p video on our way too open computers.
This isn't about protecting the media streams from piracy, this is about making sure that the future of media consumption means consumers will run the media producers' software, using their rules, on hardware they control. We are not supposed to run our own HTPC, or do clever things with media we pay for (e.g., letting an algorithm watch ahead to warn the user of scenes with strobe light effects for epileptic patients, as the EFF mentions, or simply controlling a string of LED lights behind your screen for added effect, or downloading the streams to watch on holiday, or cut fragments out of a stream to use as samples in a lawful manner (e.g., a blog about films, or some cultural analysis), or …).
Netflix, Steam and Spotify made it incredibly convenient to obtain content legally and at a reasonable price. They removed most of the incentives for piracy. There was a surprisingly long period when piracy was hands down more convenient than buying stuff legally, and services like these were responsible for reversing that trend.
More specifically, Spotify deserves a special mention, as it has been single-handedly responsible for massively changing my listening habits, because of the way the Daily Mix/Discover Weekly features keep pushing my boundaries. It gives me something valuable that I couldn't get otherwise.
Well, it works only for crooked purposes, and that's exactly the point EFF is making. DRM is therefore unacceptable, including in the context of the Internet.
And you are still missing the point. DRM doesn't make any pirating difficult. All it does is giving power to undemocratically extend copyright law in arbitrary directions by slapping DRM on something, and saying that breaking that DRM is illegal. It's a power grab tool. Just take a look how this garbage was used to prevent users from switching mobile carriers, claiming that unlocking the mobile phone (i.e. breaking its DRM) is illegal.
The real problem is DRM _law_, which is a gross overcriminalization of justifiably legal activity, like repairs, format shifting (both to and from DRM devices), security research, tinkering with your own possessions, etc. And on top of that, then demanding that all countries in the world follow suit.
I first check Hulu and Amazon video, if it's not on there I pirate it. I can't remember the last time I heard of anyone being burned legally for pirating, and torrents are not difficult to use.
If you can't find a movie on hulu/Netflix/etc, do you then buy it on DVD?
I think it's exactly this. They know they can't stop DIY hackers from pirating, but they can stop the next Napster.
The alternative is that there is no way to protect IP on the web, which means that there is no incentive to transmit IP over the web which takes a shitload of value off the table.
These anti-DRM arguments smack of blind ideology.
Should the W3C, in turn, care about keeping Netflix happy? That seems like the relevant question to me.
The frustrating part is that my choice to be a law-abiding media consumer subscribing to a bunch of services makes me get a worse service in many ways than a pirate. I can’t use a player of my choice, i can’t have a single UI on top of all media, I can’t rely on content remaining available. Pirates don’t have these problems. The DRM legislation and media conglomerates power ensures that the market can’t fix itself. You can’t make a netflix competitor without DRM because you’ll never get access to licenses for popular culture products. Even had the W3C refused to deal, the situation wouldn’t be meaningfully better.
Which is why Netflix has around 200 native clients for all known hardware and platforms where DRM is implemented outside the web.
Why people think it’s reasonable to have apps for everything, but somehow Netflix is special and must run in a browser built on an open stack...
Now that is something I cannot fathom.
Install a goddamn app. Leave the web pure. Leave the web alone :(
That's not say that's a great argument, but the problem with making EME a battleground is that there is zero leverage over the content companies that insist on DRM, zero. Studios have the content people want to watch, if they can't watch it on the web they'll use proprietary apps. Technologists like to believe we shape the future, but browsers do not shape the content industry, rightsholders do. From their perspective, refusal to implement EME is damage they will route around, and they have the leverage to do it. Also note the inefficacy of DRM in general.
The place to win this battle is in congress. We need to move towards strengthening fair use and outlawing DRM, that's the only way to take the teeth out. The idea that the browser is an important battlefront is nonsense, EME is a sensible compromise that keeps the browser relevant. I respect the Stallman-esque view that the web should in no way be compromised but it's not a winning move in the long-term.
I don't lock my doors and windows because I think it makes it impossible to break into my house. I know full well how easy it is to get in anyway, just by breaking a window. I lock my doors and windows because I expect it to create just enough of an inconvenience to mostly deter others from breaking into my house.
Let me re-iterate the emphasis on the word 'mostly'. I'm not trying to make the perfect the enemy of the good here. It's the same for media companies. They're not looking for something that will prevent everyone from pirating movies. They're looking for something that will make pirating movies just inconvenient enough that most people choose to pay for content instead.
The EFF really needs to come up with a less specious argument if it wants to see much success in convincing anyone who doesn't already agree with them in the first place.
And just to play devil's advocate for a moment, while I tend to agree about your straw man point, is it completely a straw man argument if some of the CEO's at the large corps pushing DRM actually do believe they can make copying data impossible? I mean, just because we know this is a pipe dream, and many very smart people may argue convincingly against it with hard evidence, does not mean everyone will actually believe it.
It's like arguing that all citizens should wear shackles because it will keep prison inmates from escaping. It doesn't work that way and the people insisting it does have ulterior motives.
It does not need to be perfect to achieve that.
Many people will never go looking for tools to break the DRM or DRM-free copies from torrent sites and the like.
But if anyone could just copy what they see on e.g. Netflix with the click of a button, then many more probably would.
To take a few examples, remember when the European Commission hired researches to do a study on the effect of piracy? What about the revenue from itunes after it went DRM free? Sale of music that is available on youtube after it went HTML5? Revenue from music, film, and games on the longer term after aggressive blocking of torrent sites? What about the long term effect from anti-piracy/DRM laws?
The whole EFF article ends on the conclusion that DRM will not exist if their only purpose is to prevents enough users from copying the product. That effect won't be worthwhile enough to pay the cost of DRM. Only a sticky platform that prevent competition will bring the revenue to validate investing into DRM.
What I don't understand is that it's not how it works, all it takes is for one single user to make a copy and upload it on newsgroups/bittorrent/... and it's available for everybody.
That means that in order for DRM to work you need a 100% success rate at preventing unprotected copies. This seems absolutely implausible.
Since I'm unhappy with the selection and compatibility of the current streaming services offering I keep pirating all the TV shows and movies I watch and they're always available for download mere hours after their official/legal counterparts. It's not like videogames where intricate anti-piracy measures can take weeks or even sometimes months to break, here it's mostly about the time for the pirated copy to disseminate on the network.
I wonder by which metric video DRM can be said to work. It's a pain for legit users because they can't view their movies and shows on all of their devices easily and it's a complete non-issue for pirates.
People go to Netflix because you pay once and then you can just watch stuff.
So they don't really need any sort of protection to stop piracy. They need it to corner and control the legal market.
Controlling illegitimate users is impossible. Therefore the purpose of DRM is control over legitimate users to the point where they can harm legitimate competitors.
It surely does not. DRM is broken (by any skilled pirate), and the rest of pirating users can get it without said DRM after that. So let's make it clear. Usage of DRM has nothing to do with piracy.
Whether or not DRM exists for those other 99.99% of the people is completely irrelevant. The show is already on torrents put there by those who could bypass the technical protection of DRM. So now those 99.99% of users can watch it for free, too, without having to know how to bypass DRM themselves.
That's a very big point that's not emphasized enough in the article, IMHO.
If security researchers are (legally) prohibited from investigating EME technologies in browsers, then EME extensions become a big vector attack, and standards-compliant browsers that include them, become much less secure than browsers that don't.
As a user, I care about that a lot more than I care about Netflix' competitors. Netflix is not only unjustly protecting itself from future competition, it is directly threatening my own safety.
Personally I think we should make it illegal to look for vulnerabilities in all software. And while we're at it, just on the off chance that somebody does come across a vulnerability (inadvertently, of course), why don't we simply make it illegal to exploit the vulnerability?
That is wrong (from the EME standard[0], section 10):
> User Agent and Key System implementations MUST consider media data, Initialization Data, data passed to update(), licenses, key data, and all other data provided by the application as untrusted content and potential attack vectors. They MUST use appropriate safeguards to mitigate any associated threats and take care to safely parse, decrypt, etc. such data. User Agents SHOULD validate data before passing it to the CDM.
That is, a browser has to be secure to implement the EME standard, if it is not secure it is not in compliance with EME! (Next up, anybody who falls from a building is in violation of the W3C gravity standard and as such flying is possible.)
I trust I don't have to point out that I am joking.
If the US law changes, then the w3c standard still stands, I don't think anyone involved in W3C thinks preventing security researchers doing their job is a sensible thing.
EFF are picking a fight with the wrong people, and producing propaganda to support that fight, making themselves less credible to those who actually understand the details.
I know 'Fake News' is a popular thing in the US, but I don't think its a sensible tactic in the tech community.
Any site depending on EME will not see traffic from me.
Guess saying “I told you so?” won’t do much at this point.
Just like the DRM battle was lost, I get the feeling the net neutrality battle is a losing battle. Even if it's not this year, eventually, the deep pockets will win -- From what I've seen basic computer literacy (I don't mean using a smart phone) isn't even being taught consistently -- trying to get the majority of the general populace (which isn't even enough to win politically, but I'll ignore that) to understand why repairability and open source matter, nevermind net neutrality seems like an exercise in futility.
While that happens, the tech companies benefitting the most from open source software and the openness that the web introduced are doing their best to split it up amongst themselves.
I've given up on this iteration of the internet, instead of ranting what I should probably do is go try and contribute to whatever is next, whether that's mesh networks or ipfs.
It baffles me that anyone thinks he's insane at this point. For every point he's ever made, you can now easily find 10 real world examples of his fears coming true over the past few decades.
But perhaps this is just more reasoning why the battle is a losing one -- people like me are just going to think things are gray while the people who are right are trying to convince us of the fact that it's black and white. It's just too hard for people individually to see past their own blindspots.
Stallman has often been correct, but that's not to say he isn't also sometimes utterly bonkers as well but on different issues (or to an insane extreme on some others).
I don't know that I blame Netflix as much as I blame the W3C for being spineless/bending to their will. It's absolutely Netflix's perogative to seek the most money, and to try to force their users into apps if that's how they can do so, but the W3C should have been different/stopped it. From my understanding that's the point of a standards body like that (and like the article states, it's in purported reason they were founded at all).
In the end, I'm not as dissapointed with the W3C because the world just isn't that cut and dry most of the time (and browsers still at least give you the option to turn EME off), but
That is equally lame as what Ajit pai said recently wrt to NN: "wouldn’t you want your surgeon to be able to buy access to an express lane in which a network was allowed to grant privilege to certain data over others? That is, AT&T should be allowed to provide a service in which data bytes flowing between an operating room and a surgeon take precedence over bytes of 100 dudes Googling to find out whether Jennifer Lawrence is married."
A bit OT, but can't that already happen? I thought companies could set up private networks between various locations, and set up prioritized traffic on those already, with corresponding SLA if desired.
So the surgeon/operating room can pay more money for a faster link. Just like there are different tiers of internet already with different speeds. I don't see how NN affects this.
However, I have kept all of my ripped/bought/downloaded music as well, and I have a very clear exit plan for how to keep "my" Spotify library in case the company goes belly-up or decides to cripple its offerings somehow. It will take me a couple of weeks to recreate the library locally, but I'm OK with that.
For now, I'll enjoy the recommendations and easy access to music that is new and exciting to me.
- Third party clients are a thing, to the point where I really feel like I'm being sold a streaming service and not a tiny window through which I can occasionally listen to music. My normal media player is a python script that talks to an API. This is amazingly useful.
- When using Spotify-provided apps, there's the ability to save things for later offline listening. I haven't yet hit a limit on how many things I've been able to save.
- There's no limit on the number of devices I can use with the service, although I can only stream concurrently on one -- multiple offline devices have worked great though
- There isn't a time limit that certain content is available (this is much easier to feasibly achieve with audio compared to high-definition video, and a major difference between Spotify and services like Netflix).
This is sufficient usability, freedom, and value for money for me to subscribe with the knowledge that what I'm paying for is access to a library that Spotify has created and maintained. I used to rip/buy music on a regular basis and no longer really feel the need to do so. I think it's probably useful to consider what the differences are between services and specifically what makes them anti-consumer.
No wonder it is impossible to find dvd & vhs recorder combination units. Hard to find a dvd recorder too.
You never fully owned that CD, you owned the physical object, but not the content, you only had permission to play it under certain conditions.
Perhaps someone should come up with a small <5-line snippet that explains some portion of how to defeat Widevine, and then everyone in Israel should, I don't know, configure every mail server they know of to autoinject the fragment into all outgoing mail, or something. And/or configure everyone's browsers to autoinject it into every modified multiline text input field (maybe).
Obviously it wouldn't be able to last. But it would be VERY good publicity. And the thing is, Widevine would constantly be being updated so the instructions would constantly break and need to be changed, so exact-string filtering wouldn't work ;)
So. I'll start, despite not living in Israel: both Chromium and Firefox will use PulseAudio if it's available, and fake soundcard drivers exist for Windows/macOS as well, so sound isn't really problem if you're prepared for an "export" process that takes as long as eg SpotAHEM tracks take to play.
It's always about control of something, whether it be the consumer, distribution channels, etc.
I also found https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/124762/how-does... asking how they work, which corroborates that they really do have the key inside. Shakes head Nice...
Kinda depressing to know there actually are competent implementations out there.
With that system, what would stop someone from selling software that can be used to infringe copyright. As long as they don't do so themselves or "incite" anyone else to do so (perhaps promoting a legitimate use like pre-buffering), could they be sued?
(Secondarily, the companies that advocated for DRM never questioned how someone operating under the non-aggression pact would be able to break the DRM; they tacitly acknowledged that this would be trivial -- so whether or not you're worried about secondary infringers like the ones you describe, they would exist, because things that are technologically trivial are impossible to stop, even if they're illegal -- all that EME would do is give these companies the power to stop people who WEREN'T using such tools for infringement and thus wanted to operate in the open; it would have no effect on people who WERE infringing and operating anonymously and in the shadows)
aka “software”
...there was this recent attempt at adding DRM to a (not-quite) juicer, which --- fortunately --- didn't become successful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14148216
That fiasco was the perfect moment to inform the public about why you should be able to make any coffee you want in the brand new coffee maker you just purchased, how the actual system itself doesn't stop you anyway, and how DRM is just a tool for powerful companies to continue to consolidate their power
Demand the end of lobbying in order to restore democracy instead of living under the defacto rule of bog-corps (and their owners).
Recently I've started to think that democracy is never the steady state of any government, it's just a stepping stone to democratic republics and then to oligarchy.
I mean just think about it. who's in the best position to influence the will of a large amount of people? people with the most resources. That's (probably) never going to change -- technological advances are the only things that seem to truly shake things up (as well as revolutions I guess), and even that has been successfully controlled/regulated.
The only thing I can see as the future for the internet is mesh networks and a separation of the federated internet and a decentralized one.
Democracies need to be running at a small scale. Check out the swiss:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSLs5G4SPP4&t=64s
Of read up on "democratic confederalism" (now used in the north of Syria):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqfoJvD0Ifg
> I mean just think about it. who's in the best position to influence the will of a large amount of people?
With lobbying you do not even have to go by the people, you simply pay-to-play in politics. That's just legalized corruption, thus anti-democratic.
> Recently I've started to think that democracy is never the steady state of any government, it's just a stepping stone to democratic republics and then to oligarchy.
That's an obvious progression if the democracy is highly centralized and lobbyable (or otherwise corrupt).
> technological advances are the only things that seem to truly shake things up
Currently tech it largely "bought", and thus used in the advantage of the capital-heavy. Nature and labor are totally subservient to capital in the current system. A well functioning democracy can turn that around, but they seems to be increasingly less functioning.
Sounds a bit dystopian perhaps but hey, maybe we deserve it.
Let me focus on a specific example that bothered me: "It is obviously not a copyright infringement to go into a store in (say) New Delhi and buy a DVD and bring it home to (say) Topeka. The rightsholder made their movie, sold it to the retailer, and you paid the retailer the asking price. This is the opposite of copyright infringement."
A fine example, but why the rhetorical insistence on "obviously"? The author is an expert in this area, and almost certainly knows more about the details of US copyright law than I do. But this means he also knows that the legal situation is not nearly as clear cut as the word "obviously" would suggest.
First, he knows that the US Supreme Court had a recent 6-3 decision regarding this: https://www.wired.com/2013/03/scotus-first-sale-decision/. Yes, it was decided in the direction he and I both favor, but I refuse to accept that the subject of a recent split decision in the Supreme Court can fairly be defined as "obvious".
Secondly, the author also knows that the legality of the importation of copyrighted material depends on who is doing the importing, the number of copies imported, and the purpose of the importing: https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap6.html. So while the current law does allow an individual to legally bring back a single copy of a work for personal use, it does not currently allow them to bring back an extra copy to give as a gift. Why not? Because this very similar action is still considered to infringe on the copyright holder's exclusive right of distribution.
It would be fine to say that it "should be obvious" to import copyrighted items, or that "one would hope it would be obvious", but it's lying to claim that it is simply "obvious". This strikes me as a clear indication that the author is willing to mislead his readers when he feels it furthers his goals. This makes me distrust his characterization of all the behind the scenes decisions that I can't verify.
What's the thought process behind this? Am I misinterpreting?
I mean, okay, there's bizarro legal arguments, but their use of "obviously" is as simple as saying "it doesn't need to be stated that lending a physical book to a friend does not involve copying the book".
The fact that first-sale stuff and the DMCA itself and all sorts of weird legal issues (e.g. about plagiarism) are tied into copyright law doesn't mean that this stuff is sensible. The "obvious" part is that the core concept of copyright has, in a logical intellectual (not necessarily legal) fashion NOTHING to do with playing the same disc on two different continents. It's a fine enough use of "obviously", and they don't mean it from a legal standpoint. If you were an editor of the article, you could probably have convinced them to change the sentence to say "…obviously not a copying issue…" instead of "copyright infringement" or some other nuanced edit. This is nothing more than being super picky about the exact wording in one sentence.
> I refuse to accept that the subject of a recent split decision in the Supreme Court can fairly be defined as "obvious"
While that may be a fine enough guideline, there certainly can be judges, even on the SCOTUS, who argue against what is "obvious". But again, the sentence you object to wasn't a legal brief, it was just an attempt to express the OBVIOUS lunacy in the DVD example having anything to do with copying / copyright.
Reductio ad absurdem: if a law is passed saying that it shall be considered "homicide" if a fiction author describes a murder in a book, it would still be perfectly sensible to say, "that is obviously not homicide".
Point is: the law can be "obviously" wrong. The only weird part of their sentence is that "copyright infringement" is a legal wording, and they were using it to refer to the concept rather than the legal interpretation.
You make good points, and I appreciate your response, but I think the issue goes deeper than the wording. If your reading is true, then I'm bothered by the complacency of the author in allowing the reader to conflate the legal and the logical. If this were an editing oversight, it's forgivable; but as a rhetorical strategy I find it deplorable.
While that may be a fine enough guideline, there certainly can be judges, even on the SCOTUS, who argue against what is "obvious".
Sure, but given the manner in which Supreme Court cases are chosen, it's exceedingly unlikely that a case would make it to the level of the Supreme Court unless there is something non-obvious (or at least disputed) about the matter.
Reductio ad absurdem: if a law is passed saying that it shall be considered "homicide" if a fiction author describes a murder in a book, it would still be perfectly sensible to say, "that is obviously not homicide".
And if a law is passed that says a drawing depicting a tentacled monster having sex with a cartoon child is legally classified as "child pornography" is it also reasonable to say that a cartoon is "obviously not a child" (http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/335)? Possibly, but it would be disingenuous for an expert on that topic to do so in an article discussing that exact legal debate in a manner that is likely to mislead the reader.
The only weird part of their sentence is that "copyright infringement" is a legal wording, and they were using it to refer to the concept rather than the legal interpretation.
I think it's a conscious strategy rather than a weird detail. The fashionable term for this sort of approach is "motte-and-bailey" (https://philpapers.org/archive/SHATVO-2.pdf), and involves intentionally conflating two concepts, one which is easily defensible and one which is not. The base question for me is whether or not the author is consciously using a rhetorical strategy that involves misleading the reader, not with whether some degree of simplification is always necessary. It makes me doubt the strength of an otherwise reasonable argument when an author intentionally adopts such a strategy, and I think Doctorow is a good enough author that I start with the assumption that the rhetorical effect is intentional.
This is very much my view also.
I don't lament this, really. It's my choice. I'm just wondering if it's an observation that can only be made when you're not scrambling to watch the latest season of Game of Thrones (which I have never seen).
My life is fine.
Oh, and if I do back up 10 seconds, can you explain to me why you apparently just dumped your entire buffer and have to reload it from scratch before you're willing to play anything? Did the movie change because I backed up ten seconds? No. Sheesh.
There are EME-free editions of Firefox available however.
I believe there's also a way to disable it in firefox at runtime, so no need to install a completely seperate version.
They're the equivalent of the video rental shops from the 80s/90s - we weren't allowed to rent a movie and copy it to watch after the return.
Sure, I'd love to be able to watch Netflix on a RPi or while I'm away - so if there was a way to do this, while stopping me from watching it when my subscription ends, that would be great.
I don't actually know the law, but I assume the EFF does.
Also, I wish humans were able to resist the urge to downvote things they don't agree with. This comment contributes to the conversation and was not made in bad faith.
I do not mind paying for music. Making music is hard work. There are many gifted musicians I would rather pay for their efforts if that means I get to enjoy more of their music.
I do mind jumping through all kinds of insane hoops that effectively punish me for playing fair while the kid next door gets his music illegally from the Pirate Bay and has no trouble putting it on any device he or she chooses.
I really wish film studios understood this simple fact: If buying movies was as easy and painless as buying music from, say, Amazon, I would be happy to do so. Making movies, too, is hard work, and compared to making music, it is fairly expensive, too. I have no problem with paying for a movie.
But having to watch a trailer that tells me I cannot make copies of a movie or watch it on a DVD player from another continent, being unable to watch a movie with its original audio track without subtitles, while the kid next door gets his (illegal) copy online, a copy that does not force him to watch a trailer that basically insults him for being stupid enough to pay for a legitimate copy, where he can choose to watch or not to watch the movie with subtitles, in any language he or she likes -- THAT annoys me to no end.
It's not even that movie studios (ab)use the law to cling to a moribound business model - it's that they lack the creativity (ironic, given that their whole business is about creativity) to imagine it could work any other way, and that they effectively distrust their customers.
Maybe I am just a naive dreamer, but I think if the movie studios trusted their customers enough to let them actually use the movies / series / ... they actually ____ing paid for in the ways they see fit, the problem DRM is - at least officially - supposed to solve, would at least shrink so much it would become negligible in practice.
Okay, just in case I lost you there, let me repeat my key point: Buying music legally, from Amazon or one of many other companies, is so convenient it actually trumps downloading music illegally. Paying money turns out to be the least problem in the whole process. If buying movies legally was as hassle-free, I would happily go on a shopping spree of epic proportions. You don't even need to look at the ethical dimension of the whole issue. Just do the ____ing math.
(Yeah, okay, sorry for ranting. If you are still reading this, you are probably the last person that needs convincing anyway.)
We no longer need gatekeepers for digital media, that is clear. What we need is a way to support the artists creating that media. But we've set up our economic system to put money into the hands of companies under the guise of giving it to the artists. Sure, artists typically get a small fraction of that, but they should be getting the whole thing.
Our economic models are seriously awful.
What it sounds like 'we' could do, is work to create websites using Service Workers [0] so that the importance of native apps becomes irrelevant [1].
I think using apps seems a backwards step to the days of having to write cross platform software. So it's better if there is just the one delivery mechanism that Apple and Google don't have total control over.
> Since the earliest days of computing, there's been a simmering debate about whether computers exist to control their users, or vice versa (as the visionary computer scientist and education specialist Seymour Papert put it, "children should be programming the computer rather than being programmed by it" -- that applies equally well to adults.
> EFF is suing the US government to overturn Section 1201 of the DMCA.
Yep. It's likely simply unconstitutional. And undemocratic way this law was passed[1] stinks, but repealing it is pretty hard.
1. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/ustr-secret-copyright-...
In the 1980s the civilised world turned its back on the apartheid regime of South Africa, and in time South Africa ended apartheid. This didn't come at an insignificant cost (South Africa was at the time a well-developed economy which other nations would have liked to have traded with), but it was morally worthwhile.
Clausewitz noted that war is diplomacy carried on by other means. It seems to me that this article is EFF's declaration of independence, and the next logical step is to declare war on the W3C and its members. They are breaking the web; they are destroying the security of the web's users; we need to stop enabling this behaviour.
It is a similar problem like Intel ME and closed bios.
We use usecure proprietary code, closed unreparable one-purpose 'kiosk' devices yet we can still record video output or make a screen (camera?) recording. What are they thinking? This is all just to give them advantage over users, to more control and restrict them. Terrible.
Perhaps even prevent you from copying any part of them or download anything from them?
Maybe Web Assembly will also play a role (perhaps as a DRM'd browser "wrapper" to view content through) - it would be like using a DRM'd browser "window" via Flash or something.
Where any browser can view the content, but it is impossible to get any of the content out (because no one saves bits of conversation from blogs or anything like that - and all websites will always exist).
Hmm - indeed, imagine if you couldn't copy twitter feeds or facebook posts (and they were DRM'd in such a manner that trying to do so would be a violation)...? All of sudden, people could erase posts and claim they never said it, because there isn't any copies of it around (today, they have to get lucky and hope nobody made a copy first).
So it was this kind of hyperbole that largely did EFF a disservice in my opinion. The W3C is composed of very experienced people who can see through straw man arguments and unsubstantiated facts.
The main argument from w3c was that they deal with technical specifications, not US laws.
It now seems that the EFF are starting to get this, and looking to tackle the actual issues.
The EFF acted poorly through out this thing scenario.
Now you can buy a Kodi Fire stick from Craigslist or Kodi AppleTV from eBay pre-configured with free access to all kinds of content.
I mean, it's not like anyone's fooling themselves that it won't be possible to disclose anonymously... or is it?