Truly Stupid Ideas: Adding DRM To HTML5

from the it-burns dept

You would have thought by now that people would understand that DRM is not only a bad idea, but totally unnecessary: Apple dropped DRM from music downloads in 2009 and seems to be making ends meet. Despite these obvious truths, the stupidity that is DRM continues to spread. Here, for example, is a particularly stupid example of DRM stupidity, as revealed by Manu Sporny: A few days ago, a new proposal was put forward in the HTML Working Group (HTML WG) by Microsoft, Netflix, and Google to take DRM in HTML5 to the next stage of standardization at W3C. After all, this is exactly what Web users have been crying out for: "just give us DRM for the Web, and our lives will be complete...."

Sporny runs through some technical reasons why this is doomed to failure -- little things like sending decryption keys in the clear -- and points out the awful re-balkanization of the Web that it would cause: The EME [Encrypted Media Extensions] specification does not specify a DRM scheme in the specification, rather it explains the architecture for a DRM plug-in mechanism. This will lead to plug-in proliferation on the Web. Plugins are something that are detrimental to inter-operability because it is inevitable that the DRM plugin vendors will not be able to support all platforms at all times. So, some people will be able to view content, others will not. He also notes a fundamental problem with the following Use Case for the proposed technology: What use cases does this support?



Everything from user-generated content to be shared with family (user is not an adversary) to online radio to feature-length movies. That clearly implies that when people are not sharing their own content with family and friends, then they are indeed adversaries: This "user is not an adversary" text can be found in the first question about use cases. It insinuates that people that listen to radio and watch movies online are potential adversaries. As a business owner, I think that’s a terrible way to frame your customers.



Thinking of the people that are using the technology that you’re specifying as "adversaries" is also largely wrong. 99.999% of people using DRM-based systems to view content are doing it legally. The folks that are pirating content are not sitting down and viewing the DRM stream, they have acquired a non-DRM stream from somewhere else, like Mega or The Pirate Bay, and are watching that. This is the fundamental reason why DRM is doomed and should be discarded: the only people it annoys are the ones who have tried to support creators by acquiring legal copies. How stupid is that?

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Filed Under: drm, html5