I wasn’t really thinking of me the individual, but me the software developer at an S&P 500 company where I do development and developer support for various internal and external web properties. Could we build a CDM and market it to Netflix?
I’m not sure this is a reasonable scenario. If we look at the pattern of the past decade or so we see far more startups that build a business by identifying and licensing content under valued by its owner and delivering it to those that do value it. That then bootstraps them into being able to bank roll their own content creation.
And for most small startups creating content DRM provides a negative value. Their threat is not piracy (a debatable threat for any content creator), but obscurity. Can they even get enough people to view their content? If they can how can they turn those viewers into revenue? Throwing your own CDM into this has to be one of the most colossal speed bumps imaginable to achieving that conversion.
Your telling us your offering all the drowning small content creators a free glass of water.
I didn’t say “misinformation” that implies some an attempt at deception, which I didn’t intend to imply. I did say “fallacy” as in a logical mistake. I’m also not addressing the technical aspects in my criticism of the blog post, nor was I trying to imply it was in any way not the official or authoritative position of the W3C. You try to counter every point I didn’t try to make, but you didn’t rebut any of the points I did try to make.
I feel like this argument is from a South Park episode.
EME supporters:
- Easier (or more open) DRM on the Web
- ???
- More creator profits!
Except as I said and you seem to have ignored, DRM does not improve profits. You can look at any BitTorrent site to see DRM does not stop piracy. And time and time again removing DRM has boosted sales.
What DRM does do is it consolidates control. DRM has been used to create vendor lock in. DRM has been used to retroactively revoke access to purchased content (and some times physical goods).
That seems a bit revisionist history to me, I recall back in the old days almost every browser adopted the Netscape Plugin API. The most popular DRM method prior to EME/CDM was a NPAPI plugin. Yes NPAPI is now dead, but to make the claim that it didn’t work that way before is dishonest.
If EME was instead a generic media plugin interface, or discover system for them I don’t know that i would have any issues with it, even if it was clear that DRM would likely be the major use. But EME near as I can tell serves only to connect the browser to a non-NPAPI method to do DRM.
It’s funny that about a year ago the EME proponents I interacted with were trying to tell everyone that EME was not DRM, it was totally technology agnostic, and could totally be used for things other than DRM, just no one has though of them yet. But now I rarely see that argument made.
Allowed or tolerated? I’ll admit to not knowing ever standard, RFC from the W3C or IETF, but I can’t recall any off the top of my head that were specifically designed to deliver content to an end user with the explicit expectation that they would be prevented from using that content in any legal manner they chose.
And don’t try to tell me that DRM serves any purpose other than to limit the ways a end user can use content without regard to that users legal rights to use that content. It may be primarily intended to prevent illegal uses, but I have yet to hear of a DRM scheme that doesn’t also sacrifice legal uses to accomplish that.
Do you have any links? I’d genuinely like to take a look.
So wait, could I make a CDM that consumes the content from the Widevide CDM to say save the full quality stream to disk for off line viewing?
Thank you for putting words in my mouth, that was one argument from a group of related arguments about the futility of saying “Anyone can make a CDM!”, it fails to address the real issue of what DRM represents, vendor locking, and restricting rights of users. More DRM does not make DRM less bad. Being allowed to make my own DRM does not remove the negative impacts of DRM, either on the theoretical ‘me’ that wants to start a company in internet media sector, or the real me that consumes media on the internet. I’m not saying that “individual should be able to access any big media companies content DRM free and use their own CDMs to add DRM to it and distribute it” I’m saying that providing a token reduction in the bar to create new DRM does not in fact fix any of the myriad thing wrong with DRM.
Since I’m obviously ignorant, how does one get a CDM installed on a client system? Is there a portable way that works across all major browsers and operating systems? Does it work on mostly closed platforms like iOS?
How does EME/CDMs change from when we had NPAPI pluggins doing DRM? Any one could write one and ask users to download it to get access to their site. This was once stupidly common in the period between the fall of RealPlayer and the rise of Flash video (and somewhat during both of those times).
Or you support what was the defacto standard for DRM prior to the creation of EME and support Flash through NPAPI (God it feels like I’m harping on this point, but you keep trotting out that this is somehow unique and never done before in the browser space). Flash sucks, and NPAPI sucks, but at least the system wasn’t designed specifically for one purpose that many of us feel is an evil. It may be a necessary evil, but it is evil to us.
Citation needed. From my reading of the standard there is nothing that would automatically make a random developers CDM active in my browser without either my direct interaction (installation) or the intentional inclusion of it in my browser or OS by the browser or OS vendor. I read quite the opposite that Browser vendors need to vet the CDM modules they enable.
