If you're worried about Net Neutrality, you should be worried about web DRM, too

[VenTatsu]

@redesigned

nope, nope, nope. the media industry doesn’t have any power over who can create CDMs.

Except in all the ways the article mentioned that legacy industries have tried in the past. A number of movie studios refused to sell movies to wholesalers that supplied Netflix and Redbox, attempting to starve them out of the industry. However the first sale doctrine defeated this in the end since they could end run the wholesalers by purchasing retail and supplying those to rental customers.

Digital goods are different, the law currently supplies no first sale rights, so a new streaming video start up can’t buy a copy of a new movie and rent it to a user, they can’t even buy a Netflix subscription for each and every user and stream the video from Netflix to their data center and then to the user.

@redesigned

Making it EME a standard opens it up for anyone to interact with it, create new CDMs etc. It levels the playing field for new CDM makers and new software that wants to consume CDMs.

Could I write my own CDM? I could, but it would never be used by anyone but me. There is no chance that Disney will ever allow a streaming service to use my CDM to protect their content. Distribution contracts already contain rules about only using certified secure systems to distribute content. This effectively allows the current media industry to serve as gatekeepers for new entrants into the field.

@redesigned

One can see that they intelligently refute all these false claims and the excellent work they are doing in this area, they should be applauded.

Except that the premise of that blog post is based on a fallacy.

Principled arguments for content protection begin by pointing out that the Web should be capable of hosting all kinds of content and that it must be possible to compensate creative work. Without content protection, owners of premium video content – driven by both their economic goals and their responsibilities to others – will simply deprive the Open Web of key content

Study after study has shown that if you want to increase sales of digital goods then offer more legal ways to acquire those goods. DRM has always been a limiting technology, not an enabling technology. Removing DRM in iTunes boosted sales instead of harming them, it also reduced the cost to Apple to distribute those songs.

@redesigned

EME has existed in all the major browsers for years already, it just wasn’t officially standardized. Standardizing EME doesn’t change how the browsers were already doing it, in otherwords it has no real world impact, all the browsers already had EME years before standardization was even being discussed.

I’ll grant you that it’s too late to do anything about EME, but let me turn that statement on it’s head. What does making it a standard accomplish? I don’t see a world where there is an open source CDM that any developer could fork on GitHub and set up a new streaming site with some cool new feature enabled by their changes to the CDM and get a license to the latest Hollywood blockbusters. Making EME a W3C standard does nothing meaningful to open up CDMs to the masses. It could have stayed a defacto standard championed by Google, Microsoft, and Adobe with no change to the ability to build a CDM that no one will use. All the W3C standard does is it makes it ‘acceptable’ to the open web instead of ‘tolerated’ in the open web.