I have problems with some of the anti copyright arguments. I get paid for articles I write. If a website ganks one of my articles and posts it without paying me, I get pissed off. They’re getting value from my talents and I’m getting jack shit.
If I write a useful bit of code that gets popular, runs on a website, and is making me money, shouldn’t I be able to protect it from being stolen and white labelled by some other company, or 90 other companies?
I know Mr. D advocates giving away content but I can’t afford to. If someone posts my articles or my book for free, then I’m losing money. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find money very useful in keeping myself alive and fed and regularly abluted. I think website designers probably feel the same way.
The ability to keep your content exclusive and control it allows you to profit by your talents as a coder (or writer, or filmmaker). Yeah, Hollywood wants to control who sees their movies and who downloads their videos. No shit. That’s how they make their nut. If a girl spends hours and hours creating an innovative website design, why shouldn’t she be able to protect her efforts from people who just want to download her code and put their name on it?
The fact that your desire to ‘protect’ your material requires(and, with DRM, this is an architectural hard limit, not an implementation problem) that your desires be burned into the software, firmware, and/or hardware of everyone’s computers.
Would I support you suing the ass off a website that ganks your article? Sure. Am I willing to place the root of control of every turing-complete device in my possession in the benevolent hands of one of the DRM consortia to protect your article? No. Way. In. Hell.
That’s the thing, ‘DRM’(when not pitifully useless and purely cosmetic, in which case it doesn’t protect anybody and just generates tech support calls) is serious business. Fundamental shift from ‘default allow’ to ‘default deny’, movement of root of control from the device/software owner to some other entity, mechanisms for enforcement and ‘traitor tracing’ that would be equally amenable to surveillance and censorship as to dealing with pirate kiddies, the abolition of ‘open’ hardware and software (since that would allow the DRM to be stripped). In fact, a competent ‘trusted computing’/DRM implementation would be the biggest change in computing since, well, I’m not even sure when. It’d be huge.
I’m very sympathetic to the people whose work is being ripped off; but there are limits to how far I’m willing to go, and actually-effective DRM is far more radical than it is given credit for.
You can swap those three companies around in any order and your statement would still be true. Apparently religion isn’t just about mythical figures hanging out in the clouds anymore.
the thing that really stings i tim berners lee, that he would sign off on that is a betrayal that really stings. my trust in the w3c and my high respect for tim berners lee has been greatly undermined by this.
As others have mentioned, why should Netflix et al have any say in what is a part of the standard? The linked article mentions the similarity between what they’re requesting and Flash and Silverlight. Why don’t these providers just keep publishing these kinds of plugins in order to access their content in a controlled environment? I mean, obviously, I see why THEY don’t want to, but why would the W3C basically remove the necessity for them to build plugins by making these much-maligned and crap micro-environments standard? It also seems to allow them to publish without taking on the stink of the browser plugin. All that really seems to be accomplished is a cultural legitimization of plugins by making them feel like part of the maintream, rather than overtly walled gardens. Poo.
Your ‘soon’ might be thirty years; after all you admit to being surprised by how long it took them to coopting this.
Anyway, I don’t see how they enforce their standards. There are open source browsers. People will use them. You can try to set up your server so that it refuses contact with non-standards-compliant browsers, but if you do it by simply requesting browser version you get trivially spoofed. You can try to get fancy and request some sort of handshake or hash from the new DRM-enforcing browsers, but now you’re not backwards compatible - good luck getting eyeball share.
In the long run, there is also Freenet.
W3C as a standard body is fundamentally broken, hold captive by the likes of Microsoft, IBM and other Big-Co players. Which is why WHATWG was established: real browser-makers were tired of playing political games they couldn’t win, so they just moved on.
In this context, the fact that the W3C CEO is a corporatist pro-DRM guy, is not surprising. In fact, it’s surprising that people still think the W3C has “the good of the web” at heart, because that’s not been the case for quite some time now.
Dude, you must really hate Xerox then. And those darn cameras, taking all them copies! (“pictures”, as they call them).
Guess what? if you find your content being plagiarised, you’re free to sue, today! I know, it’s so easy it’s almost crazy, right? It’s like one didn’t even need to go around locking down every machine on the internet that doesn’t even belong to her so that users could “enjoy” her original content.
Yep, and that’s enforced through law of the land, not through browser plugins.
If a girl spends hours and hours creating an innovative website design, why shouldn’t she be able to protect her efforts from people who just want to download her code and put their name on it?
Maybe because the girl (or whoever taught the girl) learnt how to do that through view-source, copy&paste and so on… like every single web developer out there, bar none.
Xerox? Really? Listen thanks for the heads up on how to handle plagiarized content. Awesome lesson. Bu suing someone is not free. Even if I win and they pay for everything, it’s months after the fact and I’ll lose money in the long run, possibly a lot of money.
How much better if I can control how someone downloads my content by adding some kind of oh-no-you-don’t code to my post? The law of the land is very helpful after the fact but enforcing that law would be quite a burden for artists and developers.
One option they could use is a new error code. They could require that you have a compatible browser that follows a new standard stewarded by various SSL Cert companies. The code would be a challenge / response that constantly rotates while viewing the website so you can’t copy the currently in-use key.
I guess I don’t understand the costs of DRM. I mean, is it actual production costs? Is it lost revenue? I’m lost here. Probably because I’m a content creator and not a coder. I can barely cobble together a simple HTML page. . .
For a while the only WG to see real activity was WHATWG, so yeah, it felt a lot like moving on. Then the W3C charm offensive brought them back, which means there are two WGs now doing basically the same thing in different political ways, just because W3C didn’t have the spherical male attributes to eject dead weight (Microsoft and friends) from HTML WG.
Yeah, I was really talking about the CDM part, which does the real work. EDIT: sorry, Chrome also includes a CDM which only Netflix uses, apparently. Not being a big media consumer, I’m not incredibly up to date with all this shit, tbh.
