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I still remember the controversy surrounding EME, a LOT of people came out against it (including the EFF[0]); despite that, they still triumphed on[1].

[0]: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-makes-formal-objectio... [1]: https://github.com/w3c/encrypted-media




And thank god for that, otherwise we'd still need to support flash to use most popular websites.


EME is for DRM'ing media. I don't see how that pertains to Flash.

WebAssembly exists as a replacement now, too.


Back in the days before the <video> tag, Web sites were using Flash to play video. Flash was also the main way to play DRMed video before EME.


If browsers didn't natively support DRM then they would have to come up with external extensions (such as Flash) to support DRM.

DRM isn't going away.


DRM should be inconvenient and expensive. There have always been ways to implement DRM security theater for the comfort of content providers in board rooms.

The media ecosystem is not going to be enhanced by making DRM more restrictive. Netflix could completely deactivate all DRM today, and it would change nothing.

Apple completely abandoned their "FairPlay" iTunes music DRM because it became evident that it was not needed.


Every single Netflix show is available on the pirate bay, but Netflix still insists on using DRM.


Because Hollywood mandates that legal distribution have DRM.


Apple in no way abandoned FairPlay. Every file on Apple Music, and iTunes Match is protected with it. And those greatly outnumber transactional sales through the iTunes store, by an order of magnitude. The customer picked the DRMed version, every time.


Because everyone else pirated to great effect.


Good. DRM should be external to the browser, not integrated into it.

DRM is mostly security theater anyway. Until a few years ago, the Spotify client just left unencrypted mp3s cached locally. And they stopped DRMing music over a decade ago. People are willing to pay a reasonable price for first party content.

If a company insist on DRM, then they should be on their own.

If we make it too easy, then they will just use it everywhere.


Spotify will not load in a browser without a DRM plugin


Yes, but that is fairly recent! Did anyone even notice? For years, you could siphon every song you listened to and save it locally. But did it affect anything? I did it for a little while, but then found it wasn't worth the trouble.


It affected Spotify enough to engineer a solution to stop it.

And five years isn't "fairly recent".

One would also note Spotify is a failing business, and it was failing even harder then.


The majority of Spotify's lifetime there was NO DRM, and ripping it was easy.

The majority of users had no idea and it didn't affect them at all. Nor is there any evidence that it had any impact on Spotify's business.


Recent? I signed up 4 years ago and this has always been the case.




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