The BBC makes a lot of content available for free. (The licence fee is payable whether you watch BBC tv or not).
The BBC doesn't produce all the content they show.
Rights owners have considerable control over what happens to the content.
Thus, many BBC radio programmes are downloadable as MP3 and can be kept forever. An excellent programme In Our Time[1] has made their entire back catalogue available, but a programme that has music (Desert Island Discs, or any live concerts on BBC Radio 1) will have much more restricted download conditions.
iPlayer (hateful stupid ridiculous name) really is amazing. The BBC led OnDemand viewing in the UK. And what we've got now is very very much better than the RealAudio kludge we had years ago.
So, really, the target here should be stupid rights holders who don't understand the benefits to greater viewership.
They need to come up with some other way of paying people who create content. The BBC is (at least, I hope they are) collecting a lot of data about how often programmes get watched or downloaded over their various online services; so maybe payment could be linked to download amounts somehow.
Paying content creators in a better way would also help "archive" services like BBC Radio FourExtra, which suffers from heavy rolling repeats.
It's payable if you watch any TV "as it is broadcast" so that means watching via a cable/satellite/freeview or watching stuff that is being streamed on iplayer the same time as on TV.
Weirdly though you don't need one to watch iplayer "catch up" content which is usually available about an hour after the initial showing.
So if you watch a lot of iplayer catch up you don't have to pay, but if you consume no BBC content and just use your TV to watch Sky1 or whatever then you do have to pay.
> You need to be covered by a valid TV Licence if you watch or record TV as it's being broadcast. This includes the use of devices such as a computer, laptop, mobile phone or DVD/video recorder.
the bbc is not one person. While i am proud of many of the things that bbc has created, this is an instance of the wrong people using bbc to further their interests.
Commercial interests will be expected to have a say, but shouldn't be the ones to decide the future of the internet. However, money talks and i don't expect the internet to remain free unless we as stakeholders do something about it.
The most obvious solution would be to boycott all DRM encumbered content. That could certainly work at a HN level, but the money of the billions of other people who don't really understand what DRM is still speaks quite loudly.
You could educate and advocate a broader boycott, but in practise what you would be asking people to do would be to forgo the majority of mainstream pop culture. Basically a tragedy of the commons.
The only other solution would be to propose legislation that would make illegal or punish those who integrate DRM. The only political party in the UK who would be open to such an idea would be the pirate party who will never win a general election because there are very few people to whom copyright law is the #1 hotbutton political issue.
Breaking DRM doesn't seem to be effective in terms of stopping people trying to apply it. The issue is not so much the DRM itself but how invasive the software is.
For example the ultimate form of DRM is the iOS style where code must be explicitly white listed by some authority in order to execute. This is potentially bad for all kinds of reasons that are nothing to do with piracy.
The trusted platform model has its advantages and not everyone wants to root their phone. I've never understood the argument that the world would be freer if we banned iOS.
It's not that trusted platform models do not have their advantages (indeed they could be used to implement systems that are "freer") or that we need to ban iOS.
However any system that relies on absolute centralised trust is vulnerable in a variety of ways.
For example if you were to develop a system that allows for secure , encrypted communications between 2 parties such as GPG.
The platform vendor can enforce a policy that any such software must include a backdoor for their own use, that of law enforcement or for their advertising partners.
Whether such a policy is implemented now or not is not so much the issue, it is that such a policy could very easily be enforced in the future.
As long as open platforms are viable and available the issue is less urgent since people can opt to use these instead.
However when you have powerful companies with lobbying might such as the various content industries who have their own reasons for preferring such a model it becomes a little scary.
i can understand why people hate walled gardens. An open sw/hw system would have meant growth opportunities for more people and companies rather than just apple. We have a little bit more open system with android but with all the locked bootloaders on android devices we could do better.
I certainly know hippy type people who would care about stuff like this at an ideological level but are not technical enough to understand the specifics and would struggle to identify whether the video they are playing on their computer is DRM protected or not.
Attack articles will not change the views of those working in the BBC's policy department. If you/we believe there are societal/economic benefits to the open web, they must be argued persuasively and clearly.
Too many digital commentators and bloggers do not engage with these issues in any productive way.
Attack articles do not reform political procedures, substantive policy suggestions do.
The BBC quite obviously, and validly, worries that open use of its content will put it at a competitive disadvantage. They can foresee International producers withdrawing content from its platforms if its distribution channels are not duly protected. That does not seem like an unfair concern.
There might be space to argue that the BBC is being short-sighted. That is to say, that while we understand its concerns on this issue, the introduction of DRM will negatively affects its longer term success. That is to say, the success of the BBC has been prefaced on the wide distribution of its original content around the world. In fact, it wouldn't be too strong to say the BBC's reputation rests on the free, worldwide distribution of its news programming -- today this has been inherited by its news website.
We might press the concern that locking all of its content behind DRM technology will harm the wide distribution of its content, hurting awareness of its international brand.
We ask the BBC to consider the following example: fears of recording radio programming have existed since the early 20th Century. If the BBC, cracked down on its distribution in response to those issues in the 50s-, we believe the BBC wouldn't be the worldwide powerhouse it is now.
Locking up its content is not in the long term interests of the BBC brand, esp. as the developing world -- China, Brazil, Russia -- start looking online for reliable programming.
Therefore, we call on the BBC to initiate a review into the implications of its policy decision, and its effect on international brand awareness.
This isn't my argument, but at least it understands, appreciates, and responds to their economic concerns.
The guys who control BBC are not employes of policy or any other BBC department. The old boy networks in UK currently see the open Internet as extremely dangerous and will do almost anything to monitor/limit/regulate/restrict it.
This is exactly the sort of the thing the grandparent talks about. Your post has rhetoric but no substance. If you want to be persuasive, show your evidence and make an argument. A bunch of unsupported assertions just reads like a temper tantrum.
Well, I'd say any person with a bit of practical experience will understand that the way BBC (one of the most influential medias in the world) policies are set is not by hiring people and letting them work based on high morale criteria. I have myself worked for BBC, all the important decisions in the department I was with were run trough and ultimately dictated by some Lady, that was the boss of some media fairness committee. That committee was privately funded, completely outside of public control.
On the Internet politics in UK, just look at the laws the Parliament passes. All the traffic in UK is now logged by the providers and available to the government agencies. There are a few black lists. The government is spending a ton of money on the Cisco, IBM, Oracle systems also employed by China and Saudi Arabia.
So, how exactly BBC attacks the whole open web? Do they demand, that all web content should be DRMed?
How did it become so, that wanting some feature means you are attacking all those who don't want and don't need that feature?
Say HTML5 gets DRM. So what? What exactly forbids you not to use it? The web is open because there are people wanting to give away content for free, not because there is no DRM tech built-in in HTML. You cannot force openness for those unwilling.
If some company thinks it needs DRM, let it have it. If they think it is essential and web does not provide it they just won't use web tech and will have some proprietary plugins for that.
How exactly GNU/Linux is in danger there? They don't like it, they don't implement it. End of story.
Seriously, people, calm down. I am being sick from all that hysterics about attack on web (just because somebody chose to develop a native app, shock and horror), walled gardens, etc.
HTML itself is a fundamentally open standard on which the entire op web is built.
Adding DRM to that ends that. Period. No hysterics.
The attempt to add DRM to HTML is a full frontal attack on the open web. This is not subject to interpretation or nuance, that is equivalent to being "a little bit pregnant".
> Adding DRM to that ends that. Period. No hysterics.
Your post is nothing but hysterics.
Adding DRM support allows browsers to decide what to do in their UI in a standard way. It doesn't force unwilling content providers to use it and claiming that it closes the web is like claiming that HTTP should not support passwords because someone could use them to prevent open access to a page.
>It doesn't force unwilling content providers to use it
This is like claiming there is nothing wrong with Microsoft's traditional efforts to promote developer tools that can't produce software for non-Microsoft operating systems because "it doesn't force unwilling software developers to use it." The problem isn't for Microsoft or those who develop for Microsoft platforms, it's for those who want to use or develop non-Microsoft platforms.
It's not about Hollywood, it's about everyone else. If you put DRM in HTML then I as a user can't use it from an open source web browser on an open source operating system. If you put DRM in HTML then I as a software developer can't write a competitive web browser or operating system without permission from Hollywood.
It's not about "protecting content" -- all the content is already on The Pirate Bay and Hollywood is doing fine -- what it's about is creating gatekeepers. It's about leveraging the dominant position the studios have over the market for video production into a gatekeeper position in content distribution, so that they can use it to make sure smaller content producers can't get access to customers without using their approved devices with their approved software, which ultimately allows them to collect a toll even for things they didn't create, and choose what message gets seen by the people and use that to frame the public debate as they've traditionally been able to do.
Even if you don't think that's what it's about or that's what their goals are, that's still what it enables and why it needs to be stopped.
> If you put DRM in HTML then I as a software developer can't write a competitive web browser or operating system without permission from Hollywood
Look, I dislike DRM at least as much as you do but whether or not we like it, DRM is not going away any time soon. When you protest HTML5 gaining a standard way to specify this, you're saying “I would prefer most of the internet run on close binary plugins controlled by a single vendor until the rest of the world adopts my political views”. Since most people are going to stop using Netflix, Hulu, etc. I would at least like the system to be standard, competitive and well-secured.
Finally, it's a canard to make this an open source issue: it's really about control of the underlying platform: if the decryption key is extractable, it's game-over – and so the studios desperately want to end general purpose computing. Neither Windows nor WinDVD were OSS and yet the first DVD key extraction happened there shortly after release.
>Look, I dislike DRM at least as much as you do but whether or not we like it, DRM is not going away any time soon.
I don't understand where people got this idea. The only reason it hasn't gone away is that we haven't made it go away. If the likes of the BBC and technology companies would collectively say "sorry, DRM is poison, we're not having any part of it" then it would already be gone. Sympathizing with or defending their refusal to do so only makes them less likely to do it, and makes the day when DRM only exists in the history books take that much longer to arrive.
>When you protest HTML5 gaining a standard way to specify this, you're saying “I would prefer most of the internet run on close binary plugins controlled by a single vendor until the rest of the world adopts my political views”.
How do you imagine any DRM could possibly work that isn't based on "closed binary plugins controlled by a single vendor"? Perhaps "closed binary plugins controlled by a cartel of large colluding vendors"? How is that better?
You can't actually publish how the DRM works in the standard or it isn't DRM anymore. You can't allow competitors to produce their own independent implementations or "competitors" from Russia will produce implementations that allow copying. Open standard DRM is an oxymoron. What they're talking about is adding to the standard a flag that says "use this proprietary DRM solution" -- in other words, promoting more binary blob nonsense, instead of encouraging content distributors to just be rational and abandon the whole idea.
>Finally, it's a canard to make this an open source issue: it's really about control of the underlying platform: if the decryption key is extractable, it's game-over – and so the studios desperately want to end general purpose computing. Neither Windows nor WinDVD were OSS and yet the first DVD key extraction happened there shortly after release.
How is it a canard? It isn't a matter of which platforms are secure, it's a matter of which platforms are legal. No DRM is secure. But open source exposes the facade of DRM security so comprehensively that no such implementations are allowed to be licensed. Or, if you're being more cynical, the point of DRM is to claim that against open source implementations in order to justify prohibiting them, so that they can prohibit free and open competitors to the Hollywood-sanctioned wall gardens that allow major content distributors to collect unjustified rents from smaller content providers and control the public discourse.
Again, you're confusing DRM with access to the private keys. Any time you say you can't publicly specify how DRM works, you are either speaking in ignorance or trying to deceive, both of which help the pro-DRM PR campaign.
If we can't get Hollywood to accept reality, we would at least be better off with the open W3C proposal (you did read it, right?) rather than continuing to entrench a massive proprietary plugin.
>Again, you're confusing DRM with access to the private keys.
How do you imagine DRM could be implemented without access to private keys? Somewhere there exists a piece of proprietary software or hardware that holds the secret. By putting this in the standard you make the standard impossible to fully implement without including that proprietary software or hardware.
>If we can't get Hollywood to accept reality, we would at least be better off with the open W3C proposal (you did read it, right?) rather than continuing to entrench a massive proprietary plugin.
Did you read it? This is from the abstract: "This specification does not define a content protection or Digital Rights Management system."
In other words, they're not standardizing DRM, they're bastardizing the standard so that inherently non-standard proprietary DRM solutions can interface with it and fragment the web into a series of proprietary walled gardens based on which DRM system (if any) your platform implements.
It does not necessarily stop the web being an open standard in that sense. An open standard is really just a way of saying "if you want to do X in a way that is compatible with Y then your implementation must follow these rules and these rules are published in such a way that any person will be equally able to produce an implementation".
You can propose an open standard for DRM that everyone is free to implement or not.
If you want to have a DRM free browsing experience you can simply use a browser that implements every part of the standard apart from the DRM part. The only thing that changes is that stuff that is built to require the DRM component will not work.
It would be just like disabling <canvas> support in your browser or something like that.
You can propose an open standard for DRM that everyone is
free to implement or not.
At the core of DRM is this: The video is encrypted, and you only give the decryption key to trusted software that promises not to let the user save anything.
Unfortunately open source software cannot make that promise - because anyone can modify it, anyone can modify it to let the user save things. So you either let open source implementations have the decryption key, in which case the DRM is ineffective; or you refuse to let open source implementations have the decryption key, in which case there's no video on Firefox or Chromium.
Perhaps you ask "Why can't the open source software check itself for modifications any only decrypt the video if no modifications were present?" - unfortunately, the check could be modified just as easily as the rest of the software.
Perhaps you ask "Surely we could have a little bit of closed source software as a plugin, like flash player?" - but the whole point of HTML5 video is to get away from shitty closed-source plugins like flash. If you want flash, stick with flash.
Perhaps you ask "What's the big deal with open source anyway? Firefox only has 20% market share" - but Chrome, Safari and (recently) Opera are all based on the open source Webkit rendering engine. That leaves IE and nothing else. Before open source browsers became popular, Internet Explorer 6 had 90%+ market share and went 5 years without a substantive upgrade due to lack of competition. A return to the bad old days would not be a net win, even for the likes of Netflix, Google and the BBC.
The fact of the matter, as I understand it, is DRM barely works when it's closed source and if it was open source it wouldn't work at all. If you think there's some way to implement open source DRM I'd love to hear how.
> The fact of the matter, as I understand it, is DRM barely works when it's closed source and if it was open source it wouldn't work at all. If you think there's some way to implement open source DRM I'd love to hear how.
Fundamentally, the problem has nothing to do with open or closed software: it's all about access to the decryption key. Open source doesn't really change this dynamic much as hackers have routinely retrieved keys from anything which they can access. You could implement something like HDCP where the content is encrypted all the way to the display device, at which point it's easy to have a completely OSS stack since it's just copying bytes to a specific location.
I'd like to think that at some point people will realize that making digital data uncopyable is, as Bruce Schneier famously quipped, like trying to make water unwet. In the meantime, I'd prefer that the software millions of people depend on be standardized and developed by conscientious security-minded professionals – i.e. not Flash.
Not sure of the specifics of implementation proposed but I imagine that the actual DRM decryption would have to happen somewhere in the guts of the kernel and the HTML part would mainly be metadata. DRM only implemented at browser level would be laughably bad as screen capture software would defeat it.
Fundamentally though this isn't really any different from current Silverlight based DRM. Things like netflix don't work on Linux (without hacks) as it stands.
Other non-drm video (which constitutes the overwhelming majority of web video) would continue to work as it does today.
Besides even closed source DRM enforcement mechanisms can be defeated by someone with strong asm skills and enough time.
You just repeated an assertion. HTML is an open standard. The DRM spec will presumably be open. How does that make the web not open? Any more than the fact you can use a paywall already?
Isn't actually true, as I understand it, the integration points to DRM will be standard and "open" but the DRM implementation can be a black box as currently proposed.
>HTML itself is a fundamentally open standard on which the entire op web is built. Adding DRM to that ends that. Period. No hysterics.
Nothing about adding DRM will make HTML any less of an open standard. It will just be an open standard that allows those who use it to implement DRM on their content.
You can throw around as much rhetoric as you want and say it isn't open to interpretation, you're still not right.
> It will just be an open standard that allows those who use it to implement DRM on their content.
As somebody who's made quite a lot of websites for quite a lot of people, I suspect that equates to "the internet will eventually be almost entirely DRMed".
So what? People who want to produce open content will still be able to use the internet to reach those who want to consume it.
I'd actually love to have viable DRM. I'd love a youtube where I could pay a monthly subscription instead of watching annoying ads. If DRM gave me that option it'd be great.
>I'd love a youtube where I could pay a monthly subscription instead of watching annoying ads. If DRM gave me that option it'd be great.
Can you explain how DRM could actually accomplish that? I don't see any existing barrier to them offering an option to pay a monthly fee to get access to ad-free YouTube along side the ad supported free version, other than that probably not enough people would prefer paying vs. watching ads for it to be worth offering it.
I guess I just don't see the huge problem in allowing people who have paid to download the videos. You already have this person's money. If they cancel their subscription then they no longer get access to new videos; you can sell long-term subscriptions with early termination fees to prevent users from subscribing one day out of the year to get all the new videos. The videos are going to be on The Pirate Bay regardless of the presence of DRM. The user who pays and wants to cheat can as if not more easily share his password with his friends than the videos themselves.
I just don't see what it's buying you -- and it's providing less value to the user who can't as easily watch the video offline or on as wide a range of devices, which reduces the number of users you can attract at a given price point.
BBC should feel free to invent its own web protocols. They should also feel free to require closed source clients for using those protocols. But the W3C should outright refuse to listen to their demands.
I felt this was a fairly poor article. One of the most telling (for me) quotes was: "Dedicating itself to sharing knowledge and creativity - not just in the UK, but everywhere in the world - is an important and worthy cause, and I will happily pay my (compulsory) £145.50 each year to support the BBC in this."
This, I feel, misses the entire point of DRM. It is the belief of the BBC that adding DRM makes them money, by making it easier for them to sell their content, both as DVDs and overseas. I don't believe the BBC would put DRM on their content purely for the fun of irritating people.
So, the question isn't "would you pay your £145.50". The question is, how much more would you pay?
Taking some very vague numbers, there are just under 25 million TV licenses, and BBC international made £160 million profit last year on a turnover of £1bn. I'm not sure how much of that turnover is "value for the BBC" (are they paying to make TV programs?), but this means I can badly handwave that removing DRM might cost between around £7 to £40.
Would most people in the UK accept an increase in their licence fee of £7 in return for DRM free, and allowing everyone around the world to get free access to BBC programs? I suspect, unfortunately, the answer is no.
(Sorry if this is a bit simplistic, a true "the money of DRM" would be interesting, if contraversal. But, I feel this article really is ignoring the real most important issue, the money).
>this means I can badly handwave that removing DRM might cost between around £7 to £40.
How do you come to the conclusion that it would cost the BBC anything to remove DRM? If anything it would save them any money they currently spend implementing it and hopelessly attempting to secure it.
The "cost" of not having DRM, if any, is that some content distributors may refuse to license to them without it. The article itself points out that this has demonstrably not occurred in the past, but even if it did, why is that a cost to the television licensee? The money not paid to license that content is still available to license some other content from someone not so irrational on the point of DRM, or to fund new original BBC programming, or (if you're more worried about the cost to the public than providing more content) to use to reduce the price of a television license.
Let me say that again: It costs nothing to remove DRM and it costs something to implement it. It is costing the British television licensee money that could be used to create original programming to instead be used to restrict what they can do with their own devices. Why are they doing this again?
The (possible) cost of removing DRM, as I said, is that the BBC currently makes money by selling the content it makes, both direct to consumers and the TV and DVD companies in other countries. If the BBC released all its content DRM-free, then this money might dry up.
As a license payer (who doesn't even own a TV), yes.
However I do understand that many would say no. Also the license fee is a pretty regressive tax[1]. I can easily afford it, but many people living in the council estate near by likely have some trouble paying it, and rich pensioners living in the posh bit of the village in their £1m houses get it for free.
[1] Yes, I know it's not strictly speaking a "tax".
I find it very surprising that the organization supposedly promoting the open "web for all" is even considering baking in DRM handcuffs.
It seems so short-sighted. Copyright is just a bunch of laws this society agrees on today. The web is not about today's laws, social mores, or profit motives, but of connectivity, sharing, and freedom of information and expression. When I see things like this even being considered, I sometimes think that we don't deserve such freedom.
If we're going to start DRM'ing media, why not just DRM the entire web page and be done with it? Why send HTML over the wire at all when we can send an encrypted blob? That'd be the ideal world for the media companies--total end-to-end secrecy, with users just being warm bodies with credit cards.
BBC, Netflix, MS, and--of all companies--Google should be ashamed to be involved in this.
Copyright is 300 years old. Before that, restrictions on copying were enforced in England through publishers monopolies. We have had some sorts of protections on copying almost as long as printing presses have been available to make copying possible.
And separating Google out in this is ridiculous. Google wants to make money off content too. They just do it by using other peoples content to spy on you and sell you out to advertisers. Yeah, far more noble than Sony just charging me for a copy of some movie. Indeed, I'd argue that the inability to effectively protect content online has made things worse. It has lead to companies like google that monetize privacy instead of companies that directly monetize creative works, because the former is logistically easier.
profit and social responsibility don't go together. Google has every reason to be interested in a locked-down web. That way it could be sure of all the revenue that youtube movie premieres would bring. Sadly, a more responsible way of doing the same thing will not be as profitable.
I totally agree. But w3c should be standing up for the open web, not the profit motives of its sponsors. If they're going to start transparently considering whatever restrictive practices their sponsors demand, then they become nothing more than an industry interest group versus what they ostensibly are now, which is a group that's at least partially community-driven.
>BBC, Netflix, MS, and--of all companies--Google should be ashamed to be involved in this.
Why should any of them be ashamed? They all have copyrighted digital content or at least have sites that host copyrighted content. They all clearly gain from this.
I know whenever DRM is mentioned everyone likes to get out the pitchforks and yell about "openness" and "freedom of information". But let's be honest, the majority of media would not be made if it was going to be handed out for free. Everyone seems to express this idealized utopian world where content is freely distributed, everyone contributes, and we all live in electro-social bliss. Sorry, until the Singularity occurs or the Age of Aquarius dawns that world doesn't exist.
>Copyright is just a bunch of laws this society agrees on today. The web is not about today's laws, social mores, or profit motives, but of connectivity, sharing, and freedom of information and expression. When I see things like this even being considered, I sometimes think that we don't deserve such freedom.
I'm not going to try and defend copyright completely, it clearly needs a lot of fixes to it, but this is just a bunch of random hogwash. Furthermore how does some sites enabling DRM limit anyone else's connectivity, sharing, or freedom of expression? Just because BBC starts limiting their iPlayer to license holders doesn't mean I can't have my own iPlayer website with my own open content that I share with everyone. You've created a rather weak strawman argument here.
>If we're going to start DRM'ing media, why not just DRM the entire web page and be done with it? Why send HTML over the wire at all when we can send an encrypted blob?
What are you even trying to communicate here?? HTTPS is basically transmitting an encrypted blob. The difference is that it (usually)contains HTML; which is an open standard that everyone uses so that you only need one program(browser) to interpret and display the blob from many sources(websites). Nothing about enabling DRM will change this, it will only limit those who want their website to be limited.
The only thing that is really questionable about this is whether W3C should be using resources to help standardize/implement such a feature. Given that the browsers will likely have to spend a lot of time/resources on making their software compatible with the new standard is a bit unfair.
I'll just say these content provider companies are going to use DRM methods to restrict use of their content one way or another. Whether it's through private plugins like silverlight, flash, etc. or though an open standard, all of the major browsers will have to be compatible to get users. I think it makes more sense from a security and usability perspective to push it into an open standard, but I can see both sides of the argument.
> Everyone seems to express this idealized utopian world where content is freely distributed, everyone contributes, and we all live in electro-social bliss.
The web should be designed as if we were targeting a utopia. The web as a technology doesn't care about today's laws or profit motives, but burdening it with them will only hinder what it can become in the future.
> Furthermore how does some sites enabling DRM limit anyone else's connectivity, sharing, or freedom of expression?
Baking in DRM software into what should be an open medium of exchange is a first step. If the standard continues to evolve in that direction, the web will become something much different, and I think worse, than what it is today. W3C should be thinking about the future it wants to be in, not the profit motives of today's entrenched media interests.
> HTTPS is basically transmitting an encrypted blob.
HTTPS protects communications from eavesdropping, but both parties are still fully open to each other. DRM is not the same--it closes off the communication from one of the parties in the "discussion" and puts one party in total control. This is fundamentally different than being able to ensure two parties can communicate without being overheard.
>The web as a technology doesn't care about today's laws or profit motives.
The web as a technology doesn't care about anything because it isn't a human being. Why are you anthropomorphising it and adding idealized moralities? If you have certain morals and worldviews, go ahead and express them in the first person as your own opinion. Because "the web" is a loose group of technologies being developed and shared between a lot of different competing humans/groups all with their own ideologies.
>Baking in DRM software into what should be an open medium of exchange is a first step. If the standard continues to evolve in that direction, the web will become something much different, and I think worse, than what it is today.
So vague paranoia about the web "evolving" into something bad is why this shouldn't be allowed? You have any specifics on what you think might next happen? I mean once the media companies have DRM in HTML how else would they need to change it? I would think they'd basically gotten all they need at that point.
>HTTPS protects communications from eavesdropping, but both parties are still fully open to each other.
That depends on what you mean by fully open. I can open an HTTPS connection to gmail.com, I still need to provide some credentials for anything to happen. gmail.com still has "total control". In fact in most any client/server HTTPS connection one party is going to have what amounts to "total control". I don't understand how DRM within HTML is fundamentally changing that situation. It's just giving the server copy protection over the media it allows the client to access. It eliminates the need for plugins such as silverlight/flash/etc. that are already being used. It's not like these content companies hand out their media unprotected as it stands.
> So vague paranoia about the web "evolving" into something bad is why this shouldn't be allowed?
We should be paranoid. Media companies do not have our interests or the interests of an open web at heart. Give an inch and they'll take a mile. Why shouldn't they? The fact is that DRM benefits media companies almost exclusively while seriously harming user freedom. That's not vague paranoia, and imagining it evolving into something worse isn't an unfounded fear either.
> I can open an HTTPS connection to gmail.com, I still need to provide some credentials for anything to happen.
Do you mean logging in to Gmail? That has nothing to do with HTTPS. HTTPS ensures that two parties can communicate in any way they wish without being eavesdropped on. (And it also suggests trust, but that's a different issue and the spec allows the same eavesdropping protection using self-signed certificates.)
>We should be paranoid. Media companies do not have our interests or the interests of an open web at heart. Give an inch and they'll take a mile. Why shouldn't they? The fact is that DRM benefits media companies almost exclusively while seriously harming user freedom. That's not vague paranoia, and imagining it evolving into something worse isn't an unfounded fear either.
It is vague paranoia. You're still just throwing out rhetoric without any concrete reasons. It doesn't harm user freedom, I don't know how to express this any clearer: "THEY'RE ALREADY DISTRIBUTING THROUGH DRM-ENABLED PLUGINS". All this would do is standardize it and allow users to access DRM content from website like hulu/netflix without needing two different private closed-source plugins.
>Do you mean logging in to Gmail? That has nothing to do with HTTPS. HTTPS ensures that two parties can communicate in any way they wish without being eavesdropped on. (And it also suggests trust, but that's a different issue and the spec allows the same eavesdropping protection using self-signed certificates.)
>In fact in most any client/server HTTPS connection one party is going to have what amounts to "total control". I don't understand how DRM within HTML is fundamentally changing that situation. It's just giving the server copy protection over the media it allows the client to access. It eliminates the need for plugins such as silverlight/flash/etc. that are already being used. It's not like these content companies hand out their media unprotected as it stands.
You're still ignoring the meat of my argument. Lets just drop the whole HTTPS analogy/credentials analogy. The rest of what I said is still valid.
> It is vague paranoia. You're still just throwing out rhetoric without any concrete reasons. It doesn't harm user freedom, I don't know how to express this any clearer: "THEY'RE ALREADY DISTRIBUTING THROUGH DRM-ENABLED PLUGINS". All this would do is standardize it and allow users to access DRM content from website like hulu/netflix without needing two different private closed-source plugins.
The only way to get DRM to work is to require a closed-source browser. If you implement your DRM in open-source browser code, that code will almost certainly end up patched to produce decrypted/unprotected output and the patch would then be redistributed.
Ultimately, you cannot combine technology that prevents the end user from doing what they want with open-source software that attempts to guarantee such rights.
I agree that would be a problem, but I understand there would be a way to implement the current proposal without requiring a browser to be closed source.
It's not a perfect method, it would require some additional potentially closed-source OS-level software to be installed for the browser to interact with. But people who don't want it don't have to get it, and the browser can implement the standard without becoming closed-source.
That's also true, but as you point out, still requires a closed-source or a hardware DRM decoder to avoid kernel-level attacks. That would seem to rule out Linux support even if Windows or OS X Firefox/Chrome can safely use it.
It's funny how all the rage is descending upon BBC while the 3 other companies that back up the DRM proposal (Google, Microsoft and Netflix) entice zero attention.
Can we put pressure on Google, Microsoft and Netflix to not promote this? That makes more sense than targeting the BBC, which is just in one country anyhow. Our targets should be the multinationals, Google and Microsoft.
Is it just me or is the copyright debate the wrong problem to be working on ?
Around the world we have people trying to speak freely about matters of justice, life and death, and they are being arrested, shot, mortared and harassed.
TOR and similar are steps in the right direction, but mobile hardware is still clearly identifiable and root is getting taken from people and given to the network operators.
Solve the problems of those who cannot speak freely, give them tools and anonymity and innovation around freedom once more and we shall see the problems of copyright solved in new ways.
These problems are sort of related. If you build technology to allow people to communicate anonymously then most likely that technology can also be used for piracy.
So enforcement of systems that are less anonymous and offer less overall control to the end user can be justified under the grounds of protecting intellectual property rights.
If you can reform IP law in some way then perhaps you can remove roadblocks towards the adoption of systems which are more open, more secure etc.
> the BBC is a public service broadcaster primarily funded by the licence fee paid by UK households
So DRM-ing BBC programmes would be very much alike, uhm... publishing publicly funded research in journals that require paid subscriptions? ...ain't that cute
Not exactly, because it'd be against their own rules - the BBC is actually forbidden to encrypt its broadcasts. That's why their DVDs were always region 0 and bereft of copy-protection.
Things get a little more murky where we're talking about "downloads" as opposed to "broadcasts" - both the BBC and theit regulator, Ofcom, have confirmed on numerous occasions that it's mandatory that the BBC's "public service content remains free to air i.e. unencrypted." ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8352241.stm ) but they've been allowed to place limits on downloaded content such as iPlayer not letting you store content forever.
I suspect this is less about "BBC wants DRM" and more about "BBC is under massive pressure to use DRM"
Either way, I was disappointed when I first saw their submission to W3C talking about their support for DRM'd media - I've always been gratified by the way the BBC was the only big media corp. out there that wasn't chasing the dream of total control over its content. If they're making a U-turn on that I'll have to rethink my policy on paying the license fee.
(Before anyone steps up with the "it's mandatory" - it isn't if you don't own & use a TV, and I'd feel no sorrow at all about getting rid of my TV)
To be clear, it's mandatory to pay for a "TV license" if you consume live broadcasts in any way, regardless of the platform on which you do it [1]. Getting rid of your TV isn't enough if you keep your web browser tuned to BBC One on www.bbc.co.uk.
I agree with your sentiments but the BBC do region code and encrypt their DVD's I know this because I have (legally) ripped several BBC DVD's that I own.
UK citizens pay for a TV license which gives them access to BBC broadcasts - through IPlayer, freeview TV, radio, and websites.
The BBC is also able to sell DVDs of their programs in the UK, and internationally (through BBC World). In theory, DRM would prevent people selling bootlegged copies that would severely impact this revenue stream.
> UK citizens pay for a TV license which gives them access to BBC broadcasts
More correctly, UK citizens pay for a TV licence which gives them access to any tv broadcast. TV and broadcast are defined in law, but it's pretty much anything broadcast live over any medium.
Thus, people living in the south of England who use a satellite dish to receive French telly (and nothing else) will need to pay a licence fee.
Weirdly, I use the BBC a lot (all day radio, Video on demand) and don't need to pay the licence.
So far it looks like the rights owners have chosen not to support standards if the standards lack support for DRM functionality they feel are necessary for protecting the content. Instead of HTML5 video we are still seeing Silverlight, Flash and similar solutions.
This - I wish I could up vote multiple times. Fundamentally, distributors want to be able to use DRM to protect their content. If open standards won't provide a way to do that, there is no surprise that they turn to Silverlight etc.
What's the issue, then? They still find a way to distribute their content but Web Standards aren't tainted. Seems like things are working as they should.
The issue is that I need a proprietary plug-in with frequent security problems (Flash) to watch the videos. It would be better if they could deliver their content through a standardised protocol with more secure clients.
On the whole, that benefit isn't worth the downsides of adding DRM provisions to an open standard. And of course, I'd prefer they could do without DRM at all, but that still seems like a pipe dream.
>I'd love a youtube where I could pay a monthly subscription instead of watching annoying ads. If DRM gave me that option it'd be great.
The pipe dream is working DRM. DRM is inherently a failure. Anything we can do to make it less convenient or harder to use will only convince more content providers not to use it -- especially when the inconveniences cause more normal users to complain, which can only be a good thing.
Or to put it another way, why are you advocating polishing a turd so that it appears less objectionable and can be more common? It needs to be less common. Hollywood is not omnipotent. They are capable of being convinced to change their ways. Witness music DRM. Witness the broadcast flag, which was defeated but HD content continues to be distributed without it. This "we won't distribute content without DRM" is just bloviating from pompous industry executives who hope you won't call their bluff. They need to be called on it far more often.
Problem is that those vendors offering the proprietary solutions may not have interest in offering their solution for all platforms.
Let's take Flash as an example. I remember days from the past when I was happily watching MythTV recordings from my Nokia Internet Tablet. The tablet had no problems playing the content, since I was able to use software optimized for the tablet.
Using the same hardware to watch some Flash content was painful. Flash implementation was not nearly as good as the video player that was able to utilize the platforms hardware capabilities.
Open standards make it possible for companies like Nokia, Blackberry and Canonical to implement the video players themselves. They don't need to rely on Microsoft or Adobe to provide support for their platforms.
This just provides a way for a source (Netflix, BBC) to talk to a DRM component that lives elsewhere in the operating system. Increasingly we're going to see a requirement that the DRM is implemented in hardware. So the same problem exists, except worse. How is Canonical going to implement DRM in their open source OS? How is anyone outside of a few big companies (Microsoft, Apple, Samsung) going to meet the hardware DRM requirement?
I'm sorry, but I don't see how "GNU/Linux in Danger".
This is actually _good_ for Linux, as adding DRM to HTML will alleviate the need to use closed-source technologies like Flash and Silverlight to stream DRMed content. Getting rid of closed-source Flash and Silverlight is a _good_ thing.
What is it that you imagine they'll be replaced with? There has to be a binary blob somewhere whose purpose is to attempt to make the decryption and display process opaque. That's what DRM is. I'm not sure what it matters whether you call it Flash or something else.
What kind of crappy article leads with a false dichotomy. DRM isn't any different than a paywall. It doesn't make the internet suddenly not open to allow sites to protect video content and for users to choose to view that content or not.
Why add DRM? It is consistently bypassed. The BBC only needs it for iPlayer, but DRM there is pointless since everything on iPlayer was broadcast prior on unprotected terrestial TV.
Just use HTTPS, check referrers, prevent iframing and require passing a one-use token, locked to IP address, embedded in the page. That won't protect you from people stealing the content, sure. But at least it prevents bandwidth-stealing.
Blaming "the people selling content to the BBC" ignores the fact that the BBC is itself a content producer which, through BBC Worldwide, makes money from that content. Media companies want to restrict the availability of their products, and sadly the BBC management is acting no different from other companies in that respect.
I can see the logic in having socialized broadcasting that funds the creation and distribution of content. But what is the point if it is buying pre-existing commercial content?
Why not lower the fee/tax and let people buy content on the free market if the price is right?
if bbc is a big enough customer for such content ( and i believe the bbc is), it can dictate terms when buying such content. If it is not doing so, we can only assume corruption and collusion as reasons.
Is the BBC big enough to fend off ITV, C5 or Sky who don't have to worry about such issues? Remember Occam's Razor before jumping to conclusions about corruption...
There are already solutions for full stack DRM. The player would output video stream only decryptable by licensed display devices. ( Which you could hack or just film the output with a camera)
If google is behind this as the article states, it just shows their hypocrasy behind their mantra of "supporting the open web". Given that companies with w3c leverage are behind this proposal does anyone think it will get through? Personally, I can't imagine anything worse for the future of the web than DRM. It would be like forcibly going to back to a dark ages that never existed for the web medium.
Shame on you BBC.
Technology cannot prevent IP theft. You can outlaw it and hope fear will stop people from sharing. Or else you can find better ways to monetize your IP.
BBC should be working on putting that license money to better use.
Our greed knows no bounds. People with money and power have the means to act on their greed. Left in their hands, the internet will become as useful as the tv is today. Anything that is not certified by the moneybags will become illegal.
Shame on you bbc for taking money from the same people whom you intend to screw.
This isn't the BBC screwing people over. This is likely a constraint introduced by licensing American (or foreign) exports for broadcast over here. If the licensors want DRM as part of the agreement, then there's not much choice left for the BBC unless they want to reduce the diversity of their content.
That is not true, since there is a significant commercial part of the BBC and since the parts of the DRM submissions quoted referenced reasons of control over BBC identity (mixing streams etc.).
But lets say for the sake of argument it is true, then there would be no need for the BBC to actively campaign on a part of a standard that they themselves would not/could not have elected to use and would only be imposed on them by others.
as a corporation running on public money, i expect the bbc to keep public interest in mind. Drm only hinders the paying public. I will have to pay for a windows license if i intend to view content i have already paid for, so that bbc can keep their illegitimate masters happy. As for others, they are free to use proprietary software to deliver their content. I just want them to stay away from buying out the somewhat open internet that we have today.
for people who believe that if only open source could reliably protect IP - almost nothing can protect content which is meant to be consumed. Only law can and that is where we are headed.
The currentl proposal [1] mandates content decryption modules that are not part of the browser but rather plugins akin to current NPAPI ones (Flash etc). Those will most likely be platform-specific binaries. That makes operating systems like GNU/Linux or BSD-likes unable to decrypt content depending without the correct CDM.
I can't believe how many apology-niks are on here trotting out the old merde about how we need DRM, and won't somebody please think of the rights-holders.
Here in the UK we pay the TV license fee. Now, granted most of the output it funds is utter crap, but hey, we paid for it.
There should be no reason for DRM to be applied at all, but especially not if delivered via the web.
If the standards wonks permit this, we really need to fork the standards, and avoid this.
If the open web does not support your intended business model then go away and change the model.
The conversation has spread beyond the UK. I would even hazard a guess that a majority of HNers are in the US, where there is no such fee and most content producers are on their own.
The BBC doesn't produce all the content they show.
Rights owners have considerable control over what happens to the content.
Thus, many BBC radio programmes are downloadable as MP3 and can be kept forever. An excellent programme In Our Time[1] has made their entire back catalogue available, but a programme that has music (Desert Island Discs, or any live concerts on BBC Radio 1) will have much more restricted download conditions.
iPlayer (hateful stupid ridiculous name) really is amazing. The BBC led OnDemand viewing in the UK. And what we've got now is very very much better than the RealAudio kludge we had years ago.
So, really, the target here should be stupid rights holders who don't understand the benefits to greater viewership.
They need to come up with some other way of paying people who create content. The BBC is (at least, I hope they are) collecting a lot of data about how often programmes get watched or downloaded over their various online services; so maybe payment could be linked to download amounts somehow.
Paying content creators in a better way would also help "archive" services like BBC Radio FourExtra, which suffers from heavy rolling repeats.