Re: Video copy protection

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 10:40 AM, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Alexey Feldgendler <alexeyf@opera.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:01:00 +0100, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:
>>
>>> It does seem to me though that the copyright information would be
>>> better placed in the video file rather than in the HTML markup
>>> pointing to the video file. So that if you have several pages on your
>>> site that link to the same video file, you don't accidentally forget
>>> this attribute in one of them. Also so that it works if someone
>>> navigates directly to the video file, in which case there is no
>>> markup.
>>
>> So you navigate to the file, click Save, the browser refuses to save it,
>> then you take that URL and feed it to wget or whatever your favorite
>> download tool is, and it happily saves the file because its author hasn't
>> even heard of some “copyright bit”. However, because the bit in the file
>> header is on, the author of the download tool gets sued by the content
>> owner?
>
> Yes, that is the concern expressed in my initial paragraph which you
> didn't quote. So this is a concern for developers of browsers and
> tools that can be used to download resources from the web.
>
> The concern the i'm trying to express in the paragraph that you are
> quoting above is this:
>
> 1. User navigate to a website with a <video forbidsaving src="myvideo.ogv">.
> 2. User tries to save but notices that there is no "save video" menu option.
> 3. User instead clicks "view video" menu item.
> 4. This navigates the browser directly to myvideo.ogv. I.e. not to a HTML file.
> 5. User can now use the "save video" menu option since there is no
> HTML tags containing a 'forbidsaving' attribute.
>
> So this is a concern for content producers that want to take advantage
> of the proposed attribute.
>
> / Jonas
>
>

It's the same with images, btw. People have developed other methods
for dealing with copyrighted images than stopping their download. I'm
not sure we want to deal differently with video than with images.

Also, I'm not sure just taking away the context menu and the option to
"view video" will be sufficient, since you can always inspect the html
code on the page. It's just a little bit of extra security by
obscurity. It is a step, certainly, that helps with your average user.

Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Monday, 8 February 2010 23:49:17 UTC