Re: Campaign for position of chair and mandate to close this community group

On Wednesday 15 January 2014 07:50:44 Mark Watson wrote:
> My point was that there is at least one case where that functionality is
> already present in the Operating System and exposed through public APIs.
> So, in that one case, you can have a browser which is completely FOSS and
> which supports EME, just as you can have a browser which is completely FOSS
> but which benefits from (other) proprietary technologies in the OS or
> hardware.

I just looked up the licensing terms on Microsoft's PlayReady website and it 
explicitly states

3.1 (a) of the PlayReady Master License agreement

| The licenses granted in the PlayReady License(s) do not include the
| right to, and Company shall not, distribute the Licensed Technology
| (or derivative works thereof, including De veloped Technology) in any
| manner that would ca use any Licensed Technology component to become
| subject to any of the terms of an Excluded License.  An “Excluded
| License” means any version of the GNU General Public License (GPL), Le
| sser/Library GPL (LGPL), Mo zilla Public License (MPL), Comm on Public
| License (CPL), Affero GPL (AGPL) or any other li cense for software
| where the license include s terms providing that (a) a licensee of th
| e software is authorized to make modificati ons to, or derivative
| works of, the source code for the software, and (b) the licensee is
| authorized to distribute such modifications or derivative works of the
| software only if recipients are authorized to receive th e source code
| for, modify or make further derivativ e works of licensee’s
| modifications or deri vative works. For purposes of this clause ,
| “distribute” includes providing access to the functi onality of the
| code through a computer network”.

The license explicitly says that PlayReady can not be used with any copyleft 
license.  It is also noteworthy that the Mozilla Public License (MPL) is also 
excluded thus preventing one major browser vendor from using this technology.

Therefore your claim seems to be wrong that a copyleft free software browser 
could support full EME functionality even on the one example platform that 
does expose an interface to its proprietary non-portable closed source CDM.

There are other noteworthy points in the license agreements.  E.g., 3.4 in the 
final product license

| Use by Other Products. Providing access to the Licensed Technology
| functionality in a Final Product via an API, interface, or other
| similar mechanism created by Company, is prohibited except as
| otherwise expressly permitted in the Compliance Rules.

Which would disallow using it for EME.  Not to mention the price tag of at 
least $30,000.

And as I stated in my previous message there is an inherent legal issue with 
any form of DRM.  A free software browser might use a proprietary 
implementation of a video codec on one system but can provide or use a free 
software implementation on another.  However it would be illegal (even a 
criminal offence in many countries) to do the same for a DRM implementation.  
Therefore we can not compare DRM to just any other common technology.

> This is just one platform, I am not claiming any more than that, but that
> proof point refutes the argument that EME can never be implemented in FOSS.
> 
> Of course, when the object is to have the entire software stack, including
> the OS and firmware, be FOSS, then it's true that you cannot play back
> protected/restricted content. EME doesn't create or change that situation.

But this is exactly what violates the W3C's principles!  They explicitly state 
"One of W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, 
whatever their hardware, software, [...]".  And that includes a free software 
operating system.

EME creates a situation where a W3C standard would implicitly depend on 
inherently closed source proprietary non-portable black boxes which are not 
compatible with free software.  The W3C can not control the usage of such 
modules outside the scope of W3C standards.  But at least the W3C should not 
encourage or help the proliferation of such modules when they are 
fundamentally incompatible with the W3C's own principles.

Regards,
Rüdiger

Received on Wednesday, 15 January 2014 16:42:52 UTC