RE: CfC: to publish Encrypted Media Extensions specification as a First Public Working Draft (FPWD)

________________________________
From: Fred Andrews [fredandw@live.com]
Sent: Friday, February 08, 2013 5:50 PM
To: David Singer
Cc: public-html-admin@w3.org
Subject: RE: CfC: to publish Encrypted Media Extensions specification as a First Public Working Draft (FPWD)

David,

The existence of an open source licensed implementation of the specification
is not the test to be applied here.  The test is: can a competent person write
an implementation of the standard and license it on their own terms?

For example, the EME plus DRM CDMs would fail many much narrower
related tests, and the Chairs can reject it now on this basis.

* Can a competent persons write their own software to implement the
standard?  Fail.

* Can someone contract out the writing of software to implement the
standard to any competent software developer?  Fail.

* Can someone purchase a license to use software implementing the
standard from any competent software developer?  Fail.

The last test is very important because without a free market for
implementations of the standard the user looses all control.

You might argue that the EME alone is just an interface to a controlled
plugin, and that the interface alone can meet all the above,

MW> Indeed this is the case and as a result the specification passes all the above tests: Given a CDM, anyone can implement the specification.

but the
intention of EME is to support DRM that does not meet the above tests
and it is clear that there is no path to meeting these tests.

MW> I interpret the concern to be that (i) the APIs for the relevant existing CDMs are not public. And the availability of those CDMs on all platforms is not assured and (ii) an alternative, fully open source, CDM has not been proposed. Thus an implementor needs not only to be competent but also to be privy to the relevant information (for example by licensing it) and working on a supported platform.

MW> We must see what we can do to relax these requirements, but I would not accept that the test should be that specification must fully define a DRM system, as you suggest. We do not do this for other HTML specifications: The video element does not define a codec, the geo-location API does not define a method of determining geographic location, WebGL can't be implemented (performantly) without hardware which is in practice proprietary (i.e. graphics cards).

cheers
Fred

________________________________
From: singer@apple.com
Subject: Fwd: CfC: to publish Encrypted Media Extensions specification as a First Public Working Draft (FPWD)
Date: Fri, 8 Feb 2013 15:58:37 -0800
To: fredandw@live.com

oops, I might have cut down the mailing lists etc. a bit too much.  sorry if you didn't get this

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Resent-From: public-html-media@w3.org<mailto:public-html-media@w3.org>
From: David Singer <singer@apple.com<mailto:singer@apple.com>>
Subject: Re: CfC: to publish Encrypted Media Extensions specification as a First Public Working Draft (FPWD)
Date: February 8, 2013 15:39:06 PST
To: "public-html-media@w3.org<mailto:public-html-media@w3.org>" <public-html-media@w3.org<mailto:public-html-media@w3.org>>
Archived-At: <http://www.w3.org/mid/E12F04EF-503A-400F-845E-B4BCB34180AA@apple.com<http://www.w3.org/mid/E12F04EF-503A-400F-845E-B4BCB34180AA%40apple.com>>


On Feb 8, 2013, at 15:26 , Fred Andrews <fredandw@live.com<mailto:fredandw@live.com>> wrote:


The objections based on EME being incompatible with open source
systems are clear enough that you can make a call now to reject it.


Open-source software is a valuable part of the industry, but it's not part of the W3C's mandate or modus operandi.  Indeed, there are many standards bodies that require reference implementations (reference software source code) for all standards.  The W3C doesn't even require that, and doesn't offer a reference implementation of any of its recommendations, as far as I know.

The use of the word 'open' in 'open web' and 'open source' does not make the latter two phrases synonymous, and in fact, it's not clear that the same meaning of 'open' is used either (viz. discussions about beer, speech, and the word 'free').

David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.


David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.