- From: <bugzilla@jessica.w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2010 15:21:41 +0000
- To: public-html-bugzilla@w3.org
http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10902 Mo McRoberts <mo.mcroberts@nexgenta.com> changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CC| |mo.mcroberts@nexgenta.com --- Comment #20 from Mo McRoberts <mo.mcroberts@nexgenta.com> 2010-10-06 15:21:40 UTC --- There are a few different issues here, and although the issues in general are relevant to a significant proportion of people who follow HTML5 goings-on, that doesn't necessarily mean that the issue itself is directly applicable to HTML5. First: media delivered by way of the video element needs some sort of DRM (or otherwise "protection") -- not because that's a good or a bad thing for it to have per se, but because it's a constraint of many large-scale applications of online delivery. For background, the agreements between rightsholders and publishers/broadcasters for delivery of media on the Web are tortuous, and not uncommonly negotiated over periods of many months, if not years; "content protection" features heavily in the discussions. There is often not a single rightsholder for a given piece of media: just the list of people and organisations who have some kind of legal interest in a single episode of a TV show can stretch into the hundreds, if not more. It really is quite, quite crazy, but it is the state of the landscape at the moment. It is certainly true that the same content is regularly broadcast free-to-air in a form with anybody with half a brain and $30 USB stick can capture, but this doesn't negate the agreements (even if it arguably /should/). Thus, the question is: is widespread adoption of the video element by mainstream media companies a goal of proponents of the video element? Personally, I believe it is, but others may of course have different views (and if so, you may as well stop reading here). Assuming you believe it is, then there's the question as to whether the path of sanity and least-resistance is to support some sort of content protection for that video, or whether it's easier to persuade all of the rightsholders to stop asking for something that's demonstrably so utterly worthless. Again, my opinion is that the former is a damned sight easier than the latter, even if it has some ideological "wrinkles" in many cases. This is made somewhat more difficult by the fact that the terms of the agreements between rightsholders and publishers are confidential, so we can never be /entirely/ sure what protections are going to be required. We can make some educated guesses, though, and discount the things which are completely infeasible (because they would only apply to closed-source systems). It's worth stressing that any restrictions which would be supported would realistically be a gamble: just as people can leech stuff from RTMP servers today, avoiding any protections the Flash plugin puts in place, people would be able to do the same with HTML5 video (or, for that matter, audio). What DRM is about, and has always been about, is this weird notion of "keeping people honest" by making it just that little bit too inconvenient to bother with. I should stress again that I think this is logically flawed in and of itself, but pitched against changing the minds of the people who own the content is a lot (possibly infinitely in the short-to-medium-term) harder than making these kinds of concessions. Now, the really important part: is this something which should happen in HTML5, or is it something which should be part of the media formats themselves? My take on it is that baking this stuff into HTML5 itself is more than a little bonkers. There are a couple of reasons why I think this (off the top of my head): first, as soon as we get into the realms of plugins doing the rendering of media, interfaces get very messy very quickly; second, if the restrictions don't prevent media from be saved locally, then any other restrictions which apply (such as expiration) need to be handled by whatever deals with the media outside of the browser. "No 'Save video as...'" is very likely to be *one* restriction of several which would be required, but is the only one which conceivably could be implemented as part of HTML5 itself. It doesn't make much sense to implement most of this stuff in the media players and just one aspect in HTML5, and it can't all be done in HTML5. Thus, the most sensible course of action would seem to be to make this a format-dependent thing. Now, this doesn't mean that it's not something which browsers would need to not care about, because if they play back media then they'll need to, and I'd love to see further discussions on how to actually go about doing all of this with the various kinds of video format that are being chucked around the Internet. It does, however, mean that it's out of scope for HTML5, and so *this* particular forum. -- Configure bugmail: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the QA contact for the bug.
Received on Wednesday, 6 October 2010 15:21:43 UTC