[Bug 10902] <video> element needs to support some form of DRM solution

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10902

Mo McRoberts <mo.mcroberts@nexgenta.com> changed:

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--- 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.

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Received on Wednesday, 6 October 2010 15:21:43 UTC