RE: DRM nonsense

Florian,

If you'd like to have an actual discussion about these topics, I'm happy to do so. But I have no interest in shouting matches, so I'm going to disregard your earlier mail.

I couple of small points below ...

________________________________
From: Florian Bösch [pyalot@gmail.com]
Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 3:19 PM
To: David Singer
Cc: public-html-media@w3.org
Subject: Re: DRM nonsense

On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 11:15 PM, David Singer <singer@apple.com<mailto:singer@apple.com>> wrote:
Because that is why the copyright owners go to all that trouble; they want to be remunerated for their work (not unreasonable), and they want it to be easier to be honest than not.
DRM makes it harder to be honest, not easier.

MW> DRM is one of the things that make it *possible* for Netflix and others to obtain licenses to distribute content over the Internet. This distribution mode is much more convenient for customers. Without DRM, honest customers would still be stuck with DVDs. Actually, DVD-by-mail service has a higher profit margin than streaming, so it would be in distributors short-term financial interest - and against that of customers - to side with you and argue against DRM on the Internet. This is not the path we follow.

You seem to have some other motivation for DRM in mind.  But you don't seem to state it; could you?
Platform lock in.

MW> For our part we have gone to great lengths to make our service available on 1000s of platforms from many different manufacturers. Platform lock-in is the furthest thing from our minds.

Almost any distribution method makes some legitimate acts hard.  It's legitimate for me to lend my books to my family in the UK, for example, but a total pain in the neck to ship them.
It's hard to find a method of that does less to prevent illegitimate uses yet does more to make legitimate uses harder than DRM.

You have a different model of what happens when content is unprotected than many creators and owners of content, I am afraid.  I don't think we should be telling them how to run their businesses.
That's just the thing. You are telling them how to run their business. DRMs are deployed exclusively by big distribution platforms. You won't find Trent Reznor or any Indie artist trying to setup some DRM system himself. It's something an artist gets shoved into after signing a contract, often unknowingly after the distributor repackaged and resold their content to third and fourth parties. It's exclusively the domain of companies like yours, and Microsoft and Netflix.

MW> Content protection is a very significant requirement in the contracts with studios and others who license content to us. It's certainly not something we impose on them.

This has all ben re-hashed quite a long time before now, and I find it quite unnecessary to do so again. The debate on the merits of DRM has come and gone and left a consensus except apparently here that it's a bad idea.

MW> I don't see much evidence of this supposed consensus amongst the people I work with, my friends and relatives, or the tens of millions of people who light up one third of US Internet capacity with DRM-protected content every night. Perhaps it was a different group of people you are speaking of ?

...Mark