Re: Video copy protection

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 1:42 PM, Robert O'Callahan <robert@ocallahan.org> wrote:
> This is a tricky situation. On one hand, if it helps people sleep at night
> and it helps adoption of <video>, then I'd be happy for the spec to include
> an attribute that means "the author politely requests that the UA not make
> an effort to make it easy for people to save the video", with the
> understanding that UAs may ignore this request. I'd even support honouring
> this request in Firefox.
>
> However, this might need some legal analysis with regard to the USA's DMCA
> and possibly other laws ... in case such an attribute would be deemed to
> constitute an "effective technological protection measure" and then any UA
> not honouring the request could be legally liable.

Indeed, this is quite a big concern. And unfortunately it's one that's
hard to get clarity in until there is litigation precedence. IIRC
there is precedence that says that a single boolean "this is copyright
protected data" flag in cable transmission meant that TiVo like
devices were required by law not to record such content. However I am
not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

It does seem to me though that the copyright information would be
better placed in the video file rather than in the HTML markup
pointing to the video file. So that if you have several pages on your
site that link to the same video file, you don't accidentally forget
this attribute in one of them. Also so that it works if someone
navigates directly to the video file, in which case there is no
markup.

/ Jonas

Received on Monday, 8 February 2010 23:01:52 UTC