Re: Video copy protection

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:
> 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
>
>

Most video encapsulation formats, including Ogg and MPEG, already
provide header fields for adding such informative information. I
believe the W3C Media Annotations working group is developing a
standard API for media data, which includes a copyright field. If that
was to be included into HTML5, it would provide an API (probably in
JavaScript?) that would allow finding out such copyright information.
Maybe then the Web page author can do something with it? Is there a
means to disable context menus in browsers?

Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Monday, 8 February 2010 23:45:31 UTC