CDM availability (was Re: Encrypted Media proposal)

On Mar 4, 2012, at 4:41 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:

> Because it's DRM, they also
> can't even legally reverse-engineer the CDM to port it to platforms
> the CDM producer chose not to care about.

Tab - I want to address this one point, because I don't understand how it would be helpful for someone to reverse-engineer a CDM if that was legal.

You would still likely require patent licenses from the CDM vendor and in practice, indemnity (against others having patents on the same technology). You still need to coordinate with the CDM vendor on the secrets that secure the system.

Personally, I would like to see a situation in which free source-code licenses are available for multiple CDMs. Device, OS and browser vendors would have no difficulty porting the CDM to their platform. CDM vendors would make money on the server side. This model is commonplace and successful elsewhere.

I can't make content protection vendors do this. On the other hand, for all I know they could be following this model already. It's probably only necessary for one to do that for the others to have to follow.

The prospect of a standard model for integration of this capability into HTML5 could be quite an incentive for them as well.

...Mark 

Received on Monday, 5 March 2012 04:13:43 UTC