Re: Encrypted Media proposal: Summary of the discussion so far

On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 02:04, Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 20:57:23 +0100, Christian Kaiser <kaiserc@google.com>
> wrote:
>
>  On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 08:48, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>  Engineers are generally unable to come up with innovative approaches
>>> when their hands are tied by contracts and anti-circumvention laws.
>>>
>>>
>> True in some cases. They also can't innovate if the barrier to entry is
>> too
>> high. Lowering the barrier to entry is one of the IMHO positive side
>> effects of the proposal at hand.
>>
>
> If we're talking about innovation within and entry to the browser market,
> this doesn't make sense.


As previously mentioned, the proposal enables innovation through
competition *between content distributors*, which in turn is enabled by
lowering the barriers to entry.
Content distributors' interests are closely aligned with users' interests
since more convenient and full-featured distribution services will win in a
competitive landscape. (Of course, this only holds water if you think that
users should be able to choose for themselves.)
In addition to that, content distributors are motivated to keep the cost of
content protection low (since they're probably carrying some of their
costs), and are therefore seeking simple, cheap and standardized solutions.
The concepts of "open source" and "royalty free" are compatible with these
motivations.
So I would claim that lowering the barriers to entry for content
distributors and aligning with their needs is positive for users and for
the web.

In the browser market, I'd argue that barriers to entry would stay the same
as they are today if one assumes that the proposal would result in a CDM
plug-in model. The hurdles to pass to allow plugging in CDMs seem pretty
similar to the hurdles to pass to allow plugging in Flash or Silverlight.


> The proposal at hand requires a few proprietary and/or royalty-encumbered
> de facto standard CDMs to emerge,


I disagree with this statement. The proposal at hand enables (but does not
require!) the use of proprietary and/or royalty-encumbered standard CDMs.
It also enables innovation to allow e.g. non-proprietary, non-encumbered
CDMs to potentially emerge.


> which can do nothing but *raise* the barriers of entry. Because browsers
> cannot have full control over the CDMs, it will also limit their ability to
> fix bugs, optimize and to innovate -- e.g. one couldn't add
> brightness/contrast controls because the video decoder output is not
> available.


I don't think that the proposal at hand doesn't allow video decoder output
to be available. You're making an assumption here.

Christian