Re: Brightcove retreats from HTML5, pushes refreshed SDKs for native Android, iOS apps

Le vendredi 22 mars 2013 à 10:23 -0700, John Foliot a écrit :
> > But I think it's making a pretty big leap of faith to assume that
> > having > an open API for interacting with a DRM blackbox will open up DRM
> > technical solutions, esp. since these solutions only get accepted by
> > the > said premium content creators with some guarantees of non-openness.
>
> I'm not making that assumption Dom. 

Well, I think invoking Firefox OS to plead the case for EME doesn't seem
consistent with not making that assumption.

My practical concerns with EME is that I have no reasonable ground to
think that I, as a user and proponent of open source, will be able to
view the content I wish on my Firefox browser on my linux desktop, even
though I'm ready to pay for that content. Since that hasn't happened
outside the Web so far, I have no ground to believe it would happen
inside the Web.

DRM system structurally rely on contractual guarantees that the system
can keep a secret from the user, and that makes them rather
fundamentally incompatible with open source. As a result, I fail to see
how a DRM-enabling solution can promote interoperability independently
of the operating system and of the browser in that context, and so I
fail to see what role W3C can play in that space.

Yes, there will be DRM-content, that some DRM-enabled browsers will
permit to see; given that the underlying systems will be proprietary and
rely on one-to-one agreements (based on what I know of how these systems
operate today), I don't see how enabling this is aligned with the
mission of W3C to enable cross-platform universal access.

> We need to be pragmatic and reasonable here: if some content creators
> want to protect their content using an encryption method, we should be
> looking on how to make that user-experience as "seemless" as possible
> (as Francois notes above). 

If that seamless experience requires proprietary systems and one-to-one
contractual agreements, I don't know that "we" need to provide a
solution for this.

> Will it be perfect? Likely not but then, is the 'whole open web'
> completely accessible as well? No - does that mean then that we should
> give up and abandon that quest too? Or that we should insist that only
> images with appropriate alt text render on screen - that inaccessible
> images not display for anyone? Where do we draw the line?

I think the line can be drawn from W3C principles:
        One of W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits available
        to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network
        infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location,
        or physical or mental ability
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission#principles

Show me a DRM system that "premium" content creators are ready to run
without one-to-one contractual guarantees, and ready to run on open
source software running on an open source OS; having yet to see such a
thing, I think enabling it on the Web would de-fact make the playing
field less open for some hardware and software, failing a primary goal
of our mission.

Dom

Received on Friday, 22 March 2013 21:50:39 UTC