Re: Dear EFF: Please don't pick the wrong fight

On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 1:13 AM, Emmanuel Revah <stsil@manurevah.com> wrote:

> On 2013/10/06 02:27, Jeff Jaffe wrote:
>
>> An interesting rebuttal to EFF's arguments, complete with a response from
>> EFF.
>>
>> Jeff
>>
>> Dear EFF: please don't pick the wrong fight
>>  http://chris.improbable.org/**2013/10/4/dear-eff/<http://chris.improbable.org/2013/10/4/dear-eff/>
>>  Chris Adams
>>
>
>
>
> In short: We need EME as a W3C standard because it's better than Flash and
> Silverlight (and those products are obsolete regardless of EME). To me it's
> sad that this is an actual argument.
>

Honestly, many of us feel that EME is just a technical refactoring of
functionality *already present on the web*. Moving functionality from
Flash/Silverlight to UAs and in the process improving the user experience
(no download, access to hw decode in some cases), security (smaller attack
surface, more UA oversight, W3C review), privacy (UA oversight, W3C
review) and, yes, openness (visible HTML5/JS apps + EME vs closed,
compiled, Silverlight/Flash code).

Flash and Silverlight may be going away, but that will change (or something
else will emerge) if there is no other solution acceptable to the content
owners. Or the content will only be available in native apps.

I still find it hard to fathom why such a technical refactoring of existing
functionality is the cause of such ire.

On the other hand, as Danny O'Brien said, "It's really hard to argue that
DRM is problematic when people can turn around and say that the W3C and Tim
Berners-Lee think it's all right.", so I see why those opposed to DRM would
object to the "in scope" statement as a loss in a broader political
context. But that's not related to EME specifically and is really an issue
between opponents of DRM and the W3C management.


>
>
> The Watermarking idea is an interesting one, but I doubt that any content
> publisher that uses DRM will be interested in hearing about it once EME is
> in place.


I doubt many content owners care about EME. They throw over their
robustness requirements and it's up to the technologists how to meet them.
Whether we make native apps or use Silverlight or use EME, it's all the
same to them.

You should bear in mind that in practice server-side individual
watermarking probably wouldn't scale. Our server guys resist even looking
at the bytes as they flow from disk to NIC. It would be a big change to the
design and economics of content delivery to do individual watermarking
server-side. You can do the watermarking client-side, but then you have the
same requirements for robust non-user-modifiable code.

...Mark





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> --
> Emmanuel Revah
> http://manurevah.com
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