Re: Cory Doctorow: W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards, says it's OK for your browser to say "I can't let you do that, Dave" [via Restricted Media Community Group]

On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 5:48 AM, cobaco <cobaco@freemen.be> wrote:

> On 2013-10-04 14:21 David Singer wrote:
> > On Oct 4, 2013, at 10:16 , Martin Kliehm <w3c@kliehm.com> wrote:
> > > On 04.10.2013 13:00, Karl Dubost wrote:
> > > - Open Source is also imperative so that *anybody* can create
> compatible
> > > players, not just a few big companies who own patented software.
>
> > If I can create a player, I can create a copier.  How do you avoid that?
>
> The alternative is saying "only the blessed developpers are allowed to
> make a
> player" .
>
> That is not acceptable in an open standard, as this creates a powerfull
> gatekeeper in the entity that decides who is blessed, and thus who gets to
> compete (i.e. it's the antithesis of open standard)
>

It's not EME that "creates" this situation. It's a pre-existing condition.
The content owners dictate in their license terms that they will only allow
players with certain properties (specifically, not also being a copier) to
play their content. They're entitled to set their own terms, or, at the
very least, W3C is not the place to argue that they are not.

As for open standards, nothing in EME is incompatible with
http://open-stand.org/principles/ (principles, btw, that WHATWG does not
adhere to).


>
> Note: The W3C patent policy has language to prevent the "only blessed
> developpers are allowed to make a player issue"-problem .
> Black box CDM's allow companies the same result through different means,
> this
> should also be blocked, for the exact same reasons.
> Yet with EME the W3C is de facto aiding and abetting exactly that. Which is
> why people, me included, are so upset with W3C over this and consider EME
> as
> the W3C selling out.
>
>
> More in general the answer to "how do you avoid that?" is...
>
> You can't, as preventing it requires violating the basic nature of general
> purpose computers and digital goods (that the digital good it's also
> happens
> to represent a piece of audio or video is irrelevant to that basic
> reality).
> Manipulating bits is what a general purpose computer is made for, and
> digital
> good are just bunch of bits.
> Thanks to that basic reality there is no noticable scarcity for digital
> goods
> once the first copy is created, and the creating itself is a sunk cost.
> Consequently any business model that relies on scarcity is doomed, and any
> attempts to introduce artificial scarcity will at best slow that doom down
> a
> bit (while inevitably generating a lot of resentment).
>

I don't think business models for a/v content have ever really been based
on scarcity. As we've discussed, the marginal cost of production of CDs and
DVDs was never a significant factor in their availability. Media is not a
commodity and it has never simply been supply and demand that sets the
price.

Sunk costs is about the irrelevance of the cost of production to future
rational economic decision making. The cost of production may or may not be
a sunk cost - sunk costs are by definition unrecoverable and maybe selling
the product is a way to recover those costs ? I am not an economist,
though. But anyway, just because the money has already been spent doesn't
imply that the future price should equal the cost of distribution. People
are free to sell products on whatever (legal) basis the market accepts.

...Mark



> --
> Cheers
>
>