Re: Campaign for position of chair and mandate to close this community group

On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 12:27 AM, Fred Andrews <fredandw@live.com> wrote:

>
>
> > From: dhgbayne@fastmail.fm
> > To: public-restrictedmedia@w3.org
> > Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2014 21:34:48 -0800
>
> > Subject: Re: Campaign for position of chair and mandate to close this
> community group
> >
> > > Unfortunately the EME
> > > proponents are just not interested - for now they are pushing to
> > > integrate tightly with the web. If the W3C were to remove content
> > > protection from the charter and shutdown the work on the EME tomorrow
> > > then the EME proponents could just roll over to this solution and still
> > > solve their use case - we would have a much better outcome for security
> > > and privacy, and keep the web discussion open and free of
> mis-features.
> > > What do people opposed to DRM in this group think? This still promotes
> > > DRM, but not on the web, and solves some significant issues. Am I still
> > > misunderstanding some important points?
> >
> > In fact, my understanding is that the solution you describe (individual
> > apps, silo'd in their respective ecosystems / app-stores) is exactly the
> > situation that people are trying to fix with EME.
>
> I would like to understand and be able to articulate this problem.
>

I believe I've explained quite a few times why confining restricted
content to native apps / plugins (the solution we have today) is a problem.
And it's purely a technological / user experience one, not a political one.

For our specific usecase, today's solution:
- requires users to go through an install step to access content on the web
- supports only software decoding, which impacts both video quality (on
constrained devices) and battery life
- is tied to a specific vendor (Microsoft). This is an issue both for the
provider and the user - it would also be better if users had a choice of
player technologies.
- that vendor has announced end-of-life for that solution

I don't know what else I can do to convince you that these are our
motivations, except to restate them, although this is getting repetitive.
What evidence could we provide that would convince you that what I say
above is true ?

The W3C is a good venue for discussing a better solution, because the right
people are here and the process is open. It is not the proponents of EME
who choose to consider that this has some political significance, for us it
is a technical re-factoring of some existing functionality.

You seem happy with a solution which "redirects" requests for restricted
content "outside" the W3C specifications. In fact EME is supposed to do
exactly that, with the piece that is "outside" being the CDM. Is there some
other way of factoring the specifications that would meet your criteria for
keeping this functionality "outside", but that would also address the
technical issues above ?

...Mark




> It's clearly not the problem of designing systems for the delivery of
> protected content as this is already solved.  I suggest that the problem
> being solved is the political problem of redefining the open web as being
> compatible with user agent restrictions on the use of content.  In this
> light, attempts by the proponents of this position to redirect people to
> this community group to design a better system can be seen as nothing but a
> redirection, and this supports my appeal to close this group.
>
>
> > Of course, the solution of EME + closed source, proprietary, hardware-
> > and OS-tied CDM is technologically and socially identical to having
> > playback apps. But not everyone agrees.
>
> There seem to be some real differences.  It is not necessary to add
> 'support of playback of protected content' to the HTML WG charter in order
> to add a mechanism to redirect some content to other apps or devices, and
> modification to the mechanism would not be circumvention of a copyright
> protection system.    Where as the EME on it's own, with just a
> copy-through CDM, could be deemed as an effective technological mechanism
> and requires adding 'support of playback of protected content' to the HTML
> WG charter.   Thus they are not equivalent, the difference is in the
> compromising of the principles of the web, and I suggest that this is the
> real problem that the proponents are addressing, and Tim and the W3C have
> already endorsed the change to the charter - don't be fooled by their
> claims about solving technical problems.
>
> cheers
> Fred
>
>