Flash and Silverlight are dying anyway. So it's up to the movie industry and not up to us to bend over. And you know at least Flash was separated from the browser and ported to several systems. DRM in HTML5 will mean that Google, Apple, Microsoft will simply bundle their DRM modules and the free software world can fuck off. DRM in HTML5 is far worse than the status quo.
I don't share completely your assertions. In order for commercial companies to be able to use html5, they need some form of drm. This is just enabling them to do business.
I believe that free and open, given some semblance of equal playing field will always win.
Just to be clear, if they came and say, no drm in html, I would stand behind that as well. I just accept their judgement that this was necessary at the moment for things to work.
I don't think only my view is right, so, I might be wrong here, but this is what I believe.
They don't need DRM. DRM does not work. Just go to pirate bay and you'll find every TV series, movie (with DVD/BluRay/Stream release), album immediately after their release. They think they need DRM. But in reality they don't. It doesn't stop piracy at all. It's a burden only to their legal customers and not to the pirates. It is all about easy and affordable access.
If a company insists on using DRM then they should simply create their own proprietary plugin like Flash. But there is absolutely no reason for us to destroy the open web and make it rely on proprietary binary modules.
I don't know about "normal" people, but all the pointless shit they put on Blurays made me go BACK to piracy. I started my first real job 2 years ago, so i felt i should buy my movies. Turns out, Blurays are EVEN WORSE than DVDs. Nonstop trailers, that use your bandwidth to download new fucking trailers, a hundred warnings about piracy and a DRM that requires constant annoying updates and a crappy PowerDVD software.
> It stops plenty of piracy as without it piracy could be as easy as a single click from a place like Netflix, Google Music, etc.
It... actually is already at this point. I can find any song, any TV show, and any film, available to stream instantly on Youtube of all places. This isn't a shady torrent site, it's a Google-owned property.
In the music sphere, Grooveshark has every song you could think of, and is claimed to fail to comply with the licensing requirements of the copyright owners, and is thus being sued over it.
There is little or no reason that a similar service could not pop up for video, aside from the fact that bandwidth is costly, and I'm sure that could be resolved to an extent through some form of torrent-over-WebRTC system.
Everyday users fail at saving a youtube video. And someone who knows how to rip a youtube video usually also knows about pirate bay or other pirate websites.
Even worse, there's a whole bunch of malware Youtube downloader programs/browser plugins. It's pretty crazy but using TPB is at least easier and safer.
Then they can keep it and they won't get my money, and everyone will just end up pirating it anyway.
You don't combat piracy by locking it down and making a pain to access your content, you compete/combat piracy by making sure its always easier and more convenient to obtain your content legitimately, not punish those that are legit for the few that will go pirate it anyway. As long as I can purchase a song for $1 DRM free and have it in 5 seconds at a high quality from iTunes or Amazon, I won't ever be tempted to find a torrent for it, even if its free.
DRM creates artificial scarcity, and scarcity breeds a black market. Those black markets may always exist, but if you make it hard enough to access your product on the device they want at the time they want, they will have more incentive to go to the black markets.
But we don't have to bend over for their believes! They can continue using Flash or Silverlight or write their own crap plugins. Why should we destroy the open web for them?
No, that's completely the wrong way around. The rights owners could not sell anything to the BBC if the BBC were to simply refuse to buy anything they can not publish without DRM, and not selling anything is not a particularly good business model in most cases.
"The rights owners" are in a market, and if the market simply refused to buy broken products, they would have to either deliver a non-broken product or go bankrupt, there is no way in which they could force people to buy broken products in order to sustain them.
The BBC fights hard enough to win the rights to show this content, if they didn't the content owners would go to the other channels, Sky, ITV, Channel 4, 5 or even create their own distro like HBO.
People, the majority of people don't know what DRM is, they don't care, they just want to watch content.
One of the biggest problems in tech and forums like these is that everyone thinks they are so much more significant than they are, they don't realise they are such a tiny minority of the consumer spectrum.
BBC as a distributor still has way more influence than a single individual. By rejecting DRMed content they'll send a strong message to the publishers. It works in other cases, so I see why it can't work with video as well.
It only says that they "don't feel the requirement will change". It says nothing about their potential influence. I'd say they are just chickening and don't have guts to stand up against crazy Lysenkoist publishers which insist on DRM. It doesn't mean they can't - they just don't want to. That was the whole point. As long as distributors would continue cowardly proliferating DRM, the situation will remain as is.
Not if the price is so high. Just because advertising spends all day every day telling us that we can't live without something, doesn't make it true. In fact, my usual opinion is that the better the advertising, the less I trust what it says.
And that's fine. If they want DRM they should write a proprietary app or plugin. But we shouldn't turn the web into a proprietary app controlled by Microsoft, Google, and Apple.
So you'd rather give up on the open web and turn it into a proprietary system? Just for a seamless experience? Sorry to say this. But that's just plain stupid.
The web is not proprietary, not an app, and only to some extend controlled by the w3c, which is much more than Microsoft, Google, and Apple.
> In order for commercial companies to be able to use html5, they need some form of drm. This is just enabling them to do business.
Is that the same kind of DRM that enabled businesses to use the printing press, radio broadcasts, TV sets, vinyl records, cassette tapes, audio CDs and MP3s?
They don't really. Any stream can be captured. So if I can play the audio or video, I can capture it in a format that I can share, drm just makes it a little harder.
