Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Posted May 14, 2014 17:59 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465)Parent article: Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Posted May 14, 2014 18:08 UTC (Wed)
by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205)
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Posted May 14, 2014 18:11 UTC (Wed)
by gerv (guest, #3376)
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Your confidence in things changing for the better in the short term is significantly stronger than mine.
Posted May 14, 2014 18:28 UTC (Wed)
by krake (guest, #55996)
[Link] (6 responses)
Does that matter?
Posted May 15, 2014 7:00 UTC (Thu)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (5 responses)
Yes it does. Opera found out that the hard way. Opera was innovative little browser for years, but found out that people ignore it: if site was broken in Opera the most they could achieve is a footnote on said site. Very rarely someone evn tried to fix it. Which meant that eventually even die-hard Opera fans started using other browsers. First in parallel to Opera and then exclusively. Now that Opera no longer exist, instead we have hollow shell of it, Chromium fork with some bells and whistles attached. Mozilla does not “hold” the market share. It's eroding. Slowly but surely. That's the problem. Mozilla just decided to do something before Firefox will repeat the sad story of Opera.
Posted May 15, 2014 7:39 UTC (Thu)
by krake (guest, #55996)
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That it is not the quality of the product or its features or its users' satisfaction that makes it hold the current market share.
That none of its values would enable it to regain lost share.
Which makes Mozilla a hostage of the market: whatever the market decides Mozilla will have to follow.
Posted May 15, 2014 8:05 UTC (Thu)
by Guhvanoh (subscriber, #4449)
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Posted May 15, 2014 8:39 UTC (Thu)
by gerv (guest, #3376)
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Posted May 16, 2014 19:18 UTC (Fri)
by Aliasundercover (guest, #69009)
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I would stick with a no DRM Firefox much like I stuck with Opera using another browser only for those things needing the blasted DRM. I also tend to ignore Flash unless I really compellingly want to see that content. (My bank requires it. How crazy is that, require the biggest security hole out there for banking?)
I don't represent most users. I think they have fair reason to fear getting ignored over web video.
Posted May 19, 2014 6:55 UTC (Mon)
by Arker (guest, #14205)
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Opera had a fairly small but very loyal *paying* userbase at one point. I know, I was one of them. They produced a very clean, small, fast and incredibly useful browser. And yes, broken web sites showed up as broken in it, at least part of the time. That did not bother Opera users, that was a positive not a negative! It is NOT the browsers job to dress up a broken pig of a failed website, put a little makeup on it, and try to fool me into giving a kiss!
And just like Mozilla, someone with more importance than he merited got it in his head that everyone would want Opera if they 'fixed' that. So they did, they made an Opera just like all the other browsers. And what happened?
People that were happy with other browsers were still happy with other browsers and had no reason to switch. While those of us that had been happy with Opera, were very unhappy, and DID have a reason to switch.
And now Opera is dead. Little lesson in there perhaps.
Posted May 14, 2014 18:33 UTC (Wed)
by riccieri (guest, #94794)
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Also, Mozilla won't ship DRM - it will ship an open-source sandbox that implements the API that the DRM module from Adobe expects. Actually downloading and executing the binary DRM module won't be done without user consent, much like it is today with Flash.
Posted May 14, 2014 18:50 UTC (Wed)
by kjp (guest, #39639)
[Link] (3 responses)
Is a deed for land imaginary property? Water rights on a river? Futures and options? An IOU? A federal reserve note? US bonds? Mineral rights for phracking? CDO/CDS contracts? Humans seem very good at 'propertizing' things.
Posted May 14, 2014 19:09 UTC (Wed)
by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054)
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Posted May 14, 2014 19:19 UTC (Wed)
by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205)
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Things like fed notes and bonds are illegal to copy because this would amount to forging a contract, i.e. making a claim of a legal agreement when the not all parties agreed. (In the case of counterfeiting, it would be the Federal Reserve who is bound by the "contract" laid out by the fake dollar despite its lack of consent.)
Property laws on the other hand are part of the legal framework which is imposed on all citizens, whether they explicitly consent or not. So there is a difference between "propertizing" IP and "propertizing" a financial instrument. The latter merely needs agreement between the affected parties; the other needs to go through due process to become law.
That's the moral distinction anyway, which is why I'd call copyright/patents/whatever "imaginary property" but not extend the term to financial instruments, even though both are ultimately just paper. I'm aware of the current legal status of IP and hope not to start a long discussion about that because to the best of my knowledge nothing interesting has changed since the last time we had one. :) I'm just saying that it's coherent to disparage IP without throwing out contract law along with it.
(As for land deeds, water rights, etc., the water or land is non-imaginary property, and I'd suggest that the deeds are some convex combination of "actual property" and "contract". I don't think they can be classified sanely as property but I wouldn't call them "imaginary property" either.)
Posted May 15, 2014 0:31 UTC (Thu)
by wahern (subscriber, #37304)
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Fed notes and bonds are types of negotiable instruments. The law of negotiable instruments predates that of modern property and contract law. Both the law and the history is fascinating, IMO.
The Wikipedia article doesn't due the subject justice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negotiable_instrument
I knew a law professor who traveled the world consulting with lawyers and judges in a somewhat vein attempt to prevent customary merchant law from being subsumed by theories of contract law. He was like the Richard Stallman of negotiable instruments.
Posted May 15, 2014 8:33 UTC (Thu)
by roc (subscriber, #30627)
[Link] (6 responses)
Everyone I know at Mozilla, *especially* the people working on this DRM stuff, earnestly hopes you're right that DRM will go away. We just don't believe it will happen in the forseeable future. If it does, this all becomes irrelevant since the CDM blob won't ever be activated.
Posted May 15, 2014 16:38 UTC (Thu)
by lsl (subscriber, #86508)
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Except that "our open-source code" in this case means Mozilla's unaltered code and not the community's. If I touch that code in any way everything stops working (presumably). If I want it to keep working I'd have to enter into negotiations with some proprietary blob vendor. This is the antithesis to the Open Web.
If what you're saying is true and a browser not supporting DRM doesn't stand a chance in the market this pretty much amounts to the end of the Open Web.
Posted May 15, 2014 17:00 UTC (Thu)
by roc (subscriber, #30627)
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But "the end of the Open Web" is an overstatement. There's a very large world of Web standards and content that has nothing to do with DRM and is unaffected by this.
Posted May 15, 2014 18:20 UTC (Thu)
by glisse (guest, #44837)
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Posted May 15, 2014 21:01 UTC (Thu)
by josh (subscriber, #17465)
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Posted May 15, 2014 21:53 UTC (Thu)
by glisse (guest, #44837)
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Posted May 15, 2014 22:09 UTC (Thu)
by josh (subscriber, #17465)
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Posted May 14, 2014 18:38 UTC (Wed)
by krake (guest, #55996)
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It contains a couple of weird sentences, e.g.
"But video is an important aspect of online life, and a browser that doesn’t enable video would itself be deeply flawed as a consumer product."
I had been under the impression that Firefox is already enabling video.
or
"Firefox users would need to use another browser every time they want to watch a controlled video, and that calls into question the usefulness of Firefox as a product."
Isn't that still the case even with the Adobe DRM?
Posted May 14, 2014 18:52 UTC (Wed)
by alonz (subscriber, #815)
[Link] (15 responses)
If I recall correctly, W3C EME enables the same video to be accessed using multiple DRM schemes. Mozilla appear to be hoping (not unreasonably) that most high-profile proprietary content sites will employ the Mozilla/Adobe DRM in parallel to any other option they support.
Posted May 14, 2014 19:01 UTC (Wed)
by krake (guest, #55996)
[Link] (14 responses)
The quoted sentence in Mozilla's statement implied that having Adobe's DRM would allow Firefox users to stay being Firefox users and still have access to all that "important" content.
As far as I understand the technologies involed it does not.
Posted May 14, 2014 19:51 UTC (Wed)
by gerv (guest, #3376)
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Posted May 14, 2014 20:01 UTC (Wed)
by krake (guest, #55996)
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Firefox users will have to also use other browsers due to the flawed design of EME.
It would have been better to not inclulde this at all, right now it looks like an attempt to fool the uninformed.
Posted May 14, 2014 22:15 UTC (Wed)
by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987)
[Link] (3 responses)
Not that anyone at Mozilla would be really happy with implementing any form of DRM support, from all I can tell.
Posted May 15, 2014 2:25 UTC (Thu)
by donbarry (guest, #10485)
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The Apache license and "open source" (as opposed to Free/Libre) culture surrounding Mozilla continues to make apologetics for this sort of backhanded support. So long as the major funding for browser development is intrinsically tied to profit interests, it cannot easily be otherwise. The enemy, as always, is the capitalist organization of software development. But it doesn't mean that one has to allow Mozilla to do this without explaining the dangers to the user community. Mozilla, like Android, have each closed their eyes and ears and wailed "lalalala" while promoting their own "app stores" (Firefox extensions) in which little or no consideration is given to the free/libre nature of the code: licenses are not mandatory parts of search results and in fact are hardly ever to be found.
Here we see another historic line in the sand breached -- not by Microsoft, Opera, and Safari, where it is to be expected -- but by Mozilla. Having breached this line, they deserve no deference or respect in participating in future standardization processes, and that is a real shame.
Posted May 15, 2014 8:42 UTC (Thu)
by gerv (guest, #3376)
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Mozilla mostly uses the MPL (a weak copyleft license), not the Apache license.
You can continue to claim that Google makes all Mozilla's decisions, but it will continue to be a claim without a shred of evidence to back it up. If Google were making these decisions for us, we'd be using their CDM, not Adobe's.
Posted May 15, 2014 7:32 UTC (Thu)
by krake (guest, #55996)
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I am also confident that they can leverage Mozillas standing to even further their uptake at the publishers' side.
As I said before I am merely critizing the phrasing, since it looks like an attempt to fool the uninformed into believing that this will allow them to continue to use Firefox as their only browser.
The very core principle of EME is compartmentalization, the goal is to make content exclusive to certain parties.
Sure, Mozilla Corp. is a for-profit organisation, but their marketing is usually way above the "fool the sheeple" level.
Posted May 15, 2014 10:07 UTC (Thu)
by jra (subscriber, #55261)
[Link] (7 responses)
> "But we hope that we will achieve our goals here."
Your only goal is market share. All else is secondary, and you have now clearly shown will be thrown under the bus if it conflicts with the primary goal.
That couldn't be clearer !
It's obviously in conflict with:
"The Mozilla project is a global community of people who believe that openness, innovation, and opportunity are key to the continued health of the Internet."
How do you do this job ? Is "Market Share" the only reason you get up in the morning ? The only reason to do this increasingly difficult job of spreading the PR message of why betraying your users is a good idea and in their own interests really ?
Posted May 15, 2014 12:29 UTC (Thu)
by gerv (guest, #3376)
[Link] (6 responses)
We still believe that openness, innovation, and opportunity are key to the continued health of the Internet. You are confusing doing something with liking it. No-one at Mozilla is celebrating today, and Mozilla remains opposed to DRM - Mitchell's and Andreas' blog post rehearsed, for the Nth time, why it's not good for users. We had two bad options; we think this one is less bad than the other one.
Posted May 15, 2014 16:50 UTC (Thu)
by lsl (subscriber, #86508)
[Link] (1 responses)
Is Linux really fully supported? AFAIK the existing Adobe DRM implementation doesn't give the same "robustness guarantees" on all platforms. They claim a higher degree of "robustness" for the Windows variant, which IIRC led Amazon (when it still had a Flash-based alternative to Silverlight) to not offer high-definition content to Linux users.
But Andreas' blog said the CDM isn't able to gather any information about its host system, so this stuff can't possibly be a problem, right?
Posted May 15, 2014 17:25 UTC (Thu)
by donbarry (guest, #10485)
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The effect of this on the corporate culture will be profound.
As Alexander Pope wrote:
"Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
Posted May 16, 2014 8:00 UTC (Fri)
by jra (subscriber, #55261)
[Link] (3 responses)
Yeah, remember when we were *cool*. Yeah, yeah, cool man... We used to be so *cool* didn't we... Remember that ?
But that was then Gervase, this is now.
Now you have demonstrated you have no principle you're not willing to abandon in the name of popularity. None. Doesn't matter what you did in the past. The point of principles is that they are immutable. That's why they are your *principles*.
A blank, looking for validation and approval. Nothing more than that. It's sad really. Reminds me a little of Tony Blair (if you'll forgive the digression in UK politics, as I know both you and I relate to that :-). Tony used to be cool once too. Now look at him. Can't go into a restaurant now without the waiters trying a citizens arrest as a war criminal.
Is that the legacy you want for Mozilla ? Is that the organization you want to give your talents to ? Do you think that's a good use of your time ?
If you want to be an apologist for DRM, I'm pretty sure Netflix would pay you a *lot* better than Mozilla. Or any other proprietary software company.
You've already shown popularity is #1 for you. How about going to work where you can be *really* popular ! You won't have to pretend you have any principles there, life will be so much easier.
Posted May 16, 2014 8:25 UTC (Fri)
by gerv (guest, #3376)
[Link] (2 responses)
Your accusation is simply false. In this particular case (which is the second significant one I know of, the first being H.264) we have had to do something we would rather not do, to avoid an even worse outcome.
Let's say we took your path, and in 3 years time, Firefox on the desktop had a market share of less than 5%, and our influence on the course of the web was negligible. Would you still be there on our backs, deploying the whip and saying "for goodness sake, Mozilla - you seem to be violating your principles all over the place these days; why are you letting these guys push you around"?
The reason we win quite a lot is because we have a decent market share. It's not big enough to win every battle. The idea that we should throw that away in a glorious Charge of the Light Brigade the first time we lose is foolish.
Posted May 16, 2014 12:57 UTC (Fri)
by jra (subscriber, #55261)
[Link] (1 responses)
What you can't do is violate your principles and claim you're only doing so to keep them clean for next time, when you promise, *truly* promise that next time will be different. We won't cave into pressure next time, really we won't. I know we did this time, but that was *different* you see, it was because we *had* to..
It's sad, just sad. Pathetic and sad. You won't even admit to yourself that implementing DRM is a violation of principles. Remember this ?
"We see DRM in general as profoundly hostile to all three of: users, open source software, and browser vendors who aren’t also DRM vendors.", or now he's gone are you planning to revise history on that ?
The industry that you claim "forced you into this" is laughing at you. "We need to keep our influence for next time" is a sick joke. You don't seem to understand - you don't have any influence left. You've shown you'll shred your morals like a cheap suit if anyone threatens you in any way. What need does anyone have to listen to what you say ? What will you do if they don't ? Capitulate again ?
You have no principles left, only a ferocious desire for market share. Be honest about it, at least to yourself. You can play the PR man out there on the web, but look in the mirror and think, really think, about what you've become, and what you're doing.
You're an apologist for DRM. Is that what you thought you'd be when you were growing up ? Is that what all that education was for ? To learn how to convince people that something you know in your heart is hostile to openness, freedom and decency isn't so bad because it's *you* that's doing it to them ?
What is Firefox and Mozilla for ? Why does it exist ?
Come back to me when you have a better answer than "to be popular".
Posted May 16, 2014 13:20 UTC (Fri)
by gerv (guest, #3376)
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No, we still agree with that. Why are we doing this? Because we had two bad choices, and this one is least bad. Brendan was involved in our strategy to work out what to do about DRM from the very beginning and, if you check his Twitter stream, you'll see that he agreed that this was necessary.
I'm not an apologist for DRM. An apologist for DRM would be someone saying that DRM is a good thing. I'm not saying that. I don't use Netflix or similar services, because I'm not interested in most of the content they offer. I may well never use the Adobe CDM. But I don't fool myself into thinking I'm typical.
From that blog post:
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Unfortunately, Mozilla alone cannot change the industry on DRM at this point.
"The industry" will be forced to change because DRM cannot and will not stop people who do not respect imaginary property, it can only inconvenience ordinary users. They cannot keep up this business model of providing inferior products at infinity times the price-point, except by draconian laws. But these laws are increasingly difficult to implement or enforce for technical reasons.
So I can't understand Mozilla's position of "we must board this sinking ship because we can't change its direction". That statement is absurd.
Furthermore, "the industry" has an actual, documented history of installing malicious software on users' computers (e.g. the Sony rootkit scandal). I can't imagine why Mozilla believes it is appropriate to ship binary blobs from these goons and run it on their users' machines. The fears surrounding closed-source blobs are not just speculation in this case. Installing Adobe software on my systems would constitute an actual attack.
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Wouldn't that imply that Mozilla is concerned that their product is only able to hold on to its market share but wouldn't be able to gain it?
That's it advantages over competitors wouldn't be enough to earn a similar portion of the market share they have nowadays?
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Does that matter?
Wouldn't that imply that Mozilla is concerned that their product is only able to hold on to its market share but wouldn't be able to gain it?
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Once more, with feeling:
Imaginary property
Property is something that, if one person has it, another doesn't.
Art, literature, pharmaceutical formulas, &c. don't fit that pattern, which is why the government has to award special monopolies for them.
I admire apoelstra's locution, and will use it henceforth wherever the (at best) ill-informed would use “intellectual property”.
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
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At least I vaguely remembering watching videos with it.
If the video site is using any other form of DRM, say Google's, wouldn't a Firefox user still have to switch to Chrome?
> If the video site is using any other form of DRM, say Google's, wouldn't a Firefox user still have to switch to Chrome?
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
I am just saying that the official statement is using a rather awkward phrasing since the alliance does not achieve the alledged goal at all.
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
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As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
> avoid implementing H.264? Why have we sweated out a deal with Adobe which
> includes downstream support, Linux support and privacy protection when (I
> suspect) we could have implemented EME much easier and earlier if we
> didn't bother about those things?
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
Firefox gets closed-source DRM
> source software, and browser vendors who aren’t also DRM vendors.", or
> now he's gone are you planning to revise history on that?