Firefox gets closed-source DRM

Posted May 14, 2014 18:08 UTC (Wed) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205)
In reply to: Firefox gets closed-source DRM by josh
Parent article: Firefox gets closed-source DRM

From that blog post:

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

Posted May 14, 2014 18:11 UTC (Wed) by gerv (guest, #3376) [Link] (7 responses)

The industry may eventually realise that DRM is a bad idea. The question is: will a significant (as in, market-moving) number of people still be using Firefox when it finally does?

Your confidence in things changing for the better in the short term is significantly stronger than mine.

Firefox gets closed-source DRM

Posted May 14, 2014 18:28 UTC (Wed) by krake (guest, #55996) [Link] (6 responses)

> The question is: will a significant (as in, market-moving) number of people still be using Firefox when it finally does?

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?
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

Posted May 15, 2014 7:00 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (5 responses)

Does that matter?

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.

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?

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.

Firefox gets closed-source DRM

Posted May 15, 2014 7:39 UTC (Thu) by krake (guest, #55996) [Link]

That confirms my suspicion that they are afraid that Firefox would not have a good standing if it weren't for market inertia.

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.

Firefox gets closed-source DRM

Posted May 15, 2014 8:05 UTC (Thu) by Guhvanoh (subscriber, #4449) [Link] (2 responses)

How wrong you are. Opera is my browser of choice. The only reason why I'm posting this from IE now is that I'm at work. On my machines at home - Linux & Windows XP, my phones and tablet (all Android), Opera is the only browser that works with all the sites I visit. Chrome doesn't on my phones or tablet.

Firefox gets closed-source DRM

Posted May 15, 2014 8:39 UTC (Thu) by gerv (guest, #3376) [Link]

How does "1 person uses Opera!" counter any of the things the above poster said? Opera did not manage to keep using its own engine because its market share wasn't big enough to drive website changes. Now it uses someone else's engine, so its voice in web standards is much reduced (which is a loss for the web).

Firefox gets closed-source DRM

Posted May 16, 2014 19:18 UTC (Fri) by Aliasundercover (guest, #69009) [Link]

I bought Opera back in the days when they sold it and stuck with it until this past year. It was my favorite and I would only fire up other browsers for sites which failed on Opera. Toward the end that came to be quite a few, not just the airline ticket sites which only worked on IE in the bad old days.

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.

Firefox gets closed-source DRM

Posted May 19, 2014 6:55 UTC (Mon) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link]

Opera killed itself in much the same way Mozilla is doing it.

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.

Firefox gets closed-source DRM

Posted May 14, 2014 18:33 UTC (Wed) by riccieri (guest, #94794) [Link]

Mozilla isn't really "boarding the sinking ship". If the ship sinks, Mozilla just removes the support for it and that's it, it's not like Mozilla now depends on the success of DRM. You're attacking a straw man.

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.

Firefox gets closed-source DRM

Posted May 14, 2014 18:50 UTC (Wed) by kjp (guest, #39639) [Link] (3 responses)

> who do not respect imaginary property

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.

Imaginary property

Posted May 14, 2014 19:09 UTC (Wed) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link]

Once more, with feeling:

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

Posted May 14, 2014 19:19 UTC (Wed) by apoelstra (subscriber, #75205) [Link] (1 responses)

Most of the things you listed are contracts, which are not themselves property, but they are a record of an agreement between some parties. In effect contracts allow people to extend the legal system to accommodate some specific scenario, within clearly-defined bounds and assuming all parties agree.

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.)

Firefox gets closed-source DRM

Posted May 15, 2014 0:31 UTC (Thu) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link]

People have a habit of obscuring things through abstraction. For the same reason shouldn't lump copyright, patents, and trademark under the umbrella of intellectual property, we shouldn't call a bunch of other random stuff contracts. (And I'm not picking on you: it's a horrible trend in the legal academy.)

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.

Firefox gets closed-source DRM

Posted May 15, 2014 8:33 UTC (Thu) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (6 responses)

You should read the announcement more carefully. We're addressing the "binary blobs" problem head-on by sandboxing the closed-source CDM module so our open-source code dictates exactly what that module can and cannot do to your system.

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.

Firefox gets closed-source DRM

Posted May 15, 2014 16:38 UTC (Thu) by lsl (subscriber, #86508) [Link] (1 responses)

> We're addressing the "binary blobs" problem head-on by sandboxing the closed-source CDM module so our open-source code dictates exactly what that module can and cannot do to your system.

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.

Firefox gets closed-source DRM

Posted May 15, 2014 17:00 UTC (Thu) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

It totally, totally sucks that a full implementation of the Web requires proprietary code. Arguably we already crossed that bridge with H.264 and Flash. In any case, it wasn't Mozilla that created that situation and we're doing our best to mitigate it.

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.

Firefox gets closed-source DRM

Posted May 15, 2014 18:20 UTC (Thu) by glisse (guest, #44837) [Link] (3 responses)

Will we have HD content on Linux ? Because you know that no sandbox will block user from capturing memory post the CDM module decryption and thus capture the unencrypted stream and do what ever they want with it.

Firefox gets closed-source DRM

Posted May 15, 2014 21:01 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (2 responses)

If the CDM is properly sandboxed, the content won't be any more protected from recording on Windows, either.

Firefox gets closed-source DRM

Posted May 15, 2014 21:53 UTC (Thu) by glisse (guest, #44837) [Link] (1 responses)

I expect on windows there is API like on Android which allow you allocate write only buffer of memory that can be written by privileged code and than composited using the hardware ie only the GPU can read back the memory to composite it.

Firefox gets closed-source DRM

Posted May 15, 2014 22:09 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

Sure, but that can obviously be faked as well. The question is then whether you allow the closed-source CDM to authenticate with the platform's protected audio-video path without completely breaking the sandbox model.