LWN: Comments on "International Day Against DRM"

this war has been lost

ploxiln — Sun, 10 May 2015 04:05:14 +0000

Nope. There was "FairPlay" DRM on iTunes music downloads for many years.

DRM on music downloads broke down and disappeared because the record companies didn't like the iTunes music store dominating the industry and setting the terms (in particular, $1 per track across the board). So, they allowed Amazon to sell DRM-free mp3s, because iPods also dominated the market, and you couldn't have any other DRM scheme than Apple's "protecting" music that played on iPods.

So, for a time, you could purchase and download DRM free music from Amazon, but not iTunes. After another year or so the DRM on the iTunes music store fell away because it was useless and not good for PR.

I guess you can thank Steve Jobs for dominating digital music distribution and forcing record companies to take extreme measures to escape Apple's distribution terms. I'm happy about it :) But sad it won't happen for video.

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AnthonyJBentley — Fri, 08 May 2015 10:41:42 +0000

I buy crazy amounts of music from Bandcamp (instant DRM‐free FLAC/MP3 downloads) and so many ebooks from O’Reilly (instant DRM‐free PDF/ePub downloads) due to their instant gratification, no fuss service. I love it so much that I try to support any companies I can find with a similar style, like GOG.com and VHX.tv for DRM‐free documentaries and indie films.

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krake — Thu, 07 May 2015 09:02:04 +0000

IMHO it is worse because it is not standardizied at all.

With the traditional plugins there was at least some de-facto standard between browsers. with EME there isn't.

You can have a perfectly EME capable browser and still have no access to protected content.

Because having EME and a respective CDM is not what counts, it is having the right CDM for the content you are trying to access.

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Seegras — Thu, 07 May 2015 08:52:07 +0000

> The files are ac3, which is patented in some places

This is irrelevant. Just about every software or even file format might "be patented somewhere". Which doesn't even make it legal within the very patent system that allowed the patent. Most patent offices completely ignore the laws which just about everywhere don't allow patents on mathematics, and sometimes even specifically disallow software.

The only thing you as a private person can reasonably do is to completely ignore patents.

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lkundrak — Thu, 07 May 2015 08:27:46 +0000

Wow, that's terrible!

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b7j0c — Thu, 07 May 2015 05:39:00 +0000

it doesn't have to, but it does

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scientes — Thu, 07 May 2015 01:05:12 +0000

I do believe that YouTube is the wrong solution, and that a distributed hash table, like the Pirate Bay founders have called for, is the right solution. A public p2p protocol instead of a large build-out of a large private and constantly and without the option of opt-out hack upon an ancient http protocol.

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roc — Wed, 06 May 2015 20:44:16 +0000

Because with image formats there is always a seamless fallback (usually JPEG), so users are hardly affected at all and won't switch browsers over it.

If major sites decided to publish images *only* in WebP (for example), we'd be forced to support it.

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edgewood — Wed, 06 May 2015 20:26:30 +0000

Wikipedia says that the Audible acquisition closed in March 2008. At some point, you have to give up on "it might change some time in the future".

However, it also says that Audible does allow DRM-free titles, and references a page on audible.com that says "Audible is able to offer our award-winning listening experience DRM-free on Audible.com for publishers who prefer this method and are committed to working with Audible to maintain a great customer experience."

My information that they refuse DRM-free titles comes from Cory Doctorow, who says that they refuse to distribute his work without DRM, and that his audiobooks aren't available on Audible because of that.

I don't know if he's out of date, or whether "committed to working with Audible to maintain a great customer experience" is code for "we're going to put up so many roadblocks that you won't actually be able to publish a DRM-free audiobook with us".

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shmerl — Wed, 06 May 2015 19:31:30 +0000

> The "new boss" of Adobe's CDM is not the same as the "old boss" of Flash.

Right, it's even worse. Since instead of being some weird external plugin, it's now standardized.

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shmerl — Wed, 06 May 2015 19:28:50 +0000

Who said streaming has to equal DRM? I personally boycott Netflix for this reason.

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dlang — Wed, 06 May 2015 17:58:47 +0000

I would worry about this more if Audible switched to requiring DRM after Amazon purchased them. If this was something in place before the purchase, I see it as a legacy thing that can change over time. Owning a company doesn't mean that that company immediately changes to fall in line with your desires.

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Wol — Wed, 06 May 2015 17:55:29 +0000

I think Baen explicitly state on their website (I haven't been to look in ages) that they view DRM as a hindrance to advertising. As in, customers share books and then those people who would never pay don't pay, and those people who wouldn't otherwise have even looked at the book cough up for a legit copy.

(I know I download a few Amazon freebies, mostly public domain stuff anyways, and if it costs I don't buy (or steal) it.)

Cheers,
Wol

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dlang — Wed, 06 May 2015 17:44:50 +0000

Correct, Baen has never used DRM and if you buy from them directly, you get the book in many different formats.

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flussence — Wed, 06 May 2015 17:23:47 +0000

> Mozilla refusing to implement EME would not reduce usage of DRM one bit; users would just switch browsers to watch EME content.

Why not? The same tactic has been used to great success against image formats, and people *wanted* those.

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b7j0c — Wed, 06 May 2015 16:58:08 +0000

Apple is moving to streaming like everyone else. Beats will be deeply embedded in the next version of iOS.

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barryascott — Wed, 06 May 2015 16:46:34 +0000

> Which autoupgrades without your consent or ability to turn it off.

On Mac and Windows I can control when and if iTunes updates.
Not sure why you cannot control the updates.
For what it is worth I have not been bitten by iTunes updates.

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pboddie — Wed, 06 May 2015 16:08:40 +0000

Sorry, I forgot to link to the article about people preferring to read books in other languages rather than pay a regulated price:

http://www.nrk.no/kultur/de-unge-leser-e-boker-pa-engelsk...

One could argue that if the government is going to subsidise the industry, it could at least insist on acceptable terms for interoperability, sharing, and so on. After all, the taxpayer should get something for their money.

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pboddie — Wed, 06 May 2015 16:01:07 +0000

It sure is a cartel, with the book-pricing agreement being something that was eliminated in the UK (for instance, the Net Book Agreement) a couple of decades ago, to the point that people are apparently so fed up with cartel pricing that they are actually buying translations of books originally written in Norwegian by Norwegian authors and reading the electronic versions in English, Swedish or whatever. (I think this gets covered as a brief aside in the article about "social DRM" that you linked to.)

This behaviour of everyone reading the latest blockbuster in English undermines the supposed cultural promotion political objectives, of course, although I can easily imagine that it isn't completely wide-eyed cultural idealism: one always has to ask which side of the corruption line such arrangements actually lie when long-established companies like these ask governments for favours.

There are also various bizarre adventures in the e-reader market in Norway, but that's perhaps another matter...

http://www.nrk.no/kultur/bok/magnetkort-boker-far-hard-kr...

...and the process of buying paper books can be quite comical: going into the store, looking up books with the sales assistants on the chain's Web site and, failing that, looking up books on random book distributor sites. Sometimes you get the impression that they're not really in the business of selling anything.

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scientes — Wed, 06 May 2015 15:52:54 +0000

> You need the itunes program.

Which autoupgrades without your consent or ability to turn it off. And when it upgrades it will upgrade the firmware on your devices. Many of those firmware upgrade served no purpose other than to break Rhythmbox compatibility with iPods.

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edgewood — Wed, 06 May 2015 15:34:58 +0000

> Amazon does not force you to use DRM, the publishers are the ones demanding DRM

Currently true of ebooks, but not true for all media. Amazon owns Audible. Audiobook DRM is mandatory on Audible, even if the publisher doesn't want it.

That suggests that Amazon's lack of mandatory DRM on ebooks is a business strategy that suits them in the current environment, not a core value of the company.

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rsidd — Wed, 06 May 2015 14:20:03 +0000

You need the itunes program. Which is available only on Mac, iOS and Windows. Some report being able to run older versions under wine - not me. We have a mac at home and this is all I use it for. The files are ac3, which is patented in some places (not mine I think) but are playable on Linux and android, tagged properly, stored sensibly in properly named directories, and DRM free.

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Tara_Li — Wed, 06 May 2015 14:16:00 +0000

We should recognise specifically those publishers who have elected to not use DRM in their e-books - Baen, and at least some portion of Tor, has elected not to use it - Baen hasn't ever, I think.

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scientes — Wed, 06 May 2015 14:12:29 +0000

Or your public library.

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scientes — Wed, 06 May 2015 14:10:53 +0000

Well I don't have flash in installed. I wrote that on he basis that youtube-dl works, but yes I forgot about Youtube's "premium content" that I don't use nor will ever use.

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lkundrak — Wed, 06 May 2015 13:24:17 +0000

Wow, that surprises me a bit.

I feel a bit stupid, but I never really figured out how do I buy music from iTunes...

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hkario — Wed, 06 May 2015 12:53:47 +0000

to be able to see that it's a bad decision, you need to actually see past tomorrow or next quarter bottom line

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dsommers — Wed, 06 May 2015 12:17:20 +0000

None of the Norwegian publishers I've checked explicitly provides a clear policy statement regarding DRM. But ... there has been some talks about in the media:

http://www.dagbladet.no/2011/04/08/kultur/litteratur/bok/...
https://nrkbeta.no/2014/10/01/viljen-til-a-ta-feil/ (Esp. follow the discussions, where the chronicle writer is engaged in the dialogue)

Other than that, you'll have to see the e-shops for e-books. Most of them state more clearly that they use "watermarking" (or so-called SDRM - Social DRM, which is their term for watermarking) - or observe what kind of DRM technology the book has (which these days usually is "watermarking").

But I'm sure you'll get clearer answers if you contact the publishers directly, such as Aschehoug, Gyldendal, Cappelen Damm, etc, etc. The whole book industry in Norway looks quite a lot like a cartel, where the publishers also owns a lot of the book stores, including those on the net and the pricing models is fixed (with the governments blessing). So the information you find in e-shops is just as relevant in regards to the information from the publishers.

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pboddie — Wed, 06 May 2015 11:51:29 +0000

Any links to the details of the Norwegian schemes? I don't pay close attention to e-books, other than to observe the squabbling between the entrenched Norwegian publishing interests, their top-selling authors (lots of wealthy celebrity crime authors pleading poverty), and other random players.

That said, I have seen an apparently successful attempt to get one Norway-targeting e-reader vendor to provide the GPL-covered source code for their product after some pestering and the usual Dropbox link to a hastily-prepared or wrapped-in-brown-paper-under-the-counter (you decide!) archive that one would expect from nth-rate producers of gadgetry.

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pizza — Wed, 06 May 2015 11:49:59 +0000

> "Mozilla refusing to implement EME would not reduce usage of DRM one bit; users would just switch browsers to watch EME content."

> That's an assertion and phrasing it like a fact won't change that.

Anyone who doesn't recognize the truth of the original statement is delusional.

Firefox nearly took over the world because it was *better* than IE and cost nothing, not because it was Free Software. Not being able to play commercially-available video makes Firefox demonstrably *worse* in the eyes of most people. And "most people" are what drive market share, not the tiny handful of people that frequent this site.

I'm disappointed in Mozilla's choice too -- but I recognize the position they found themselves in. , IMO they took the least worst option, and left the use of the proprietary EME stuff as an end-user choice.

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nye — Wed, 06 May 2015 11:41:18 +0000

Well it depends what you want. Personally, in the last month alone I've bought 9 DRM-free ebooks and 11 DRM-free albums (well, okay, some of them were EPs).

With music, in particular, you don't even need to go to indies or small publishers to get DRM-free music - DRM is not the norm there.

I think there's a very real chance that major book publishers will manage to strangle themselves with DRM and eventually go under or get bought by Amazon, but there's a great deal of good work out there that has no DRM; you just won't be getting the latest bestsellers (probably).

Games are a mixed bag - there's actually a pretty wide selection that uses no DRM, but people hardly even notice any more because most (certainly not all) modern DRM for games is no longer the colossal inconvenience that it used to be, and it turns out that the reason *most* people dislike DRM is simply the inconvenience.

Film and TV is really the major problem area - there's not a lot out there that has no DRM, and legally getting access to anything remotely mainstream online means either renting Netflix style, or 'buying' something with DRM so draconian that you are effectively only renting it anyway, because it can only be viewed via some specific authorised means that is always a *tremendous* fucking inconvenience.

I really hope that film and TV moves more in the direction of music, but crucially I actually think that hope is not entirely unrealistic.

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niner — Wed, 06 May 2015 11:34:52 +0000

"In Firefox, the Adobe CDM is in a very restrictive browser-imposed sandbox with a very narrow interface to the browser and OS, so it will have fewer bugs, and those bugs (or even malicious code) that do exist can do minimal harm to user privacy and security."

It's still closed source, proprietary code.

"Mozilla refusing to implement EME would not reduce usage of DRM one bit; users would just switch browsers to watch EME content."

That's an assertion and phrasing it like a fact won't change that.

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nye — Wed, 06 May 2015 11:20:44 +0000

>Amazon does not force you to use DRM, the publishers are the ones demanding DRM
>The publishers are being stupid about this, if they didn't insist on DRM it would be easier to migrate people away from kindles to other stores

Essentially they are not only handing Amazon a loaded gun pointing right at their own heart, but they are *demanding* that Amazon pull the trigger. It's a business decision so bafflingly against their own interests that it's not hard to see how conspiracy theories form.

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dsommers — Wed, 06 May 2015 11:11:17 +0000

> Amazon owns the ebook market. DRM wins books.

Maybe so for the main stream English literature. O'Reillys books are DRM free. All the *publishers* in Norway (main stream literature in mostly Norwegian, but also some non-Norwegian books too) have abandoned DRM in favour of watermarking the books (each bought copy contains "hidden" details about the order throughout, in addition to a "this book belongs too"-page).

And it might be slightly different in other countries too.

The pro-DRM guys wants us to believe DRM has won though. But the battle is far from over.

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roc — Wed, 06 May 2015 11:08:23 +0000

That EFF article is wrong in a few ways, FWIW.

Youtube didn't use Adobe's DRM for HTML5 video then, and still doesn't today.

The "new boss" of Adobe's CDM is not the same as the "old boss" of Flash. Flash is/was a very complicated and featureful platform with complex interaction with the browser and the user's OS. Flash bugs cause all kinds of stability and security problems, In Firefox, the Adobe CDM is in a very restrictive browser-imposed sandbox with a very narrow interface to the browser and OS, so it will have fewer bugs, and those bugs (or even malicious code) that do exist can do minimal harm to user privacy and security.

I really don't like the EFF's take on Mozilla's position. Mozilla refusing to implement EME would not reduce usage of DRM one bit; users would just switch browsers to watch EME content. So it sounds like the EFF wanted Mozilla to make a symbolic gesture that would reduce our ability to do all the other good things we're trying to.

Having said all that, the EFF's main point that DRM is harmful and anti-Web remains totally true.

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rsidd — Wed, 06 May 2015 10:19:19 +0000

Steve Jobs beat out DRM for music -- he insisted on no DRM for iTunes, and that is one thing we can thank him for. (Saying no to flash on iOS is another. A third is... well, can't think of any right now, but these two are good.) I would be very surprised if Apple introduces DRM now or goes streaming-only.

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lkundrak — Wed, 06 May 2015 06:44:42 +0000

No, they didn't won as long as my machine plays their content and they don't control my machine. I can still make a copy that's not plagued with DRM.

Also, I'm not too sure about the music but I buy music rather often and I didn't run into any DRM-protected music yet. I buy both self-produced stuff and music from large distributors.

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dlang — Wed, 06 May 2015 04:06:43 +0000

Amazon does not force you to use DRM, the publishers are the ones demanding DRM

The publishers are being stupid about this, if they didn't insist on DRM it would be easier to migrate people away from kindles to other stores now that the publishers have declared Amazon the Big Evil, but as long as they insist on locking customers into one store (and fixing prices across all stores to boot), they should not be surprised that network effects work.

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pabs — Wed, 06 May 2015 03:50:08 +0000

> We are a rental society.

Ownership isn't for everyone, witness the popularity of the cloud, or home renting.

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b7j0c — Wed, 06 May 2015 03:36:16 +0000

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/new-drm-boss-same-o...