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0 pointsasadotzler12y ago0 comments

"As it is now, businesses have to balance the cost of losing customers against the cost of not being able to DRM their content. Take that dilemma away and I think you certainly have a new incentive."

And the businesses (Hollywood) with the content that Web users want have done that math and decided that DRM through plug-ins and native apps is an EXCELLENT system and they're happy to keep mandating it forever. If Plug-ins go away, as they're slowly but surely doing, then native apps will be the only place to get this content.

Hacker News types, myself included, will cringe at this truth, but most consumers don't give a shit about the Web. They care about the content the Web gives them. If the Web cannot give them the content they want, they'll get it elsewhere, probably from silo'd App Stores where things "just work."

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pdonis12y ago

If the Web cannot give them the content they want, they'll get it elsewhere, probably from silo'd App Stores where things "just work."

And in this scenario (i.e., the way things are now), someone like me, who doesn't give a shit about "content" but does care about the Web itself, can still avoid DRM by not installing the plugins, not using the silo'd App Stores, etc. But if my browser is the silo'd plugin/App Store, I'm SOL. That is why all this matters: it makes DRM and all of the closed source nastiness that goes with it the default, instead of something people have to choose. I think that's a very, very bad idea.

takluyver12y ago

This is unlikely to change. Firefox at least is not about to ship with DRM plugins built in, any more than it comes with Flash built in now.

EME is not strictly DRM in your browser: it's a standardised interface to allow your browser to talk to DRM modules.

jonahx12y ago

> Hacker News types, myself included, will cringe at this truth, but most consumers don't give a shit about the Web. They care about the content the Web gives them. If the Web cannot give them the content they want, they'll get it elsewhere, probably from silo'd App Stores where things "just work."

I don't cringe at that, it's just the way it is. But I promise you no-install browser delivery of DRM'd content which "just works" is very valuable to those businesses. People grab the thing within arm's reach. Sure, if there isn't anything in arm's reach a decent amount of them will still walk across the room for what they want, but I think that's besides the point.

duncan_bayne12y ago

> If the Web cannot give them the content they want, they'll

> get it elsewhere, probably from silo'd App Stores where

> things "just work."

That's entirely reasonable. Silo'd 'app stores' are where things like DRM belong, not the World Wide Web.

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