Mozilla today launched Firefox 38 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Notable additions to the browser include Digital Rights Management (DRM) tech for playing protected content in the HTML5 video tag on Windows, Ruby annotation support, and improved user interfaces on Android.

Firefox 38 arrives with DRM tech required to watch Netflix video, Ruby annotation, revamped look on Android
http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/12/firefox-38-arrives-with-drm-tech-required-to-watch-netflix-video-ruby-annotation-revamped-look-on-android/

The most important addition to Firefox 38 is undoubtedly integration with the Adobe Content Decryption Module (CDM) to play back DRM-wrapped content on Windows Vista and later. Mozilla announced the controversial (given the closed nature of DRM) move just under a year ago.

The company’s reasoning for the decision is the same today:

We are enabling DRM in order to provide our users with the features they require in a browser and allow them to continue accessing premium video content. We don’t believe DRM is a desirable market solution, but it’s currently the only way to watch a sought-after segment of content.

The CDM in question is downloaded from Adobe shortly after you install Firefox 38 or higher, and it activates when you first interact with a site that uses Adobe CDM. Mozilla says some premium video services, including Netflix, have already started testing the solution in Firefox.

Mozilla has designed a security sandbox that sits around the CDM, adding another layer of security for code that the company does not control itself. Firefox users can also remove the CDM from their copy of the browser, and the company even offers a separate Firefox release without the CDM enabled by default

“Questioning the W3C’s stance on DRM, Simon St. Laurent asks ‘What do we get for that DRM?’ and has a thing or two to say about TBL’s cop-out: ‘I had a hard time finding anything to like in Tim Berners-Lee’s meager excuse for the W3C’s new focus on digital rights management (DRM).”

“What should we ask in return? And what should we expect to get?”

What do we get for that DRM?
The W3C sells out users without seeming to get anything in return
http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/10/what-do-we-get-for-that-drm.html

I had a hard time finding anything to like in Tim Berners-Lee’s meager excuse for the W3C’s new focus on digital rights management (DRM). However, the piece that keeps me shaking my head and wondering is a question he asks but doesn’t answer:

If we, the programmers who design and build Web systems, are going to consider something which could be very onerous in many ways, what can we ask in return?

Yes. What should we ask in return? And what should we expect to get? The W3C appears to have surrendered (or given?) its imprimatur to this work without asking for, well, anything in return. “Considerations to be discussed later” is rarely a powerful diplomatic pose.

“none of us as users like certain forms of content protection such as DRM at all. Or the constraints it places on users and developers. Or the over-severe legislation it triggers in countries like the USA.”

The saddest part of that discussion, however, is the question. What are we users – and what is the W3C – getting from building the risk of programmers being jailed into the core infrastructure of the Web? I have no doubt that browser vendors eager to cut deals will incorporate DRM into their offerings. Does that make it a good idea for the W3C to offer its name, its facilities, its intellectual property agreements, and its umbrella from antitrust prosecution to such a project? Why not leave the companies to pursue their own directions, and take on the risk of legal action themselves?

On the bright side, I’m privileged to work at a place that understands the fruitlessness and damage inflicted by DRM schemes. I keep hoping that more people will take that example as a sign that businesses can thrive without treating customers as thieves.

Tim Berners-Lee has warned against the risk of not standardising digital rights management (DRM) in the HTML specification, saying an approach that “does the least harm” might be the best approach.

Web daddy Lee said Wednesday unless the geeks take charge and devise an acceptable standard, delivering a universal answer to DRM, then the web risks “fragmenting”.

“The W3C does not and cannot dictate what browsers or content distributors can do. By excluding this issue from discussion, we do not exclude it from anyone’s systems,” Berners-Lee said here.

Berners-Lee pointed out the danger of citing “what’s best for the user” in the argument on content protection, saying there are so many different parties involved – end users, browser makers and content distributors.

During discussions about adding DRM to HTML the list of new scenarios and what they might mean for “the user” has grown.

“The best solution will be one that satisfies all of them [users], and we’re still looking for that. If we can’t find that, we’re looking for the solutions that do least harm to these and other expressed wants from users, authors, implementers, and others in the ecosystem,” Berners-Lee said.

Here’s the bad news: the World Wide Web Consortium is going ahead with its plan to add DRM to HTML5, setting the stage for browsers that are designed to disobey their owners and to keep secrets from them so they can’t be forced to do as they’re told. Here’s the (much) worse news: the decision to go forward with the project of standardizing DRM for the Web came from Tim Berners-Lee himself, who seems to have bought into the lie that Hollywood will abandon the Web and move somewhere else (AOL?) if they don’t get to redesign the open Internet to suit their latest profit-maximization scheme.

Danny O’Brien from the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains the wrangle at the W3C and predicts that, now that it’s kosher to contemplate locking up browsers against their owners, we’ll see every kind of control-freakery come out of the woodwork, from flags that prevent “View Source” to restricting embedded fonts to preventing image downloading to Javascript that you can’t save and run offline. Indeed, some of this stuff is already underway at W3C, spurred into existence by a huge shift in the Web from open platform to a place where DRM-hobbled browsers are “in-scope” for the WC3.

Delivered as part of Windows 8.1, Internet Explorer 11 supports WebGL, a standard previously opposed by Microsoft on security grounds, enabling hardware accelerated graphics in the browser without a plug-in. DRM support for web video means that sites like Netflix can also deliver content without a plug-in.

If you reject DRM, you “risk” walling off parts of the Web.

If you accept DRM, however, you GUARANTEE that parts of the Web will become walled off.

Yes. We risk “walling off” Sony, Disney and the rest…

Wow. A web the way I liked it, before big-media and commercial presence sought to replicate the AOL experience.

In fact, that’s a great way to describe this: If you accept DRM in HTML, you risk the AOLization of the web.

In fact, having a standard implementation is worse for these companies because it will be a lot harder to replace once its broken and only a fool would assume that it won’t be broken almost immediately.

Source: comments at http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/06/27/1839217/reject-drm-and-you-risk-walling-off-parts-of-the-web-says-w3c-chief

Summary: The web would be in danger of losing content if it were to turn its back on DRM-protected media, said Dr Jeff Jaffe, CEO of the web standards body W3C.

Web technologies need to support DRM-protected media to reduce the risk of parts of the web being walled off, according to the chief executive of the web standards body W3C.

Proposals to provide a hook for DRM-protected media within HTML are necessary to help prevent scenarios such as movie studios removing films from the web in a bid to protect them from piracy, said Dr Jeff Jaffe, CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium.

Earlier this year the Free Software Foundation was one of 27 organisations strongly criticising proposals for Encrypted Media Extensions, a W3C draft specification for a set of APIs to allow HTML and JavaScript to interact with DRM systems, specifically with Content Decryption Modules (CDMs). This would allow the delivery of DRM-protected media through the browser without the use of plugins such as Flash or Silverlight.

Ultimately, Jaffe believes it is in the interest of everybody that protected content remains available on the web, and that EME is a compromise that will make this possible.

“The concern that we have is the premium content that owners are protecting using DRM will end up being forever severed from the web,” Jaffe told ZDNet at the Cloud World Forum in London.

“We would like the web platform to be a universal platform. We don’t think it’s good when content finds its way into walled gardens or into closed apps.

The World Wide Web consortium is considering a proposal to specify standards for HTML extensions to implement Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). The proposal is supported by Netflix, Microsoft, Google and the BBC.

Of course, the W3C cannot prevent companies from grafting DRM onto HTML. They do this through nonfree plug-ins such as Flash, and with nonfree Javascript code, thus showing that we need control over the Javascript code we run and over the C code we run.

However, where the W3C stands is tremendously important for the battle to eliminate DRM. On a practical level, standardizing DRM would make it more convenient, in a very shallow sense. This could influence people who think only of short-term convenience to think of DRM as acceptable, which could in turn encourage more sites to use DRM.

The arguments for standardizing DRM aim to avoid hypothetical minor inconveniences.

However, the main point is that that’s a side issue either way. It is insignificant compared with the importance of discouraging DRM.

Proprietary software is an injustice since users can’t control it, and it commonly carries other injustices with it. The proprietary plugins or kernels required to view media under this standard, like proprietary software in general, could never merit users’ trust. Once they harbor one malicious functionality, the digital handcuffs of DRM, there is no reason to suppose they won’t have back doors and spyware as well.

We currently use Microsoft Silverlight to deliver streaming video to web browsers on the PC and Mac.

But since Microsoft announced the end of life of Silverlight 5 in 2021, we need to find a replacement some time within the next 8 years. We’d like to share some progress we’ve made towards our goal of moving to HTML5 video.

HTML5 Premium Video Extensions

Over the last year, we’ve been collaborating with other industry leaders on three W3C initiatives which are positioned to solve this problem of playing premium video content directly in the browser without the need for browser plugins such as Silverlight. We call these, collectively, the “HTML5 Premium Video Extensions”:
Media Source Extensions (MSE)
Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)
Web Cryptography API (WebCrypto)

First Implementation in Chrome OS

We’ve been working with Google to implement support for the HTML5 Premium Video Extensions in the Chrome browser

Streaming video leader Netflix says it’s eager to move away from using Microsoft’s moribund Silverlight technology to support its service on desktop PCs, but it will be a while yet before today’s HTML5 browsers support the features it needs to make that happen.

In a blog post on Monday, reps for Netflix – which by some estimates now accounts for around a third of all internet traffic in North America – said the company definitely plans to get off the Silverlight boat

“We’re trying to get to the point where we don’t need a plugin. But we have to have DRM.”

Silverlight has long been Netflix’s technology of choice for implementing its DRM solution on Windows and OS X.
that solution presents a host of problems.

approach of maintaining separate, dedicated clients for each platform can be a real drag. It would be much better if support for Netflix streaming were baked right into the HTML5 standards – and if the company has its way, it says, that’s just what will happen.

But forget about getting rid of the DRM

If all of this effort seems like a lot of trouble just to implement DRM technology that customers don’t really want, get used to it.

“Right now what we’re basically doing is giving billions of dollars to Hollywood to buy the content, so that they can afford to build more content,” he said. “That’s basically the business we’re in.”

“We just do streaming,” he said.