[whatwg] More YouTube response

[Henri Sivonen]

"John Harding" <jharding at google.com> wrote:

> Rather than ask browsers to get into the DRM
> business,
> what I think would work best is having a means for 3rd party DRM
> providers
> to supply browser plug-ins which implement the <video> tag for
> protected
> content - not all that different than selecting a pluggable codec.

I think this would defeat a huge chunk of the value of <video>. A big part of the value of <video> is that competition and innovation on the computing platform space will be fostered when the vendor of a computing platform can port (or have ported) one of the Open Source browsers to the platform, pay Opera to port Presto or write their own (like Microsoft) without having to persuade a plug-in proprietor that it's worth the plug-in proprietor's effort to port a certain plug-in to the platform.

Pluggable DRM or codec modules would regress back to the situation where the proprietors of those plug-ins act as gatekeepers for the success of computing platforms.

I observe that Hollywood movies (the most "premium" of content, supposedly) are routinely licensed for DVB broadcast without DRM, and on the Internet every other form of content is distributed without DRM. It may well be that when the potential audience grows enough, at some point the ability to reach that audience weighs more than "protection" and the problem gets solved without DRM (and without the ill effects of DRM to computing platform freedom, competition and innovation).

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/