[whatwg] HTML 5 : The Youtube response

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 11:27 AM, Marques Johansson
<marques at displague.com> wrote:
> What is  the problem with #3?  My recent emails on this list concern #3.
>
> I know that anything that has been seen or heard can be recorded,
> replayed, and redistributed by illegitimate parties but that doesn't
> mean content protection is silly.  Content providers have a right to
> determine who, how, and when their videos can be accessed.
>
> For pay-per-video services I would think a watermark + sue policy for
> files distributed over HTML5/HTTP could handle content protection as
> well as any flash based solution.

Indeed, but that can be done without HTML helping in any way.


> For pay-per-minute or pay-per-byte services I believe the HTTP and/or
> HTML5 specification needs some minor changes to allow the server to
> dictate the amount of data the UA should attempt to fetch from an open
> and standard file over an open and standard protocol.

The server can throttle itself by itself.  Any restrictions in the
markup can be trivially bypassed.


> The user  is being charged for access to the content in some granular
> fashion so the ability to constrain fetches would allow these service
> providers to make sure that first parties have paid for the content
> they are receiving without sending them and charging them for more
> content than they wish.

HTML can't help with that without losing openness, which isn't worth
the benefit.

~TJ