Re: Any Restriction Placed on the Internet
> The content providers can withhold and stick to the classic models; people still pay bookoo bucks to sit down at cinemas, and so on. People come to them, not the other way around.
Not that I necessarily disagree with you, but would this be the same set of content providers who've been screaming bloody murder that people aren't coming to them, and instead pirating content?
It's true that people go to the content providers, but if they're to be believed, fewer and fewer people are actually doing so. In fact, it seems like the more they push down DRM sort of routes, the more they manage to piss people off enough for them to sit down and work out how to bypass it.
> Their content, their rules. Take it or leave it.
As with others, I'll leave it thanks. I'm more than happy to pay for content, but DRM isn't something that should be supported, so I'll withhold my contribution to their funding and will hold out on the hope that it continues to be possible to disable EME in the browser's settings.
I've ostensibly failed to watch legal content in the past because the provider has stuck something broken or incompatible in the way to "protect" the content I've just paid for.
The long-term effect is that I don't go back there, but the short-term effect is often that I'll sit and look hard at their mechanism to work out how to bypass it and get the content I've just paid to watch. I'm pretty bloody-minded when I'm pissed off, and 9/10 times, once I've figured out their protection I could quite easily watch their content for free thereafter (though don't).
Ultimately, it may well prove to be just the same with EME, they'll piss someone off enough, and the "standardised" DRM will be broken and off no more protection than they have now. We'll effectively be back to where we are now, but with an additional nasty binary lump in the browsers for no good reason.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
