Firefox will support DRM as a plug-in

[Samson]

From el Reg

Mozilla has announced that it will add Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) for digital rights management into a future build of Firefox, even if the organization disagrees with the technology on principle.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is to add EME into the specifications for HTML5 at the behest of Microsoft, Google, and Netflix. Sir Tim Berners-Lee supports the move, but Mozilla had been objecting to the plans as technically unnecessary. However, it has decided to cave.

"We have come to the point where Mozilla not implementing the W3C EME specification means that Firefox users have to switch to other browsers to watch content restricted by DRM ," said Chief Technology Officer Andreas Gal.

"This makes it difficult for Mozilla to ignore the ongoing changes in the DRM landscape. Firefox should help users get access to the content they want to enjoy, even if Mozilla philosophically opposes the restrictions certain content owners attach to their content."

The W3C spec requires the use of proprietary Content Decryption Modules, which is one of Mozilla's big objections to the system. Gal said that Mozilla would reluctantly use Adobe's CDM system, but it would have to be software that users download and it won't be built into Firefox directly.

For added user protection, Firefox will run Adobe's CDM in a sandbox, so that the software will only send the minimal amount of data on a user's machine back to the content provider and ensure it has no access to either the user's hard drive or network.

Of course we can discuss the various sides of if DRM has a place on the internet, my personal opinion is that I would rather it is not there but this solution seems about as good as it could be.

What really interested me was "Firefox will run Adobe's CDM in a sandbox, so that the software will only send the minimal amount of data on a user's machine back to the content provider". While I do not know what exactly they mean by a sandbox, I would interpret this as meaning that firefox could make it look like your machine is anything. This could completely subvert the point of DRM meaning that you could download and store any stream that is sent to the monitor / speakers. I could be wrong, what are your thoughts?

 

[Zelig]

They didn't really have much choice, consumers have shown they don't care about DRM.

I won't be bothering to install it, I have no real interest in streaming video, DRM or no.

If you pirate media stuff, DRM doesn't apply to you anyway, so not really relevant.

And you can always download/store anything that's sent to your monitor/speakers.

 

[Samson]

And you can always download/store anything that's sent to your monitor/speakers.

My understanding is that the idea behind internet DRM was that the browser would check that this cannot happen, from the comments on the linked article "A DRM plugin needs low-level access in order to function. It needs to be able to get driver IDs so it can be sure the sound drivers aren't actually a loopback recorder, it needs to be able to check hardware IDs to determine which computer it is on, it needs low-level OS and graphics API calls to prevent the use of screen recorders or just printscreen on documents."

I thought this was why Netflix works on windows but not linux. I have been meaning to try Netflix on a VM, but not got round to it.

 

[Zelig]

Sure, that might be the idea, but it's never going to work.

I can run the entire OS in a VM and feed arbitrary driver and hardware IDs to it.

And it doesn't matter if it's not really easy, only one person needs to work around it, and then everything becomes trivially available to download DRM-free on the interwebs.

 

[Mr.WorldWide]

Props to Mozilla for letting us effectively 'opt out' if so we choose.