DRM

I am a little dismayed that whatever fervor Silicon Valley had for copyright and patent reform has long since been replaced with ire towards other industries and entrenched monopolies. Fifteen years ago, or very close to that, we were seeing startups getting threatened by the music industry and taken down for infringing actions. The technology industry had a clear existential threat in the music and movie industries, and every corner of the industry hated it. We wanted things to be fixed. But that's gone now.

So what happened?

As complained about previously on Fantranslation.org, the HTML5 Encrypted Media Extensions are a "standard" way of getting a DRM-laden video to play on a DRM-laden browser. The technical details are unimportant (it's shit), the main issue is that it represents, on a political level, acquiesence and surrender to large multinational media conglomerates whose CEOs wet themselves at night and need a security blanket that makes us all radically more insecure.

A little while ago I talked about a certain Kickstarter project and it's... complicated relationship with the words "DRM free". Well, it looks like Team 17 is willing to reopen that particular can of worms again with the Humble Bundle "DRM-free" release of Worms Reloaded by withholding features.

The economics of game development are completely unhinged from the way they're monetized. When you go and buy a game you're told that they're very expensive, that they're going to be $60 (or regional equivalent) a piece and that you should keep hold of them because they are most certainly valuable objects. But the cost to make those copies is actually zero - ever since the beginning of the CD era distribution costs have slowly fell to the point where, with digital distribution, the cost to actually ship a file to your machine with the game on it is on the order of pennies per copy.

Today, the Kickstarter-funded project "Shadowrun Returns" announced... a modification of sorts to their original project. You see, they had originally promised DRM-free copies of their project as part of their Kickstarter rewards. The key phrase is "DRM-free": Many modern PC game stores - yes, including Steam, this is why people used to HATE Steam - have technologies that allow the owners of those game stores to remotely disable copies of games arbitrarily.

So let's talk about HTML5 - the much touted "open web" that kicks proprietary, insecure plugins like Flash, Java, or Silverlight to the curb. Specifically, it adds audio and video handling functionality to the browser specification so that you don't need to use Flash anymore. You just add a <video> tag and bam, you have a functioning video player in your browser. It almost makes handling video and audio in the browser as easy as handling images.