Who really gains from EME?
Previous posts on EME
Here’s some economics of DRM. There are three parties, the media companies, the platform providers and the consumers/users. Media companies want to sell as much media they can. They want to restrict copying (through DRM) so that all the media people buy generates revenue for them. Platform providers sell their service or platform like the (hardware) DVD player, set top boxes and software and internet media players, and obviously their aim is to maximize their profit. And people want to buy the media for as cheap as they can.
Media companies rely on the platform providers to implement robust and tamper proof DRM protection. In case there is a high competition among platform providers, then they have a negative incentive to do so. That is because people prefer to buy players which have the least restrictions inbuilt in them.
This is what happened with region coding in DVD’s “user preferred to buy DVD players in which region coding could be turned off, so the vendors raced to ensure that everyone knew how to turn it off” [1].
On the other hand, in case of high competition among media providers, there is an incentive to provide media with less intrusive DRM, because people will prefer to buy that in comparison with a equivalent media with intrusive DRM.
Now it is unclear if media companies really again anything from DRM. In practice DRM has always proved to be an ineffective technique to prevent copying and whatever the DRM, there always exists the “Analog Hole” because people can always capture the media from the analog medium using which people consume their media. Media companies cannot really crack down upon torrent users because there are so many of them and cracking down on torrent hosting site is ineffective new sites come up quickly to replace older sites. Also it appears that in many cases media companies don’t really “need” to stop piracy it will be only extra income. The fact that almost every new song is now legitimately available on YouTube (which is without DRM), indicates that even Western Musicians don’t need DRM, they are exploring alternate business models. BTW in India I’ve never seen a local media house pushing for DRM either through technical or legal means. Movies makes a good amount of money through box office collection. Songs usually comes out as part of movie and artists makes money by selling their rights to producers, and concerts.
The ones who are actually gaining through DRM are platform providers. Now a days media is usually consumed through internet or locally installed softwares and there are very few numbers of players out there which means they can dictate any term which can get accepted in court room. Popular platform providers have a huge incentive to restrict people from moving out of their services. Microsoft Word is a classic example, its .docx is proprietary. Microsoft controls it and the specifications are unknown to the public. Historically, Word only supported its own format. Because it is so popular another word processor which doesn’t read or write Word’s format was largely useless. Other softwares like Libre Office have to reverse engineer MS’s format to handle it, but the reverse engineering is imperfect often resulting in inferior quality results. Basically you have to use word because everyone else is using it, and Microsoft retain its monopoly. DRM makes it even easier for companies to lock-in customers in platforms. First because it is a legally risky area to reverse engineer DRMed formats. Second because DRM makes it easier to reject open formats and standards as DRM is fundamentally inconsistent with FOSS.
If you look from this perspective, W3C’s Encrypted Media Extension (EME) is almost vicious. It is open enough to appear open on the face of it, plus it has the legitimacy and the non-profit status of W3C. But the “standard” allows non inter-operable implementations which can force users and media providers to use specific platforms and then lock them in it. EME as an open standard is only openwashing.
References
[1]: Ross Anderson, Security Engineering Chapter 22
[2]: Hal Varian on DRM https://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/Varian.pdf
