Bonum Certa Men Certa

Total Lock-down Ambitions - Part III - The Web Browser as DRM Pusher

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 19, 2025

Little Bittern

COMPUTERS without proprietary software (and no DRM) can be very stable and predictable. But those are also becoming quite scarce because Web users are being fed DRM and proprietary blobs (for DRM) even if they use what they believe to be "FOSS", e.g. Firefox. Some years ago Mozilla turned Firefox into proprietary software after the World Wide Web Consortium had basically become a GAFAM-controlled DRM pusher.

We started this series a few days ago to explain where we stand. Part I focused on cautionary tales and Part II gave an update on Microsoft and Apple. Today we'll focus more on Google because it dominates Web browsers (akin to virtual machines for 'Web' 'apps').

"The Apple chips keep the DRM on a low profile," an associate explained, and likewise "the Widevine and Chrome-based DRM keeps a low profile. Both are spreading, especially the latter."

A lot of "streaming" stuff is DRM, but the media doesn't describe it as such. Web context notwithstanding, the content (video, text etc.) is becoming gargled and scrambled for no reason other than protecting the interests of copyright conglomerates.

Good luck finding good information about this in 2025. Search the Web and you may find some other (unrelated) "DRM" stuff or only articles promoting DRM without naming specific methods and technologies. Well, Google is pro-DRM, so it lacks an incentive to correct this. Both in Linux and on the Web, Google keeps pushing DRM quite hard (in prior years we showed it pushing DRM into the kernel itself). Since all other search engines are just Chinese, Russian, or Microsoft Bing in a trench coat (e.g. DuckDuckGo), there's no simple solution to that. Microsoft's Steve Ballmer said DRM was the future and that's the sort of message they still promote. As psydruid put it the other day in IRC, DRM is "only available for certain sanctioned hardware and preferably not too cheap, so the whole DRM chain can earn more money from the operation" and "the tech industry is still so primitive in this way that most of the money is earned on the basics, which are being shuffled every few decades without any material progress being made" (making products obsolete to sell more of the same).

In practice, their DRM schemes barely work, either. See for example "Microsoft DRM Hack Could Allow Movie Downloads From Popular Streaming Services".

"Google produces and pushes Widevine," an associate explained, "so there is surveillance on top of the usage restrictions and encroachment on basic civil rights and the doctrine of first sale."

The "First Sale Doctrine" is essential for preservation. Without it, libraries perish (both public and personal). The Copyright Office understands that and says there are "limitations on exclusive rights". There are also peer-reviewed papers such as "Creating True Digital Ownership with the "First Sale Doctrine" and "Fighting the First Sale Doctrine: Strategies for a Struggling Film Industry".

Without some limitations or exemptions, we would not be able to reproduce or make more easily accessible this new video from Peru.

Google has managed to "popularise" DRM by keeping it hidden and widespread. It moreover faced almost no scrutiny when it pushed that into Linux, the kernel. There was no resistance from anyone that we could see at the time.

The above focuses on legal aspects and societal harm. We're going to lose a lot of information because of DRM, which deliberately makes it hard to make copies of things. It's for an artificial scarcity, nothing else. It's about increasing revenue by increasing scarcity or limiting availability.

"That's probably enough background regarding the First Sale Doctrine," an associate argued. "Specifics about the M1, M2, M3, M4, etc chips is missing still. It's hard to find and not covered much."

We do know, however, that TPM restrictions which are being pushed by Microsoft (compelling people to buy PCs with user-hostile chips in them) have a lot to do with DRM and the implementations are secret.

Moving to Chromebooks or even some GNU/Linux distros might not be enough. Choosing Firefox over Chrom* may no longer be enough either. Stay tuned for the final part, where workarounds will be discussed. I myself never used and probably never use DRM (on anything), at least not consciously. A lot of the hardware here is considered "old", but it works OK.

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