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DRM is dying.

CSS, AACS and HDCP are all broken, Flash is on its last legs and music downloads have largely abandoned it to positive consequences. Streams seem to be the last bastion, but that doesn't even make sense -- the reason people subscribe to Netflix is to watch new content every month, not to watch the same content over and over. If they wanted to do that they would just buy the Blu-ray (or, if so inclined, pirate it once). And pirates have no reason to rip a 6Mbps stream when they can rip a 40Mbps Blu-ray.

DRM is a box you have to check when a suit was bamboozled by a DRM snake oil salesman into putting it in a contract. How the DRM works is irrelevant because it won't actually work anyway. A fig leaf doesn't need codec support.

That's what EME is about, and that's why you hear the free software people griping about it but not the actual pirates. EME makes piracy easier. It separates the DRM into its own little box which makes it easier to circumvent. Which is what the pirates will do because they don't care about breaking the law, but which law-abiding free software people are proscribed from doing by DMCA 1201.

But the most fundamental flaw in your argument is that you misunderstand who decides what DRM gets used. DRM is not content. What gets supported is ultimately decided by the platform companies. When Apple says there will be no DRM on iTunes, there will be no DRM on iTunes. The only thing Disney or Universal can do about it is withhold their content, but that costs them more than it costs Apple or Google. Which means it isn't something they can credibly threaten unless the dispute is of a make or break significance, and the particulars of DRM implementation are not on that level.



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