
Save Netflix - thecombjelly
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/save-netflix
======
stegosaurus
Many companies that exist today seemingly couldn't begin in 2016.

The major computing platforms now have gatekeepers (Google Play, iOS App
Store).

Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to
thin clients attached to the mainframe - without computing power, individuals
have less choice.

I think we need to focus far more on hardware - it's never looked darker -
Secure Boot and the ME make me worried for the future of x86, even.

I'll be fine as long as my old machines survive - but how are businesses going
to produce mass market software when all the popular hardware is locked down?

Just to pick an arbitrary example - how does a project like Bitcoin take off
when all we have are tivoized devices that won't run un"trusted" code? The
community of a few hundred hardware hackers isn't big enough.

Not only that, despite the fact that 256GB of flash can be had for ~40GBP, the
latest smartphones come with piffling amounts of storage and seemingly no
expandable slots. It's a deliberate design decision to force the use of the
network.

The IBM compatible desktop computer produced the revolution we see today.
What's the next step?

~~~
cm3
> Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to
> thin clients attached to the mainframe - without computing power,
> individuals have less choice.

Only for those who don't use more than a smart phone. Everybody who takes
photos, does engineering, develops software, works with media, plays games, or
has a laptop, will at least have external local storage of some kind.

> What's the next step?

Something else produced on IBM compatible PCs or Macs, naturally.

All of this sounds like this: everybody goes to a fast food chain to get food,
what will happen to kitchens now?

~~~
frio
> Only for those who don't use more than a smart phone.

Sadly, that's an increasingly large segment of the population. Anecdotally,
many of my extended family only have mobiles, maybe a tablet, and maybe a
videogame console -- no laptops or desktops to be found. Many friends have
similar stories.

~~~
rnovak
To counter your anecdote with one of my own: Literally everyone I know,
including my 93 year old grand-parents own a smartphone _and_ at least a
laptop or desktop. Every. Single. One. That includes my technologically
challenged siblings.

Anecdotes are just that. I wont take yours to represent society as a whole, as
you shouldn't take mine to either.

~~~
sloanesturz
Compare your experiences, though, to that of the developing world. Many
hundreds of millions of people have gone online for the first time this decade
and almost all new Internet users only have smart phones. This huge population
never owned a PC and may never need to own one, especially as apps get better
and better.

~~~
Godel_unicode
Phone with SSH client, Bluetooth keyboard, Chromecast to TV, digitalocean
Ubuntu droplet.

No computer != can't write code. What millenial had access to anything close
to that nice when they learned to code?

~~~
cm3
While this is nice, I could never use something with such high latency for
editing code or interactive sessions. You've just added latency all over the
place. Delayed input and output plus networking across the world.

~~~
fsckin
Remove the extra step going from Phone to Chromecast (plenty of phones have
HDMI OR the Chromecast can run an SSH client) and this a great solution with
minimal latency. Anything remotely comparable in the 80s/90s would have been
totally out of reach on a student budget.

~~~
Godel_unicode
Serious (I hope!) question: how does one run the SSH client on the Chromecast?
Are you proposing installing Linux on the Chromecast, or is this something
available out of the box?

Totally agree with your point about HDMI, I overlooked it because my phone
doesn't support it.

~~~
manveru
You can cast your whole screen from Android or a Chrome tab to Chromecast (now
called Google Cast). That includes any SSH client you have running there.
(There are SSH clients for both Chrome and Android)

~~~
Godel_unicode
If you look at my GGP comment, you'll see that mirroring to the Chromecast is
what I initially suggested. I was specifically asking about the statement "OR
the Chromecast can run an SSH client".

------
rashkov
This was so light on technical information that I am more puzzled than before
I read the article. Haven't the browsers standardized on a few DRM schemes
already? Does that have anything to do with what the W3C is doing now, and if
not, just what is the W3C up to that is offensive to the EFF? Are they talking
about protecting data streams, such as movies? Why would you compare that to
what Netflix was doing with physical DVDs?

~~~
throwaway160303
Yes they have, yes it does, they think the world would be better if everyone
Just Said No to DRM and the W3C isn't going along with their grand plan, yes,
and because they (correctly) think it'll sound convincing to the target
audience (mostly other Just Say No-ers, probably consisting mostly of the EFF
and Mozilla. And that's it.)

I'm really getting tired of what seems to be the EFF's somewhat-newfound
mission (it's been getting steadily worse over the last couple years) to push
the limits of "shrill squawking about nonsense" to new heights.

~~~
rashkov
I'm generally a fan of the EFF's work but I completely agree when you call
this "shrill squawking". The lack of any coherent argument or details in this
statement reminds me of some the "rally the mob" emails that I receive from
Fight For The Future. It's a shame that they take their audience for granted
and feel that it's enough to rile people up to send angry emails using nothing
more than an appeal to their own authority. That may work for a while but at
the expense of their credibility.

~~~
studentrob
Agreed though I'd put it in slightly less harsh tones. Rhetoric from EFF and
FFTF is light on the informative side, and heavy on the FUD side.

------
tombert
I don't know the right solution to the HTML5 DRM thing. I hate DRM, I don't
really support its use, but I also use Linux full-time.

Without the HTML5 DRM, I don't think I'd be able to watch Netflix on my
laptop, without some Wine wrapper, and really, is that much better? I don't
see the studios signing off on Netflix without the use of DRM, and since
Silverlight doesn't work on Linux, I selfishly don't have a problem with HTML5
DRM...most of the time.

That said, ethical-me totes does have a problem with DRM being part of the
otherwise-open web. Relying on stuff that I can can't break sort of makes my
inner-Stallman sad.

~~~
Daiz
>I don't know the right solution to the HTML5 DRM thing.

Easy. If they want content protection, they should build it in JavaScript.
Doesn't threaten the entire existence of the Open Web, any sufficiently decent
scheme will prevent casual copying (dedicated pirates will always find a way,
if nothing else then via screen capture), and it's actually cross-platform
(unlike EME, where "cross-platform" is entirely up to the creators of the
black box DRM plugins, so if Netflix et al wanted to say "sod off, we're not
making our DRM plugin available on Linux" then you'd be totally out of luck).

Sadly, of course this isn't actually enough for the people demanding heavy
DRM, since it's not just about "protecting the content" but about controlling
the whole platform, which is what really makes EME such an existential threat
for the entire Open Web. That's why I can't approve of it, and why you
shouldn't either.

But content protection through JavaScript? Totally fair game, I say. Assuming
that it's for a catalog rental model like what Netflix offers, anyway. Content
protection has no place in any individual (media) products you buy, those
should be DRM-free - otherwise you're not really buying them, just renting
them for an undefined period.

 _(On a final note, I also practice what I preach here - I work for a comic
publisher and am in charge of most things digital distribution, including the
content protection scheme for our catalog rental subscription service. It 's
developed in JS and I'll do my utmost best to ensure we never ever touch EME
in any way. Should be more cost effective for us that way anyway!)_

~~~
tajen
Why doesn't Netflix/all film directors distribute slightly different versions
of their movies to every single viewer? Half a second here, a whiter scene
there, it takes only 32 boolean situations to uniquely identify 2bn views, and
they culd chase the viewer in court. Or do they do that already?

~~~
Daiz
That'd require a lot more extra processing power than you might think, as
video encoding is very demanding processing-wise. Say you have a 1h30min long
movie. Without anything like this, you only need to encode that 1h30min
once[1], after which you can serve the same encode to all your customers,
whether there's hundreds, thousands or millions of them. But if you encoded
even just say, 5 seconds of unique footage per customer, it takes only about
1080 customers to double your video encoding time for just this title.

There are also other issues with this, like how resilient the scheme would be.
If your watermarking relies on things that the user would hardly spot when
watching, then it's very likely that re-encoding the video would simply get
rid of the watermarks, since quality video compression is generally based on
the idea of throwing away as much information that the user wouldn't notice
while keeping as much important bits as you can. At the same time, if you make
the watermarking easy enough to spot while looking carefully, then you could
just have two people compare their watermarks and consciously mess them up.

That being said, various kinds of watermarking technologies do exist, but
unless they're dynamically added to the content on playback they should all
very much have the same kind of scaling issues as far as video encoding is
concerned.

[1] Once in all the varying quality and compatibility levels you offer,
anyway.

~~~
dasil003
Well actually with modern segmented streaming (HLS or DASH), you only need 2
encodes to get 2^n (for video of n segments) unique streams. The trick is you
generate the manifest per user, and they each get a unique permutation.

I actually spoke to a vendor in the last month that claims to have actually
deployed this and actually prosecuted pirates. Obviously this is a sales
engineer pitching a product, so take it with a grain of salt, but I have no
reason to believe the technology is not reasonably robust and scalable.

~~~
ant6n
So then we need captures from, say, 16 users and some software to scramble all
of them together.

------
jewel
I'd love to have something like Netflix but with every movie ever. I'd even be
willing to pay a reasonable fee per movie to stream them. I have hope that
companies with a business model like VidAngel could legally provide that.

VidAngel is a family-friendly video streaming company that filters movies as
they stream. While filtering may not be something that you're interested in
personally, what I'd like to draw your attention to is their business model.
They sell the movie to the viewer for $20, and then the viewer has the option
to sell it back for $19 (SD) or $18 (HD) within 24 hours.

I have no idea if this is legal or if they are just under the radar, but so
far VidAngel has a wide selection of new releases with a price point that
feels reasonable to me personally.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
[https://www.vidangel.com/legal/terms](https://www.vidangel.com/legal/terms)

> VidAngel provides a service that allows its Users to buy or sell physical
> media, such as DVD and Blu-ray discs. While a User owns any physical media
> purchased from VidAngel, VidAngel will provide streaming services to permit
> the User to stream the Video Content associated with that physical media as
> many times as desired. [...] Using the VidAngel Services, a User may
> purchase physical media from VidAngel, whom then stores the physical media
> in VidAngel’s physical media vault. [...] VidAngel also provides shipping
> and handling service that allows any User to direct VidAngel to ship, to an
> address identified by the User, any physical media the User owns which is
> stored in VidAngel’s physical media storage vault. A reasonable shipping and
> handling fee applies. The amount of the shipping and handling fee, which is
> generally dependent on shipping location, time, and other shipping and
> handling circumstances, is disclosed to a User when the User requests the
> shipping.

You are buying a physical copy which they keep, or so they say. It is almost
certainly questionably legal, because the license you receive from the film
distributor when you purchase a physical copy does not permit you to stream
the work, nor does VidAngel's license permit digitizing the work and streaming
it out to you simply because you "own" another copy.

There's no army of contractors running around inserting your disc in racks
upon racks of Blu-Ray players. They digitized and are serving a film from some
other copy. That requires special licensing which their pricing scheme does
not circumvent, nor the "ownership" (which is flirting with fraud, by my
read).

Modifying the content with filters, especially user-selected ones, is even
worse. Just doing that for broadcast requires special care. I know because I
used to edit films for OTA broadcast, and observed the legal side that went
into crossing every T. It took months before I was even allowed to load up a
film in an editor, because merely importing the content into Avid _entails a
licensed usage_. Film copyright is serious.

I don't care how many lawyers vetted this, it will not stand up under scrutiny
(and, importantly, I'm not saying whether I agree or disagree with that). What
concerns me more about VidAngel, though, is their mixed messaging and
shadiness. On their about page, they say:

> That’s why VidAngel does not claim to be a moral authority. We will never
> tell you what to watch or what filters to use. You have the choice to watch
> however the BLEEP you want.

Sounds great. But then, one reads this:

> As VidAngel has grown and reached a broader audience, a few new customers
> have begun asking if they can stream on VidAngel without filters. [...] The
> short answer is, unfortunately, NO.

> There are a lot of great streaming websites for unfiltered movies like
> Amazon, Google Play, and Vudu. Use those sites for watching movies as-is,
> and use VidAngel for any movies you choose to filter.

(Note that the second link asks "why are filters required?" and then does not
answer the question.)

[http://blog.vidangel.com/2016/01/07/vidangel-policy-can-i-
wa...](http://blog.vidangel.com/2016/01/07/vidangel-policy-can-i-watch-
vidangel-without-filters/)

[https://vidangel.groovehq.com/knowledge_base/topics/why-
are-...](https://vidangel.groovehq.com/knowledge_base/topics/why-are-filters-
required)

So it sounds like the filtering is important in their interpretation of
copyright law (I only say this due to "unfortunately") or they _are_ a moral
authority and don't want to admit it to you. Which smells either way. Avoid
like the plague and throw a few bucks at someone who flies by day, has a
registered DMCA agent, and doesn't employ _WHOIS privacy on their domain_.
What are they hiding? Seriously, if you take money and employ WHOIS privacy, I
get immediately suspicious.

They're based out of Provo and only reveal that on their Privacy page
(legally-required, I'm sure). I can safely predict exactly what is going on
based on their being based in Utah and that the owner went to BYU, which is
why it's funny that they try so hard to convince you that they're not a moral
authority but then don't let you watch uncut content _at all_ , then tell you
that you're getting a choice. Quite the spin.

~~~
theWheez
I'm an employee at VidAngel so I may be able to provide some insight (although
my opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer and should
not be taken as such).

When VidAngel says that it does not claim to be a moral authority, it is
separating itself from the competition (e.g. ClearPlay). It is not going to
tell its customers that x is inappropriate or that it is appropriate to view
y. All it is saying is that it is up to the customer to decide their moral
standing and what they would and would not like to view. We simply tag the
content, they decide what they would like to view in their home.

VidAngel is, at its core, a filtering company. So if you are not filtering,
VidAngel give you alternatives such as Amazon and Google Play. That does not
conflict with its refusal to be a moral authority. It offers the service to
filter movies and TV shows in the privacy of your own home, but what you
choose to filter is not up to VidAngel.

VidAngel is a filtering company and doesn't offer unfiltered movies--because
that is not the market it is after. Within that filtering, VidAngel offers no
opinion on which filter is 'morally correct' or not.

As far as 'shadiness' goes, VidAngel definitely doesn't try to hide what it is
doing. You can contact VidAngel at support@vidangel.com if you have questions.

~~~
DaveMebs
The legal terms state "A User owning physical media must use VidAngel’s
filtering service to permit the streaming of Filtered Video Content to the
User’s device."

Section 5.2 at
[https://www.vidangel.com/legal/terms](https://www.vidangel.com/legal/terms)

This sure makes it sound like filtering is believed to be required to make the
movie legal to stream.

I really struggle to believe VidAngel would build a feature to turn away
customers because it is not their market focus. It just doesn't make sense as
an engineering investment decision - it is easier and more profitable to allow
any number of filters (with 0 being a valid number).

------
AndyMcConachie
I don't understand this argument. Netflix depends on DRM and always has.

Also, this pledge won't protect anyone. Because there's no guarantee that the
people/companies suing the developer who breaks future DRM will have signed
the pledge. The best protection a developer can have against the DMCA is to
not live in the USA.

I generally support everything the EFF does, but I don't get this. If the W3C
doesn't standardize DRM we'll still get DRM. It will just be more buggy and
with more security holes. Just like MS Silverlight and Adobe Flash.

The idea that you can prevent something from being developed by not
standardizing it is absurd.

~~~
digi_owl
> I don't understand this argument. Netflix depends on DRM and always has.

Nope, they never really have (though it may be changing now that they are
producing their own content). The studios supplying them with content on the
other hand has.

~~~
AndyMcConachie
Do you think they would have gotten any contracts for content without DRM? I
doubt it.

------
shmerl
Film industry is one of the most corrupted and backwards thinking (MPAA is the
prime example). So this can be rephrased as "Help fixing film industry which
keeps pushing for retarded idea of DRM at every occasion!". And really it's
not the whole film industry. Actual creators most often don't care about this
garbage. It's publishers and lawyers who feel the need to satisfy their
unquenchable urge for control. DRM and DMCA give them that. Ego feeding
control feeling (which is really fake, since in essence they don't control it
anyway). I'd call them control freaks.

And how can one exactly fix it? GOG attempted it a while back[1], trying to
replicate their success with DRM-free gaming. But they failed.

[1]:
[https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree...](https://www.gog.com/forum/general/introducing_gogcom_drmfree_movies/post499)

------
city41
Minor correction:

> It's Netflix, from its founding in 1997, the company mailed DVDs around
> America and then the world, right up to 2007, when it switched to streaming.

Netflix's DVD service never went beyond the US, and still exists to this day.

~~~
morganvachon
I was bothered by that too. Up until three years ago, we had kept the DVD-by-
mail subscription active for those movies we wanted to watch that weren't
available on the streaming sub. After we got our first Roku, we dropped the
DVD sub since pretty much anything we wanted to watch was offered on one Roku
channel or another (not to mention Netflix's streaming offerings steadily
improved over the years).

------
deegles
I believe that in a few years every content owner will have developed their
own streaming platform. Or the opposite in Netflix's case. Customers will be
forced to pay for N different providers to get access to all content.

What we need is legislation similar to radio broadcasting, which has fixed
per-play rates, but for video.

~~~
cpeterso
Perhaps this is a business opportunity for white label streaming services (as
hosted SaaS or on-premise deployment).

~~~
malka
Plex could develop their product to fill this market imo

------
fludlight
The information density of this article is very low.

> For the first time in its history, the W3C is adding encumbrances to the
> Web, rather than removing them.

How, specifically, so?

~~~
davexunit
>How, specifically, so?

By pushing the EME standard. A Netflix employee is on the working group for
it.

------
rtpg
So this is about the DRM stuff in the new specs? Didn't Netflix use DRM since
the outset?

I know there's some moral positioning about standardising DRM, but would it
really affect the 'next Netflix'? Standardised DRM responds to business needs,
and companies have already discovered that DRM-Free is a feature, so
standardising DRM won't make DRM-free stuff disappear...

From the petition page:

>Imagine a new, disruptive company figured out a way to let hundreds of people
watch a single purchased copy of a movie, even though the rightsholders who
made that movie objected.

> Of course, it's also the business model of Netflix, circa 1997

This is only true in a pedantic sense. Netflix was shipping around physical
copies. Sending digital copies goes by another name: broadcasting! The Supreme
court already ruled on that one.

I can't see people being like "oh, yeah, people should be able to broadcast
other people's content to hundreds of thousands without the content owner's
positions" (Think: this is the main objection to Facebook's Video strategy)

I guess EFF has a position and this is them trying to defend it but their
narrative is pretty unconvincing from where I stand.

------
schnable
Maybe I'm missing something, but how would EME have stopped Netflix? They
always had proper licensing and DRM for their digital content.

~~~
jcl
I think the author's point is that the Netflix of today was only able to
afford proper licensing and DRM for digital content because they made so much
money mailing around discs, against strong objection from the content
providers. And if someone wanted to bootstrap a new video distribution service
today on a digital platform, EME would give the content providers the power to
put an end to it.

------
empressplay
TFA makes it sound like Netflix bootstrapped itself by buying DVDs from
WalMart, which is false -- Rental DVDs, of course, are purchased from
distributors and are substantially more expensive than consumer DVDs.

~~~
nkurz
You state your answer with great confidence, but I think you are wrong. In the
US (where Netflix is based), the "first sale doctrine" has been held to allow
the rental of any legally purchased DVD (even those purchased at Walmart):

    
    
      Because of the first-sale doctrine, any DVD reseller,   
      including Netflix, can basically buy a DVD at WalMart, and 
      turn around and rent it to someone else the very same day. 
      The content owners have absolutely no control over whether 
      the copy can be resold or rented. Period. As such, Netflix 
      has the ability to rent (via DVD) any movie which has ever 
      been sold on DVD, and its costs are relatively fixed as a 
      result of the retail price of the actual DVD.
    

[http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/09/18/understanding-why-
netfli...](http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/09/18/understanding-why-netflix-
changed-pricing/)

In your defense, it appears that many lawyers also do not understand this law.
Here for example we see three saying that rental of consumer DVD's is clearly
illegal, and two saying that it's just fine: [http://www.avvo.com/legal-
answers/is-it-legal-to-rent-out-dv...](http://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/is-
it-legal-to-rent-out-dvd-s-i-ve-purchased--815989.html)

This is probably because various studios have attempted to convince the public
that rental of consumer DVD's is not allowed, even though falsely marking
DVD's in this way is probably not legal:
[http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2007/05/first-sale-
fandango...](http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2007/05/first-sale-
fandango.html)

But while I'm pretty certain you are wrong, and although I think I understand
the law here, I am not a lawyer, much less a specialist in copyright law. If
you can point to evidence that supports your contention, I'd be eager to see
it.

------
tryitnow
Glad to see this. I've criticized EFF before. Not because I disagree with them
but because they haven't done a good enough job clearly communicating why
they're relevant.

This article shows that they're improving in that direction. Netflix is
something that average people really get and the idea that future Netflixes
could be stillborn is a good way to communicate the importance of these
issues.

Good job, EFF.

------
useYourIllusion
5 years old but still very relevant:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg)

------
disposeofnick9
Verizon is throttling YouTube for unlimited data-plan customers _a lot_ , to
where it's unusable... other sites work somewhat better.

------
hmans
Remember when everyone agreed that there was no point to competing with AOL
and CompuServe?

------
dfc
I am confused. Save netflix from DRM? Despite Netflix's commitment to open
source I can't stream movies because the DRM solution Netflix chose is not
supported under linux.

~~~
ac29
Netflix works fine under Linux and has for over a year.

~~~
dfc
Wow! This is great news, I never thought there would be an open source Netflix
solution. Can you give me some pointers for where to find more information? I
did a quick search and did not find anything.

~~~
ac29
1) Open Google Chrome.

2) Go to netflix.com

3) Watch netflix.

------
profeta
Wow. the whole thread here one have a single top-level comment, with a
completely wrong understanding of the issue. (and yes, the title of the linked
article is awful)

------
scorpio3203
Honestly I have no thoughts on this

------
serge2k
> making some of the most innovative programming on any of our screens

Evidently the author hasn't seen "the ranch"

~~~
blakeyrat
F is for Family is the last of their "original series" I tried.

Wow. What a hateful show. It's like they found the world's greatest
misanthropist, gave them $10,000,000, and said, "here, make a show that's kind
of like The Simpsons I guess."

I have to admit I watched all the episodes, kind of like how when you see a
horrible train collision you stick around to see how many bodies will be
strewn about when it's over.

~~~
waterside81
It was comedian Bill Burr's idea. He pitched it to Vince Vaughan's production
company, who then went to Netflix.

~~~
91bananas
And he was probably not paid $10,000,000. But he is damn hilarious in that
show

~~~
blakeyrat
You thought it was funny? I found every minute of it horrifying.

------
smaili
Anyone else miss Blockbuster?

~~~
blakeyrat
Blockbuster's DVD mailing service was _way_ better than Netflix's. Ironically,
while Blockbuster stores were (rightly) criticized for having a very small,
limited selection, their selection of DVDs was incredibly complete-- far
larger than Netflix's. Even their envelopes were better-designed.

So yeah I kind of miss it.

------
Houshalter
This article is very confusing. What exactly about DRM prevents Netflix?

------
tootie
I don't understand this post at all. And I'm smart.

------
worldunited
Why is my phone going to CRASH

