Widevine retiring its Cloud License Service (CLS)

That is exactly what the purpose of DRM is. Its not to prevent piracy, its to create a barrier to entry.

Oh, definitely. They could put the foot down and end this pointless charade swiftly. But if Google and Apple had the balls to go against the big media, the world would look very differently.

They are, in fact, the big media themselves now. They have the power, and more than enough of it. No streaming service can afford to skip having an app on iOS or Android - all Apple has to do is crack the whip. Say "this DRM is no longer compliant with our device policy and will be phased out by 2030" and there goes that.

But they still act like they're weird web teens who can't raise a voice against the big media boys without getting bullied for it.

That, or they believe this DRM charade serves them - and user experience can go suck a dick.

FYI Samsung was paid by MS to add DRM to the Galaxy devices ~2010. Source: I was part of the team that had to implement the customer-facing part, carrier billing integration and backend 4-way revshare accounting in zero time. Harder than it sounds, and probably never repeated since unless you're preloading it's against terms to introduce payments on Android. IIRC the real heroes were the Indian embedded engineers who were 10x better than the Koreans.

Every other exploit chain that the likes of Cellebrite use to pry the user data encryption keys out of TZ starts in some shitty DRM module.

In ARM, TrustZone[0] is a higher level of privilege than hypervisors (EL3 vs. EL2); it's morally equivalent to x86 System Management Mode. That means it categorically can steal your data. There's nothing EL2 code can do to prevent inspection or manipulation from a malicious EL3.

A less awful design would have been to keep the security code at EL2 and have CPU hardware that can isolate two EL2s from one another[1]. This is ultimately what ARM wound up doing with S-EL2, but you still need to have EL3 code to define the boundary between the two. At best the SoC vendor can design a (readable/auditable!) boot ROM that occupies EL3 and enforces a boundary between secure and non-secure EL2s.

[0] Or, at least, TrustZone's secure monitor. TZ can of course run secure code at lower privilege levels, but that doesn't stop a TZ compromise from becoming a full system compromise.

[1] If you're wondering, this is morally equivalent to Apple's guarded exception levels.

Yes. The demands are stupid and useless. Nonetheless, some idiot put them down and into the licensing agreement. And that makes you the idiot tasked with fulfilling them.

Most of those Stallmanesque nicknames feel kinda childish, but this one is so spot on that it always takes a moment for me to realize that it's not how it was originally named when I see it being used.

How is it that articles about DRM have people like you commenting who are critical of IP (I'm not disagreeing with you on that), but articles about AI being trained on GPL code, books, and art are full of people complaining about IP rights not being respected. Why don't the commenters cross-pollinate so the pro-IP guys can come here and say "We need DRM to protect artists' livelihoods" and the anti-IP guys can go there and say "AIs are doing God's work making information free like it wants to be".

If your law enforcement does as much to prevent or deter murder as DRM does to prevent or deter video piracy, oh boy do I not want to live in your city. I'm not sure who would. Maybe all the serial killers?

The vast majority of DRM protected content (or at least majority by watch time) available in UHD via torrent in a matter of hours. People like to stay away from torrents, because it carries significant risk in many jurisdictions. But the only reason UHD versions are only available via torrent and often not as streams or downloads is bandwidth cost. I can't see how it has any thing todo with DRM. The only thing it maybe cut's down is sharing within friend groups. But even then it only takes one to figure out how to set up a VPN for torrenting.

In my case, the in-browser DRM is what is making things more difficult. Whenever something uses the DRM checks, one or both of my monitors turn off. I am not interested in troubleshooting this beyond disabling DRM in my browsers. I don't generally pirate any media, but it might actually be easier than troubleshooting this hardware problem.

> If you have no DRM and people can just share the install disk, they will do that and piracy will be universal

There are plenty of consumers who are happy to pay a reasonable price for an easy-to-access product.

The question is, does adding DRM onto your product push more of those consumers towards piracy than it does towards paying...?

With streaming content, the barrier to just copying it is already as high as pirating. You don't just have a file you can email to your friend -- you have to install and use software to capture the video and then handle the big file that results, on your phone, which is awkward. And that just gives you one movie which in isolation is barely worth anyone's attention to begin with. By the time you've figured out all that, you could have just figured out how to torrent, or even easier, find a free Chinese website that streams the pirated content to your browser just like the original service.