The EFF Speaks Out On Flash Video DRM

Friday, February 22, 2008 by Mistlee

Hey FlashNewzers, Your friendly neighborhood newsletter author here bringing you tidings from all across the world...in cyberspace. We'll be globetrotting showing off some Flash sweetness from Germany, Italy and Russia.

First up we've got this kid from Russia that totally pimped out his porfolio. He's only 23 and has mad flash experience that shows. He's got some skills and tricks to make any flasher green with envy. The site's got a hyper tech look and a real sense of fun.

Next we've got Hema. I don't know what it says or what it's for but I love it. I think it might actually be for a computer hardware business. They've painstakingly emulated a catalog order website like Amazon and animated a cause-and-effect sequence of chaos. It's obvious these guys had a lot of fun making this. The quality of animation's apparent and there's so much going on that every time you view it you'll notice something different.

Last up is an Italian home design site that shows some ridiculously awesome house gear anyone would love to buy if they had infinite dollars to spend on an art sink or a circular ceiling mirror. Their flash is money too.

Well I gotta zip outta here, Stefan's hooking us up again this week with article about Flash Vid DRM. Holla!


Mark Rivera



"DAS BOOT! ! !"





For any thoughts or suggestions for a website to be featured in FlashNewz gimme a shout at mark@flashnewz.com

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The EFF Speaks Out On Flash Video DRM

Stefan Richter By Stefan Richter

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) Seth Schoen has posted an article on the upcoming - as he calls it - DRM features of Flash Media Server 3.

Make of DRM as a technology what you like but I think the author has missed the point here, or does not understand the purpose of RTMPE, the new encrypted flavor of Adobe’s Real Time Messaging Protocol. FMS3 doesn’t actually apply any kind of DRM to the video content itself, it merely secures the transmission and thereby circumvents content from being intercepted in transit, a process that’s similar to the way that your credit card information is being transmitted to a payment provider when you buy things online - anyone listening in on that transmission will see just garbage that would take years to decrypt.

The author also raises concerns that ‘remixers who find and use tools that break the Flash Video encryption could be sued, even if their transformative creations would otherwise have been fair use’. These concerns are unfounded - many sites, including all the consumer facing properties which deploy Flash video progressively, are unlikely to move to FMS anyway, hence will not use encryption and will continue to offer remixing facilities .

Lastly, encrypting the delivery channel does not sound like DRM to me, it’s mere access control. Using secure transmissions and token based authentication, this has been done already. All Adobe did in regards to FMS3 is make the SSL-style encryption easier to use and lighter on system resources by using RTMPE.

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