It's duplication, not transfer, so "sharing" is a more appropriate word than "stealing".
> I'm sure it's in the contract of every streaming service that they have to protect the licensed content to the best of their ability.
I've also read many EULAs which contain onerous terms; contracts don't need to be agreed to, and negotiations are a two way street. We need more of http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/2843069.stm and less of https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/nov/14/bbc-hd-dr...
> need to license content to survive
> Considering almost half of all bandwidth (in the US at least) is used for streaming, I'd say it's pretty important to have a well-defined solution to enable streaming companies to do what they need to do.
Streaming companies don't "need" to do anything. If they truly "need" DRM to exist, then they should shoulder that burden themselves rather than coercing others into doing the work for them; especially organisations and structures governing the Web, which was created specifically to disseminate human knowledge.
If that's too much of a burden for media companies to handle, then they should bow to market forces and close down. Humanity has survived perfectly well for millenia without them. Perhaps that will help divert some of the entertainment industry's billions towards causes of some actual importance.
There are a few schemes, which normally do not even count as DRM, that is intended to protect copyrighted material. Encrypted TV channels is a primarily example. A streaming service could copy that scheme, but delivery physical tamper-proof boxes that do key-exchange every few minutes is quite expensive. Alternative they could what YouTube/Twitch do, which makes copying a stream about as difficult as downloading a pirated version from a torrent site (ie, you need to use a third-party software). For movies, it is the best protection as you can get without having to distribute physical boxes.
They shouldn't because it is useless. DRM can always be circumvented.
> it's in the contract of every streaming service that they have to protect the licensed content to the best of their ability
This is the only reason why DRM exists: Stupid, greedy rights sellers. They don't care why or how people consume the media. They only see licenses and money. "Protecting" licenses equals protecting money for them.
DRM is not bad because I want to "steal" anything. It is bad because proprietary software with the main goal of restricting its users leads to a bad experience. Amazon Prime Video for example is horribly buggy and hard to use. If I could use a decent player, I would pay more money for the service. Both sides would benefit from no DRM, but greedy rights sellers don't have logical thinking in their toolbox.
> because the alternative to this proposal is not "no DRM", the alternative is a worse UX from a plethora of more hostile, wider reaching proprietary DRM implementations.
Good. Everything which makes DRM easier to implement, more reliable/stable/cross-platform/interoperable/etc., more streamlined and simpler to use, just skews the cost/benefit in the wrong direction. Everyone should be Free to make whatever DRM system they like, but such anti-social behaviour shouldn't be encouraged, and I certainly don't want to see organisations (FSF, Mozilla, W3C, etc.) making that activity any easier.
Plus, the harder it is to obtain and set up a working DRM system, the easier it will be for me to avoid it. For example, online tracking is very easy to accomplish, and is supported by many Free Software browsers, which means I have to spend time maintaining black/whitelists, selectively enabling JS in NoScript, deobfuscating and reading through JS source, etc. to avoid it. In comparison, Silverlight and Flash can be avoided very easily by not installing them.
Consider an analogy to proprietary software. It still exists, everyone is Free to make it, and many say it has a better UX. That doesn't stop me from running pure Free Software systems. If, say, the FSF had caved in years ago, and accepted some proprietary software, then my choice to avoid proprietary software would have been much harder since I'd have to disentangle such blobs myself.
The point of the GPL is to make Free Software easier to write, without benefitting proprietary software.
> There's a time and a place to fight about DRM vs. no-DRM , but it's not here, this is the fight about how the DRM we will inevitably get works and interoperates.
If you've given up that's fine, but please don't get in the way of those of us still fighting.