There is no technical reason that DRM technology can't be FOSS and use non-secret keys; this is a result of licensing agreements with content owners. I'm hoping to have those agreements made public so technical discussions surrounding EME can take place with a degree of transparency.

Eh? If your DRM code is FOSS I'm just going to patch it, recompile it, dump out the keys, decrypt my media, and ignore all your constraints.

Technical DRM only 'works' when the code is an obfuscated steaming pile and the implementation/platform/hardware tries to make it an incredibly difficult process to mess subvert.

Theres never been a consumer-facing DRM technology thats made a lick of sense, and frankly I'm glad most of the FOSS success stories are in defeating it rather than proliferating a broken trust model that serves to prop up slow-moving industry monopolists who bump up costs (of many kinds) to consumers and are going to lose in the long-run anyway.

Sure - and the fact that you can do that is why 'big content' don't want a bar of FOSS DRM.

Personally, I like the idea of copyright bits that travel with content. Some way of telling the user how the creator wishes the content to be used, or not used. Not enforced, mind you (because as you say, that's impossible) but just notified. Making it easier to do the right thing.

That would go well with watermarking to identify paid content, and a good system for processing micropayments.

But of course it's easier just to lobby the W3C and break the Open Web :(

I agree. I think if we promoted Creative Commons and generally made people more aware of how copyright law can be used to promote creativity, fair use and empower indy content creators that we'd become more sympathetic to the case made by Hollywood and the music industry, and maybe eventually get out of this rut of seeing it as a weapon for big media.

I wouldn't oppose any standard that made it mandatory for copyright and license information to be encoded in to image, video and audio content. Nor would I oppose a requirement for browser vendors to expose that information accessibly (on demand) to users.

I'd also like to see online registries that worked like TinEye or Midomi and let me quickly identify content with an emphasis on copyright and license discovery.