Why Collabora really added Digital Restrictions Management to Weston October 7, 2019 on Drew DeVault's blog

A recent article from Collabora, Why HDCP support in Weston is a good thing, proports to offer a lot of insight into why HDCP - a Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) related technology - was added to Weston - a well known basic Wayland compositor which was once the reference compositor for Wayland. But this article is gaslighting you. There is one reason and one reason alone that explains why HDCP support landed in Weston.

Q: Why was HDCP added to Weston?

A: $$$$$

Why does Collabora want you to believe that HDCP support in Weston is a good thing? Let’s look into this in more detail. First: is HDCP a bad thing?

DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) is the collective term for software which attempts to restrict the rights of users attempting to access digital media. It’s mostly unrelated to Direct Rendering Manager, an important Linux subsystem for graphics which is closely related to Wayland. Digital Restrictions Management is software used by media owners to prevent you from enjoying their content except in specific, pre-prescribed ways.

There is universal agreement among the software community that DRM is ineffective. Ultimately, these systems are defeated by the simple fact that no amount of DRM can stop you from pointing your camera at your screen and pushing record. But in practice, we don’t even need to resort to that - these systems are far too weak to demand such measures. Here’s a $100 device on Amazon which can break HDCP. DRM is shown to be impossible even in theory, as the decryption keys have to live somewhere in your house in order to watch movies there. Exfiltrating them is just a matter of putting forth the effort. For most users, it hardly requires any effort to bypass DRM - they can just punch “watch [name of movie] for free” into Google. It’s well-understood and rather obvious that DRM systems completely and entirely fail at their stated goal.

No reasonable engineer would knowingly agree to adding a broken system like that to their system, and trust me - the entire engineering community has been made well-aware of these faults. Any other system with these obvious flaws would be discarded immediately, and if the media industry hadn’t had their hands firmly clapped over their ears, screaming “la la la”, and throwing money at the problem, it would have been. But, just adding a broken system isn’t necessarily going to hurt much. The problem is that, in its failure to achieve its stated goals, DRM brings with it some serious side-effects. DRM is closely tied to nonfree software - the RIAA mafia wants to keep their garbage a secret, after all. Moreover, DRM takes away the freedom to play your media when and where you want. Why should you have to have an internet connection? Why can’t you watch it on your ancient iPod running Rockbox? DRM exists to restrict users from doing what they want. More sinisterly, it exists to further the industry’s push to end consumer ownership of its products - preferring to steal from you monthly subscription fees and lease the media to you. Free software maintainers are responsible for protecting their users from this kind of abuse, and putting DRM into our software betrays them.

The authors are of the opinion that HDCP support in Weston does not take away any rights from users. It doesn’t stop you from doing anything. This is true, in the same way that killing environmental regulations doesn’t harm the environment. Adding HDCP support is handing a bottle of whiskey to an abusive husband. And the resulting system - and DRM as a whole - is known to be inherently broken and ineffective, a fact that they even acknowledge in their article. This feature enables media companies to abuse your users. Enough cash might help some devs to doublethink their way out of it, but it’s true all the same. They added these features to help abusive companies abuse their users, in the hopes that they’ll send back more money or more patches. They say as much in the article, it’s no secret.

Or, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt: perhaps their bosses forced them to add this¹. There have been other developers on this ledge, and I’ve talked them down. Here’s the thing: it worked. Their organizations didn’t pursue DRM any further. You are not the lowly code monkey you may think you are. Engineers have real power in the organization. You can say “no” and it’s your responsibility to say “no” when someone asks you to write unethical code.

Some of the people I’ve spoken to about HDCP for Wayland, particularly for Weston, are of the opinion that “a protocol for it exists, therefore we will implement it”. This is reckless and stupid. We already know what happens when you bend the knee to our DRM overlords: look at Firefox. In 2014, Mozilla added DRM to Firefox after a year of fighting against its standardization in the W3C (a captured organization which governs² web standards). They capitulated, and it did absolutely nothing to stop them from being steamrolled by Chrome’s growing popularity. Their market-share freefall didn’t even slow down in 2014, or in any year since³. Collabora went down without a fight in the first place.

Anyone who doesn’t recognize that self-interested organizations with a great deal of resources are working against our interests as a free software community is an idiot. We are at war with the bad actors pushing these systems, and they are to be given no quarter. Anyone who realizes this and turns a blind eye to it is a coward. Anyone who doesn’t stand up to their boss, sits down, implements it in our free software ecosystem, and cashes their check the next Friday - is not only a coward, but a traitor to their users, their peers, and to society as a whole.

“HDCP support in Weston is a good thing”? It’s a good thing for you, maybe. It’s a good thing for media conglomerates which want our ecosystem crushed underfoot. It’s a bad thing for your users, and you know it, Collabora. Shame on you for gaslighting us.

However… the person who reverts these changes is a hero, even in the face of past mistakes. Weston, Collabora, you still have a chance to repent. Do what you know is right and stand by those principles in the future.

P.S. To make sure I’m not writing downers all the time, rest assured that the next article will bring good news - RaptorCS has been working hard to correct the issues I raised in my last article.