After years of insisting that DRM in HTML wouldn't block open source implementations, Google says it won't support open source implementations

The bitter, yearslong debate at the World Wide Web Consortium over a proposal to standardize DRM for web browsers included frequent assurances by the pro-DRM side (notably Google, whose Widevine DRM was in line to be the principal beneficiary) that this wouldn't affect the ability of free/open source authors to implement the standard.

The absurd figleaf used to justify this was a reference implementation of EME in open source that only worked on video that didn't have the DRM turned on. The only people this impressed were people who weren't paying attention or lacked the technical depth to understand that a tool that only works under conditions that are never seen in the real world was irrelevant to real-world conditions.

Now the real world has arrived, and it was just as predicted. Samuel Maddock is a free software developer who is creating a new browser called Metastream, derived from Chromium, the free/open version of Google's Chrome. Metastream is designed to allow users to "playback videos on the web, synchronized with other peers."

This is obviously not a copyright violation of any kind. Metastream allows users to stream copies of videos they are allowed to see, but synchronizes playback so they can watch them together. In an age of Twitch, this is obviously useful (also: it's something I personally ghost-wrote in to the BBC's 2006 Charter Renewal document as a favor to one of the people involved, so it's something that major rightsholder groups like the idea of, too).

Maddock wanted to allow his users to do this with the videos they pay to watch on Widevine-restricted services like Hulu and Netflix, so he applied to Google for a license to implement Widevine in his browser. Read the rest