Flash DRM Could Kill Flash Video

Part of the reason Flash is the most popular streaming video format today is its lack of stupid DRM restrictions. From player innovation to cheap distribution to user mashability, the absence of DRM allows Flash video to thrive in ways DRM-laden formats never could.

That’s why Flash DRM is a bad idea.

Now Adobe, which controls Flash and Flash Video, is trying to change that with the introduction of DRM restrictions in version 9 of its Flash Player and version 3 of its Flash Media Server software. Instead of an ordinary web download, these programs can use a proprietary, secret Adobe protocol to talk to each other, encrypting the communication and locking out non-Adobe software players and video tools. We imagine that Adobe has no illusions that this will stop copyright infringement — any more than dozens of other DRM systems have done so — but the introduction of encryption does give Adobe and its customers a powerful new legal weapon against competitors and ordinary users through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Recall that the DMCA sets out a blanket ban on tools that help “circumvent” any DRM system (as well as the act of circumvention itself). When Flash Video files are simply hosted on a web site with no encryption, it’s unlikely that tools to download, edit, or remix them are illegal. But when encryption enters the picture, entertainment companies argue that fair use is no excuse; Adobe, or customers using Flash Media Server 3, can try to shut down users who break the encryption without having to prove that the users are doing anything copyright-infringing. Even if users aren’t targeted directly, technology developers may be threatened and the technologies the users need driven underground.

Furthermore, the prospect of widespread adoption of DRM restrictions on Flash threatens to squash a growing tradition of expressive fair use of online video — a practice effectively in its infancy that, left unfettered, would be a dynamic solution to our failing effort to teach media literacy. Before we understand how to read media messages, we must first learn how to speak their language — and we learn that language by playing with and remixing the efforts of others. DRM, by restricting the remixing of Flash videos, stands to bankrupt a rich store of educational value by foreclosing the ability of students and teachers to “echo others” by remixing videos posted online.

DRM would inhibit a lot of the things that made Flash video such a runaway hit in the first place. Way to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, Adobe.