I’m simply taking the stance of the consumer. I don’t think it’s in their interest, as pointed out in my response. When I was a kid, I taped music from the radio as all my fellows did. Now that I’m adult, I’m paying for it. Although I paid for it, I cannot move it between the devices I own. The people that did not pay for it are probably laughing at me. The DVDs I buy today do not play on my DVD player that I bought two years ago, because of copy protection. For non-technical people, all this non-interoperability is a big hurdle to actually adopt digital media. That’s why I think copy protection leads nowhere. And what doesn’t help the consumers, won’t help the producers in the end.

@FFD, there is an arms race going on about siphoning the bits that come from your beloved or hated broadcaster onto your monitor. That arms race now takes the matter to an extreme and I agree that it cannot be won by the currently existing broadcasting and monetization schemes. The EFF post had some comments about monitor manufacturers that want to comply to the Windows DRM/encryption must decrypt the pixels/frames in hardware so that there is not really a place in the image pipeline where you can drain the stream. Given these (extreme) efforts I don’t think that anyone at Adobe thinks that the stream encryption with a standard cipher will change the game in any way, it will give content producers (smaller, but mostly the bigger ones) another option.
There, of course, is an advantage for Adobe. If you want to encrypt your stream you need to shell out a thousand bucks for an Adobe FMS server. If you don’t want to pay that money you have to keep serving that FLV file from your free HTTP server, or serve to content to an open source H.264 player from your open source RTSP server.

Do you think that Adobe should not allow stream encryption and take the side of people that advocate as little protection as possible for content rights? Given the dominance in web video do you think Adobe has some form of “moral” obligation? And why do you think that obligation exists? I would be interested in your thoughts/speculations on how an eco-system that is free of content rights (or protection of those rights) will play out better in the long run over an eco-system where people pay a good chunk of money to create premium content and then want to monetize the content, either with advertising or by selling the content or subscriptions. And can both eco-systems exist side by side?
Where does the money flow? Is it only tools? Ads? Subscriptions? Pay-per-view? Purchase of the video? What keeps the eco-system humming and pays the electricity bills of the server farms?

Hopefully Joerg will show up to clarify, but I assume what he means is there are no built-in restrictions to how often you can view a stream. Also, the encryption can be used for other things besides DRM, if I understand correctly, such as secure streaming.

I don’t think that open source is antithetical to strong encryption. As you say, that isn’t a problem for open source SSL implementations. My understanding is exactly that Adobe isn’t trying to control what you do once you have the stream. They are just preventing other players from reading the encrypted data.

To bring the discussion back on topic, how do you envisage Adobe completely open-sourcing their Flash products if that requires giving people the full source of how to decode the DRMed content they’re sending? In a world where it is “just like SSL” that would’t be a problem. In a world where its purpose is to control what you do *after* you receive the stream, that’s going to be much harder – I’d say impossible.

From a consumer’s perspective, it looks different. Copy protection will work with everyday users, but talented hacker will break it easily, because if you can see it on your screen, you can copy it. Tools will soon become available to crack it.

The Flash copy protection will reinforce the fundamental misunderstanding of media companies that digital goods can be protected by technical means. Instead of stepping back and implementing new and open strategies of content distribution and monetarization, they will be encouraged to continue their aggressive and in the long term hopeless fight that we have seen to create so much damage in the music industry. Why should we repeat this drama with video?

My guess is that the media industry will pressure video hosters with all means to put copy protection on all videos, as soon as it is technically available. They are unlikely to succeed, but it any case, the Flash copy protection won’t be a step forward for the web itself and the consumers.