Actually I have read the spec for HLS and it does not specify any restrictions on the operating system, handling of keys, or handling of decrypted content.

The fact still remains - your issue here is with "DRM" as a concept, which is perfectly fine. I honestly don't think it matters to most consumers.

I dont think purveyors of DRM systems view them as being flawless. The point is not to make it impossible to pirate content but to make it inconvenient enough that the average consumer wont do it. HDCP, CSS, FairPlay, AACS etc. have been very effective at that.

How is it any more anti-competitive or anti-consumer than copyright in general? If your issue is with copyright why not just come out and say it?

I feel like reasonable people can disagree about both sides of that statement.

Is that true though? Lots of protected content is distributed through systems that use standardized encryption / content protection mechanisms (HLS, for example). However it sounds like your issue is in fact ideological ("DRM is bad"), which is fine, but just your perspective. I wonder how many of Netflix's 33 million subscribers have a similar perspective. My guess would be - not enough to matter.

So your critique is not that DRM is bad, but that the spec does not go far enough in specifying a standard "CDM?"

It also specifies a "CDM" that must be implemented by all browsers.

What? There are a lot of different 'rights' out there - are you arguing that there shouldn't be notions of property and 'property rights?'

The people trying to make money from content will deploy whatever technology best enables them to do so. Not enabling your technology to meet this need will simply ensure that they use something else. That something else may not be as good as your solution could have been.

The issue here is not looking 'beyond money' but setting the right time horizon. China's activities make perfect economic sense when you properly consider how long it takes to build / extend / upgrade energy infrastructure and how long the components tend to last for. You don't get off of fossil fuels in months or years, but decades.

Why should you have any right to say what others do and do not do with the software that you write? Under the GPL, someone could add something relatively simple and then sell the software, they would just need to adhere to the requirements of the GPL in the process.

I wonder if someone will get caught stealing unlicensed software hosted on places like GitHub, leading to some kind of a case in which an implied license is discussed. Furthermore, I wonder what kind of license they would decide is implied in that situation (if they decided that there were one) - BSD style, or GPL style?

"you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories." Sounds pretty permissive to me.

In a "GPL-Only" world, interpreting that as all software must comply with the terms of the GPL license, the concepts of 'ownership' and 'property' would not apply to software. There is a philosophical case to be made (but perhaps, not a practical one) that all scarcity in software is artificial and that notions of property are applied to it not validly but regressively.

Doesn't that apply if you are processing credit card transactions? In this case, the person selling the app is not actually doing that, only Google is.

They probably couldn't do that even if they wanted to. Some of the documents likely contain business records that can't just be 'sold to the highest bidder' (imagine how bad such a scheme would be for the consumer!) The costs associated with sorting the stuff they could sell from the stuff they couldn't would likely exceed whatever you're all willing to pay for them. Then you know, plus shipping...