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An anonymous coward writes:
"In March, 2013 Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, proposed adopting DRM into the HTML standard, under the name Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). Writing in October 2013, he said that "none of us as users like certain forms of content protection such as DRM at all," but cites the argument that "if content protection of some kind has to be used for videos, it is better for it to be discussed in the open at W3C" as a reason for considering the inclusion of DRM in HTML.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has objected, saying in May of last year that the plan 'defines a new "black box" for the entertainment industry, fenced off from control by the browser and end-user'. Later, they pointed out that if DRM is OK for video content, that same principle would open the door to font, web applications, and other data being locked away from users.
public-restrictedmedia, the mailing list where the issue is being debated, has seen discussion about forking HTML and establishing a new standard outside of the W3C."
(Score: 2, Interesting) by paddym on Tuesday February 18 2014, @02:22PM
Not to rant to anyone personally, but here's my rant to anyone who cares:
"The W3C mission is to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the Web."
DRM is short-term. It is short-term content. I don't care how many standard wrappers are put around DRM, either the mechanism becomes hacked, or the content becomes unusable. It will probably take the death of people (i.e. these medical records were saved with DRM, and now we can't read them) before we abolish it all together, but it is inevitable. If the W3C pushes through these standards at the behest of the industry, I can unequivocally say that we will one day look back at the standards and wonder why we had to add so much complexity for such a short-term occurrence in the history of the world.
In the past, entertainment was commissioned. Now we can commission work again. Sure the taxes are difficult to handle right now, but this barrier will be lowered. We can pay quality folks to make quality entertainment in full before they even start working. This is more efficient and it requires no DRM. Any subsequent profit is icing and can be shared by the most efficient distributors.
If it becomes standard to lock up content, then it will become the default output mechanism for many applications. This will require additional software or libraries or plugins on the client computer. The source code can not be built into Firefox. This is no different than what NVIDIA does with Linux kernel drivers or Adobe does with flash today. But whereas old versions of drivers tend to be usable in some contexts, obsolete DRM is NOT! Even though DRM should require little effort to upgrade in theory, the reality is that vendors have no record of being up-to-date, careful, or conscientious especially when it comes to supporting multiple operating systems. They are fickle at best.
The W3C is subsidizing an obsolete industry at best. At worst, it is enabling a whole-sale Balkanized internet of unsharable content. I fail to see how that is compatible with "long-term growth of the Web".
(Score: 0) by crutchy on Tuesday February 18 2014, @05:03PM
i hate drm as much as anyone (i don't buy anything with drm)
but the reason why flash is so prevalent is because of the lack of any w3c standard
want to kill flash? support the w3c
drm sucks, but if you think it's going away you're living in a dreamland