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  1. Defend the Open Web: Keep DRM Out of W3C Standards

    There's a new front in the battle against digital rights management (DRM) technologies. These technologies, which supposedly exist to enforce copyright, have never done anything to get creative people paid. Instead, by design or by accident, their real effect is to interfere with innovation, fair use, competition, interoperability, and our right to own things.

    That's why we were appalled to learn that there is a proposal currently before the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML5 Working Group to build DRM into the next generation of core Web standards. The proposal is called Encrypted Media Extensions, or EME. Its adoption would be a calamitous development, and must be stopped.

    In the past two decades, there has been an ongoing struggle between two views of how Internet technology should work. One philosophy has been that the Web needs to be a universal ecosystem that is based on open standards and fully implementable on equal terms by anyone, anywhere, without permission or negotiation. This is the technological tradition that gave us HTML and HTTP in the first place, and epoch-defining innovations like wikis, search engines, blogs, webmail, applications written in JavaScript, repurposable online maps, and a hundred million specific websites that this paragraph is too short to list.
    Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and W3C EME

    Mozilla believes in an open Web that centers around the user and puts them in control of their online experience. Many traditional DRM schemes are challenging because they go against this principle and remove control from the user and yield it to the content industry. Instead of DRM schemes that limit how users can access content they purchased across devices we have long advocated for more modern approaches to managing content distribution such as watermarking. Watermarking works by tagging the media stream with the user’s identity. This discourages copyright infringement without interfering with lawful sharing of content, for example between different devices of the same user.

    Mozilla would have preferred to see the content industry move away from locking content to a specific device (so called node-locking), and worked within the W3C to provide alternatives.

    Instead, this approach has now been enshrined in the W3C EME specification. With Google and Microsoft shipping W3C EME and content providers moving over their content from plugins to W3C EME Firefox users are at risk of not being able to access DRM restricted content (e.g. Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu), which can make up more than 30% of the downstream traffic in North America.

    We have come to the point where Mozilla not implementing the W3C EME specification means that Firefox users have to switch to other browsers to watch content restricted by DRM.
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  2. DECEASED
    Join Date
    Jun 2009
    Location
    Heaven
    Search Comp PM
    Thanks for the info , I didn't know the W3C people had already gone that low

    Anyway, that's an old trend sadly, cf. http://scriptogr.am/mattsah/post/html5-sucks-part-1
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  3. Originally posted by El Heggunte

    Anyway, that's an old trend sadly, cf. http://scriptogr.am/mattsah/post/html5-sucks-part-1
    Thanks for the links.

    Corporate Capitalism mixed with HTML5 is taking new (dangerous) turn on the web/internet which leaves no rooms for small fishes.
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