Slashdot Mirror
Defend the Open Web: Keep DRM Out of W3C Standards
jrepin writes "There's a new front in the battle against digital restrictions 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."
A standardised DRM means everyone will use it.
Which is a good thing because then it allows more VALUABLE art to produced. (and please, make sure you call it "art", and not "content")
It is why YouTube is filled with completely worthless junk and ads, and why you pay for movies/netflix/cable subscription instead.
Right now the web is filled with low value junk. That is because no one builds good art for free distribution online, since there is no way to distribute it in a standard way to people that only pay for it.
Don't worry the people that don't want to pay for higher art will still have their low-value YouTube & corporate ad-supported junk available, but the people that prefer to pay for exclusive non-corporate art will now have a standard way to get that.
The last thing we want is for people that don't pay to have access to high value art. That simply causes the high-value market to not exist, since artists hate giving away their work for free.
Yeah, it would allow people to view sites like Netflix and Hulu without a plugin. Oh, the horror!
Here's the thing. DRM exists. It's not going to go away because a bunch of reactionaries leave it out of some web standard. That's because it already doesn't exist in that web standard! And DRM is doing quite fine without it.
What this will do, instead, is hasten the demise of Flash and Silverlight. Video that is currently DRM'd will now be available without a plugin, right from the browser. This gives the consumer more choice.
What it will not do is all of a sudden turn every web video into a DRM'd stream. It means more video, not less.
If someone wants to use DRM on content THEY produced, why is that not their right?
Does your right as a non-paying "consumer" somehow trump their rights as a creator? Maybe code writers should also be forbidden from using any license other than BSD or GPL?
Yes! Screw paying the artist. They're already starving a little less income can't hurt.
Christ. Some people's sense of economics doesn't extend beyond their parents' basement.