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Reject DRM and You Risk Walling Off Parts of the Web, Says W3C Chief
An anonymous reader writes "Web technologies need to support DRM-protected media to reduce the risk of parts of the web being walled off, the chief executive of the web standards body W3C has told ZDNet. Dr Jeff Jaffe, CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium, says proposals to provide a hook for DRM-protected media within HTML, via Encrypted Media Extensions, are necessary to help prevent scenarios such as movie studios removing films from the web in a bid to protect them from piracy."
It's what is happening. I had a professor in college who predicted by 2015 - 2020 the internet as we knew it then would be over. It would be controlled by corporate and governmental interests and that would be achieved through fragmentation and the fact that the backbone of the internet is owned by just a hand full of companies worldwide. While we've not yet seen the fragmentation yet, we've heard grumblings. I think what Iran is trying to do is similar to how the Great Firewall of China proved the internet could be tamed far easier than most around here thought. If Iran is even marginally successful in creating a Jihadnet or whatever, look for other other countries to try and do the same.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
They are idiots.
There are two choices...
1)
DRM is embraced, studios put crippled, DRM-enabled content on the web
Outcome: The dumbest 1% of consumers pays for DRM streams, the other 99% goes to The Pirate Bay.
2)
DRM is not supported in web browsers.
Outcome: Studios don't put any content on the web, the dumbest 1% of consumers buys disks or whatever and the other 99% goes to The Pirate Bay.
Here's the far-fetched option 3:
DRM is not supported anywhere.
Studios sell on-line for a fair price in a real format.
Outcome:
10-50% of customers pay for proper, unencumbered content and the money goes to the rightful publisher.
The rest turn to The Pirate Bay.
How many of these measures to "Protect something from piracy" ever work?
It is not about $$$ counterfeiter. Those people will always counterfeit.
This is mainly about little guys and their little Johny. If Johny can get something for free from their friends, they will. If they can't get it easily, they will nag mom and dad about it until they give him $10 or $20 to buy the movie/game/magic wand.
DRM is also about getting kickbacks from manufacturers. Each DVD player needs to be blessed and needs to pay royalties to the consortium. You don't make $1b all at once. You make it $5 at a time.
DRM was never about the real counterfeiters and never will be.
As someone on countless W3C mailing lists: please don't. It's highly unlikely you're going to bring any new discussion points to the mailing list (sheer quantity of the objections is, sadly in this case, not going to change anything), as the topic has been discussed to death already.
If you want to stop the specification, you're better off petitioning implementers to not implement it than the W3C; as it is now, EME is going to become a de-facto standard with the majority of browsers (by market share) supporting it regardless of whether the W3C publish any specification or not. Convincing the W3C not to standardize it will have no effect in the end, it'll just become a de-facto internet standard instead of a de-jure one.
Reject DRM in total and you will see a gradual decrease in the number of new movies which require millions of dollars to produce. I'm pretty sure crowd funding might not do the job.
Multi-million-dollar (per episode) production Game of Thrones seems to do quite well, despite being the most pirated TV show on the planet.
It appears that others in the W3C mailing lists have in fact objected to the implementation of DRM in HTML5.
They were instead shunted off to 'more appropriate forums' to discuss their objections.
There are literally hundreds of emails there to plow through. Although there are many strong objections raised by different parties, the one who really seems to be pushing DRM is Netflix.
Even the EFF have formally objected to the DRM scheme.
It also appears that the CEO of W3C is the one who made the decision.
The current W3C CEO is Dr. Jeffrey Jaffe.
So in a nutshell, if you're wondering who to blame for EME in HTML5, thats the story.