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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."
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.
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.