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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."
How many of these measures to "Protect something from piracy" ever work? Name the most DRM'd copy-protected movie ever distributed. I'll be there's a copy on Pirate Bay. They seem to be under the impression that each individual pirate has to crack their weird schemes.
Once a single person does it and produces a clean file then it's game over - its in the wild - and SOMEONE always manages to do it.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Weasel words. Walling off content is effectively the same thing.
Good, let them wall themselves off.
removing anything off the internet is like trying to take the pee out of the pool
I'm not sure I understand what the fuss is all about. Our nice little series of tubes is not going to be diminished if "the movie studios remove movies from the web" in any significant way. It's the movie studios that will be diminished and, likely, quickly outcompeted in the marketplace. I think it's time to start full-stop calling all the bluffs.
Dr Jaffe misses the point.
Yes, opinions about whether DRM should be in HTML vary, and some people are very opposed to it, and have a perfect right to be. Reasonable people can disagree.
However, the proposal isn't DRM in HTML, it's worse. It's a way to call DRM plug-ins. It doesn't standardize the DRM, or the plug-ins, or the language the plug-ins are written in, or in any other way reflect the notion that HTML is a platform in and of itself, independent of the layer it runs over.
Indeed, it doesn't specify anything that cannot, today, be done via plug-ins.
As such, it's a stupid addition to web standards. It's pointless. It will not make studios suddenly excited about using the web, because if they're excited about using the web they're already using it with the existing plug-in framework. And it will not stop content providers who demand, rightly or wrongly, DRM, fleeing the web, because it doesn't add anything.
This proposal should not appear in the HTML standards. It should never have even been considered for inclusion.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
What he said is along similar lines of "If you don't use something other than Linux, you're probably not going to be able to watch Neflix." Or "If you don't let the TSA molest you, you won't be allowed on the flight."
The Chief here says basically that if you don't let them have their way, you won't be able to use their services. And I'm not sure I give a damn whether their services get used in the first place. That's time I could use to practice guitar instead, but honestly, I'm lazy enough and easily distracted enough that as long as things are easy to use, I'll still get home, sit online, and then wonder when I drag myself to bed, "where the hell did my evening go?"
So to those who would wall off portions of the internet, I say bring it. I need to finish learning the solo from Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" anyway.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
It's DRM'd content that kills. And it doesn't kill a person, it destroys culture and human legacy. Because when a thing is published and yet not available except under specific conditions controlled by a party, when changes occur, bad things happen to that content.
It is a violation of the spirit of copyright law to have DRM. The spirit of copyright is that for a limited time, the work is exclusive to a party for licensing, publishing and distribution. But when that time is up, it SHALL fall into the public domain as a contribution to the collection of human works. The problem is the content will be lost forever before the content is released to the public domain and there is no financial incentive for publishers to publish DRM free content free of charge and certainly no such REQUIREMENT.
Publishers think they "own" the content and I don't think that is entirely the case. The content is allowed under government blessing like a child. A parent has rights and responsibilities over a child until the limited term of parenthood has expired. The law doesn't allow a parent to kill a child or otherwise to prevent him from entering society. Additionally, other forms of abuse of children are illegal and/or prohibited.
When a copyright holder engages exclusive rights, the second half is not being honored or guaranteed. That needs to change. Furthermore, the publishers need to be held to task and even sued over the loss of things which have already been lost.
Human culture and history is being lost and it is significant. And the losses are due to be increasingly larger as content of today is almost exclusively digital in storage format.
DRM cannot be open-source, for an obvious reason: If it were, you could just comment out the 'don't copy' line and recompile. The proposed HTML DRM scheme isn't a DRM scheme itsself, but an API by which a propritary DRM binary can be loaded and interface with the browser. So even if Firefox and Chrome supported the API, the DRM vendor (ie, Netflix) would also have to release a linux binary - and given the difficulty of ensuring the DRM is secure on an OS where everything from the kernel to the video driver is subject to user modification, there isn't any chance of that happening.
Uh, yeah.
This content is ALREADY walled off from the net.
The bricks of that wall are DRM!
They essentially set up a completely one-sided transaction here.
We pay them so they can tell us when and where and how many times we can view content we paid for.
And if we disagree? Fuck us! They have our money. We can just NOT have access to something we've paid for.
The whole piracy argument is maybe about 5% fact and 95% bullshit.
DRM is about increasing monetization of their content at the expense of open access. Piracy could drop to zero and they'd STILL claim losses to piracy.
Let these greedy money grubbers pull their content from the web!
All the smart content providers will stay, understanding that piracy and DRM is simply an expensive game of escalation where the only winners are the people selling their crappy DRM schemas. They'll continue to make money.
And all the rest of the jackasses who've pulled their content from the web can bitch about how their declining revenues are to be blamed on piracy, rather than their own stupid short-sightedness and greed.
In short, the old axiom proves true. If you don't want to lose control of something DON'T PUT IT ON THE WEB.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Also, perhaps, if we reject DRM, the parts of the web we wall off are exactly the ones we should.
Music will be on our side of the wall; DRM is dead there. Seems to me that's a trend worth encouraging.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.