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Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Approve Work On DRM For HTML 5.1
An anonymous reader writes "Danny O'Brien from the EFF has a weblog post about how the Encrypted Media Extension (EME) proposal will continue to be part of HTML Work Group's bailiwick and may make it into a future HTML revision." From O'Brien's post: "A Web where you cannot cut and paste text; where your browser can't 'Save As...' an image; where the 'allowed' uses of saved files are monitored beyond the browser; where JavaScript is sealed away in opaque tombs; and maybe even where we can no longer effectively 'View Source' on some sites, is a very different Web from the one we have today. It's a Web where user agents—browsers—must navigate a nest of enforced duties every time they visit a page. It's a place where the next Tim Berners-Lee or Mozilla, if they were building a new browser from scratch, couldn't just look up the details of all the 'Web' technologies. They'd have to negotiate and sign compliance agreements with a raft of DRM providers just to be fully standards-compliant and interoperable."
How does this affect open source browsers like Firefox? If something is open source you surely can't enforce any sort of DRM restrictions; someone can just build a hacked version of the browser.
Is this possibly the beginning of the end for open source browsers?
Why in the hell are they even THINKING of approving this bullshit?
So fucking sad
Please tell me that Tim Berners-Lee is only declaring it as in-scope so that it doesn't get worked on by some other group, so it can be killed as it should be.
Huh? EME is already supported in the shipping versions of Chrome and IE, with Safari coming soon, and is already in use in the real world by Netflix to deliver video to users of IE and ChromeOS. Firefox is the only major browser to have not implemented or begun implementing support for it, and with every other major browser supporting it, all that will accomplish is to marginalize Firefox amongst the average user. To them, the problem will be manifested as "Netflix doesn't work in Firefox".
If you allow web sites to require DRM, the web is no longer open. That's all there is to it. If you browsers must protect content, then browsers must be certified and signed before they can access the content. Had your desire to prevent the theft of your hard work guided the original protocols of the internet, it never would have become the important communications resource it is today.
> and the point of this is to increase interoperability.
This does squat for increasing interoperability. It doesn't really change much of anything actually. The real problem is that it demonstrates a fundemental philosophical shift on the part of those entrusted with looking after web standards.
The web is no longer an open medium designed to be usable by anyone with any browser.
No, it's just another content consumption medium now. It's just cable TV.
The old status quo was fine. The corner case of media consumption was isolated while still being accommodated.
There was simply no need to "swim in the kool-aid" here.
This will not make Netflix any more accessible to Linux and will likely only make more of the web INaccessable to Linux and other alternative and non-corporate players.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That sounds good to me.
That's because you misunderstand the proposed standard.
The standard is a standardised API to an external encryption plugin. All this means is that it is marginally easier to communicate with the plugin, though clearly it isn't much of a problem at the moment with flash anyhow.
It will still require a binary plugin to actually do the decryption, just like flash.
How many of your devices have flash?
Do you think $RANDOM_EME_PLUGIN will work on your Windows PC (of course!). Your Windows phone (uh...?) your Mac (perhaps...) your older Mac (probably not) your brand new Andriod phone (could do), your older Android phone (doubtful), your Atom android phone (really unlikely), your Blackberry (ha!), iOS devices (crapshoot), your TV with a built in web browser (not a damn chance).
If you think "just like the bad old days where you had to worry about who Adobe was supporting today with flash except now any monkey thinks they can make a binary DRM plugin because it's standard" sounds like a good thing, then you have a very different definition of "good thing" to me.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I can see your argument, but on the other hand I look at the example set by digital audio. The same balkanization occurred there, until finally things got so bad that finally the media caved to pressure and now I can finally buy legal audio in formats that really are interoperable. There were several lousy years where I basically gave up buying new music while the industry figured out that the reason I wasn't buying what they were selling was because DRM didn't work for me.
So there is precedent that delaying adoption of really interoperable DRM has resulted in better media access in the end. On the other hand, I can't think of any precedent saying that having relatively painless DRM has resulted in better media access. Of course it's possible, but I think precedent weighs against you.
On the other hand, maybe you're right and the battle is already lost; with digital audio it was really Apple's closed distribution model that finally broke the camel's back-- there was no way for anybody except Apple to encrypt music for iPods, and music encrypted for iPods wouldn't work anywhere else. Nobody was able to put together a deal that would bridge that gap, and although Apple's market share was significant it wasn't big enough to standardize the entire market on, and consumers knew that they would be screwed one way or another if they opted for any of the then-available DRM flavors, so enough of them stayed out of the market that eventually the markets were forced to open up. With digital video, that hasn't happened. All of the major media playback manufacturers support the same DRM flavors, so most of the market can be served with relatively little pain.
On the third hand (ha ha), while I have started buying music, I've stopped buying videos. I bought a lot of DVDs after CSS was cracked so I could actually play them on my other devices; it was essentially an interoperable format in practice if not in law. I stopped when Blu-Ray came out because DVDs became second-class citizens, but Blu-Ray was too locked down. Streaming rentals work for me because the DRM only has to work once, but I'll never actually trust that streaming companies will still be there, supporting "my" content years from now after they've made their buck today.
So I still think that there's an effectual struggle to be made, that there's a chance that big media can be convinced to accept open standards. I'm not super optimistic, but I think it's possible, and so I'd oppose any attempt to make DRM more seamless and interoperable for the masses (easy for me to say, since they never seem to interoperate with MY devices anyway. Hazards of running Linux I guess).
Signed binaries running from a signed kernel, booted on UEFI Secure Boot hardware you can't legally compromise.
Alan Cox explained this 12 years ago.
That is the dream these people have.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!