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The W3C Sells Out Users Without Seeming To Get Anything In Return
An anonymous reader writes "Questioning the W3C's stance on DRM, Simon St. Laurent asks 'What do we get for that DRM?' and has a thing or two to say about TBL's cop-out: 'I had a hard time finding anything to like in Tim Berners-Lee's meager excuse for the W3C's new focus on digital rights management (DRM). However, the piece that keeps me shaking my head and wondering is a question he asks but doesn't answer: If we, the programmers who design and build Web systems, are going to consider something which could be very onerous in many ways, what can we ask in return? Yes. What should we ask in return? And what should we expect to get? The W3C appears to have surrendered (or given?) its imprimatur to this work without asking for, well, anything in return. "Considerations to be discussed later" is rarely a powerful diplomatic pose.'"
music, maybe. It's video that is a nightmare right now
There are many forces commercial and governmental both which want to rein in the internet. It's too dangerous in their view to have anyone able to communicate freely with anyone else without permission or monitoring.
Thus gradually step by step the once open nature of the internet will be closed down. The problem is that people look at each 1/1000th of the whole picture and say "that isn't so bad!". Secure boot. That isn't so bad, you can disable it! (for now). DRM in HTML5. That isn't so bad! Etc. But the overall trends is clear. The internet became what it was before the authoritarians really became aware of it. They won't make that mistake again, and they will act to put more and more controls on it both legal and technical, until what made it an incredible thing is gone.
And we won the music wars primarily because there was no DRM in the standard. Every attempt to impose a DRM-hobbled "standard" on the music industry came from a single company: RealAudio wasn't real, Apple's AAC fell to the wayside, Microsoft's SureWontPlay, etc. We forced content providers to choose: Roll your own DRM product and fail, or adopt a DRM-free standard, and make money.
By leaving DRM out of the standard for the Web, we could have forced content providers into that same choice: offer DRM-free video at a price, or starve.
I like Netflix. But I don't like Netflix more than I like the web.
Is with DRM is that nobody will use it. Having DRM is not about being free or not, is the companies controlling how, when and where people could use the content they bought. Is about renting, not selling, and probably in the process getting ownership of the client hardware, own data, and competition content (and is not something hypotetic, Sony already used DRM to install a rootkit in the past ). This always was about punishing and abusing your customers, the ones that actually pay, not the ones trying to get a free ride.
And doing this, in this very moment that the intelligence agencies try to make cracks to get their backdoors inserted in every computer, is not just stupid, is criminal. Internet is getting physically broken into pieces thanks to US intervention, and will be in logical pieces thanks to this DRMd shoot in the foot.
"Nobody is forcing you to use DRM on your website."
They are forcing it into his browser by declaring it a standard, and the websites can use it without his explicit permission. So he's entitled to be pissed at them. Really it should carry a mandatory 'turn off' flag. Also what makes you think you get the choice even with 'your' website. You use adverts, you use third party software, you'll get stuck with this.
Think of it this way, one of the first uses for this will be the NSA injecting a surveillance packet, so it can track us without us being able to delete their tracker. Is that OK with you? What about GCHQ injecting its packet into American browsers, ok still? What about China injecting its drm packet? Ok? Google, OK? Microsoft? Still OK? Facebook? Still happy?
I'm not sure you're attributing this victory to the right cause. I think it's a lot more simple: regardless of the DRM employed, piracy still worked fine. No DRM scheme has ever survived in the wild for any viable period of time, which has made the entire exercise moot. The stores slowly realized that they could make just about the same amount of money without investing into often costly DRM schemes, and as a bonus they'd get free publicity from savvier users saying just how great they were for not putting DRM on their tracks.
We get a standards-based way to deliver copyrighted media
You're an idiot. The DRM is NOT standard, only the hooks to it are. So no, you don't get that. You will get a ton of platform-specific, closed, binary blobs doing who knows what to your system.
If someone doesn't provide the blob for your minority platform, well, tough luck. That's VERY different from the web originally, where anyone- you, me, anyone - could read the spec and write our own web browser. Here, it's locked down hard.
You're either an idiot or a shill. Or possibly both.
DRM is the opposite of an open standard. Duh! DRM means that your browser (and possibly the computer it runs on) will have to be certified to behave just the way the DRM masters tell it to. How is that in any way compatible with a so-called open standard.
I'll respect copyright law once copyright law respects me back.
Well, as both a consumer and programmer I will NOT have any encrypted code or codex coursing through my system. The bullshit DRM'ed content and corresponding proprietary code is not worth the risk of losing control of the system that I do my banking on.
If the browser makers bow and include such features the must NOT be installed by default and be optional plugins that are installed after installation. If not, then I will simply remove from the sources any DRM that finds its way into any of the open source browsers I use. I will then compile and make available the binaries and sources without said defective by design non-features (providing a stampede of GNUs doesn't beat me to it).
Even if "mainstream" consumers do not flock at first to the more open non-proprietary systems, this DRM will still fracture the web along a line dividing the herd from those who would be heard decrying this move as invasive. It's not uncommon for an upstart to take the lead in the browser wars. In a post Snowden world, built in DRM'd browsers don't stand a chance. The mud will be slung, because it's fun to do so. How can you prove that the DRM module doesn't have a backdoor? If it's open source, then it will be subverted in seconds.
The W3C missed the memo: DRM is dead.
you're talking about a piece of black box code that is designed to talk directly to the hardware, and designed so it can override the OS
snowden's whistelblowing made it general knowledge that collusion between all of the big software companies and the US and UK intelligence/spy-communities is common.
does that really seem like good idea to you?
By paying the correct toll at the correct tollbooth, and tacitly agreeing that culture is something you "buy" and not "participate in".
> Tim Berners-Lee: DRMed HTML least of all evils
No, Tim, DRMed HTML is a pretty big evil, in that it sabotages an open, readable format by saddling it to an unnecessary rights management monkey.
Let stakeholders in DRM do their own dirty work and see if the public embraces it. The fact that they are going to do so doesn't make it incumbent on web developers and standards bodies to make it more easy for them to do so in a more universal manner.
Check your mandate, Tim.