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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.'"
How high do I jump?
How much of spoils of corruption can I get out of this?
How long before W3C's reputation is ruined?
Has W3C jumped the shark?
. . . we won the DRM wars? All the major stores are DRM-free. Obviously tho, some people don't really like music - they just like being self-righteous on the internet. (That's right, I ripped off xkcd 546 AND 849
Cushy consulting gigs at the content producers/distributors.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Adding something to an open standard is "selling out"? WTF? Calm down and get a sense of perspective before posting these stories, or at least do a little research and see what you're talking about. The world is not ending. Nobody is forcing you to use DRM on your website.
It's crap like this that makes me wonder why anyone still reads this site.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
What are we users – and what is the W3C – getting from building the risk of programmers being jailed into the core infrastructure of the Web? I have no doubt that browser vendors eager to cut deals will incorporate DRM into their offerings.
The users don't have anything to bargain with except their eyes, and the W3C is made up from browser vendors, so if he understands why browser vendors want to incorporate DRM, that answers the whole question.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I can hear the argument in a few years "We didn't need considerations when we implemented DRM, why should we actually give some now when it could cause problems". Fuck the whole argument, we don't need DRM and we don't need considerations now or later. Leave both out. - HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
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.
That is probably one of the most idiotic things I have read in some time. You either allow it or you dont. What is there to trade? Its like saying.. well.. we'll let you have the H1 tag.. but you gotta let us have the HR tag.. what??
Imagine what it would have been like if this mindset had been around when the internet was starting up in the 1970's.
The "standard" for email is just a hook to a blob that won't interoperate with any other. Instead of absolutely anyone being able to read the standard and implement their own mail client, it's locked down, and you can only run them with permission. The blob from one vendor won't work with the mail sent from another. Want to write your own mailer? Sorry, no such luck.
Just try firing up GCC and writing your own DRMed video receiver. You can't do it without permission.
Legimatizing DRM in HTML is a disaster and steps all over the very spirit of openness and cooperation that made the internet what it became.
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?
"Considerations to be discussed later" is rarely a powerful diplomatic pose.'"
No shit. It means those considerations consist entirely, wholly, and purely, of bupkis.
--
BMO
The committee members that push it through will get swanky positions with the industries that benefit from DRM. And since the world economy is crashing and only a few are going to live the good life I suppose I can't blame them...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The W3C used to be a member (i.e., company) driven organization, but in 2012 they took a large donation from the Internet Society and were basically brought under ISOCs umbrella (they were running out of money) :
This does not sound like "deep organizational change at W3C," or particularly open in nature. I think that interested parties should comment / complain to the ISOC Board of Trustees.
Ooh! I know!
We get a standards-based way to deliver copyrighted media without insecure browser plugins and the hassle of multiple incompatible streaming formats, versions, etc!
And get this - you can choose not to view that content if you feel so strongly about it.
Amazing!
A physical box or small physical rental media?
As we see with ideas around 4k http://www.red.com/products/redray users can have quality and content producers are happy.
Broadband bandwidth is the only part missing.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
As long as Google and Mozilla simply fail to implement DRM, it will be DOA.
Without DRM nobody will use it... Companies won't make their content free just because there is no DRM, they will find another way
Until recently I was also fairly convinced that browser vendors shouldn't implement EME... To be honest I don't know anymore.
I hate DRM just as much as the next guy, but there are a few points to consider:
* DRM won't last forever, because when streaming is Hollywoods primary source of income, they'll find that expense to actually stream DRM'ed content are significant, and they can save a lot of money by not doing this... Also DRM-free streaming is less buggy and gives a better user experience. That said I'm still not sure I want DRM, but we already have flash, silverlight, Widevine, these can do a lot more that just DRM as they are not sandboxed.
Anyways, I've at least realized that there more than just pro/con-DRM to EME.
Losing the freedom to read is never a wise choice to make and certainly something to be politically active about. The world doesn't have to end for significant bad things to occur which demand our active principled disagreement and action. This issue isn't just about what one chooses to use on their site, it's about what users under the digital restrictions have to live with to make their computers behave in the way they want to. Saying one doesn't have to use digital restrictions management on their site is taking the weapon-user's point of view instead of the reader's point of view. Your attempt to marginalize the reader by comparing the objection to the world ending is reduction by hyperbole.
Asking what we're getting in exchange for the acceptance of DRM means one's priorities are misplaced—this question is entirely misplaced because nothing should restrict the reader. Trying to bargain for better terms after accepting a deal signals profound ignorance of how to get what readers need: the right to read.
Digital Citizen
Fine by me. I can survive without their content. Can they survive without my money?
A company that does not sell its products goes under. I don't quite get why everyone thinks it would be different for content providers. Why does everyone think they got the longer breath, it's not like we're dying without the latest Hollywood crapfest.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Relax, it's W3C. It's not like any browser that ever existed did actually implement any of their standards correctly, what makes you think it's different with DRM?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem with those industries is te old saying: "there's one born every minute*". A never ending flux of uninformed idiots supports stupid businesses.
* it's more like 4 per second, now, so either that saying is incredibly outdated or it was coined by one of them.
Utter BS. this is not just about "audio" or "video" - this is a giant barn door for every other fucker who want to protect their precious content. Which includes stuff like news and the very fonts used - and we already have a problem with people not being as informed as they ought to be (like you!) without *actually* putting in any efforts in excluding people through technology with no other legitimate purpose.
So, does this mean it is time to fork W3C and have a more meaningful standards organization?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
And just like today, DRM will be a bastard and suck down CPU cycles that on a limited system will make said content unusable. Worse, and the real reason to be against DRM, is that it introduces a layer of "trust us, download this" as a part of said "free content". That is the very hallmark of a lot of the current malware epidemic. That the W3C is greenlighting any of this is going to make already said limited systems even worse off if it catches on.
So, just like today, people will be better off just bypassing all of the above and pirating the content post DRM-removal.
Jolly, everyone else is doing a shitty job and pushing on DRM people. The W3C should too! Because making it a standard somehow makes it better.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Content owners that make their DRM not work for me (a Linux user) cannot consider me in their market. Therefore they would LOSE NOTHING if I crack the DRM and access their content privately.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
'What do we get for that DRM?'
Did "we" vote on this? Let's look at their members list: Apple, AT&T, Facebook, Csico, Comcast, Cox, Google, Huawei, HP, Intel, LG, Netflix, Verizon, Yahoo!, Zynga and ... The Walt Disney Company. Seriously, are we really so daft that we sit here scratching our heads wondering why a consortium of those players and THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY ended up including DRM? REALLY? There is a bill known as The Mickey Mouse Act in regards to excessive copyright that was passed into US law. And we're wondering how Disney might have influenced DRM as an option in a standard ... they're on the list, folks! Pull your heads out of your asses!
And those are just the companies I recognize that have a serious amount of money to be made on DRM (hello, Netflix?!). If I examine closer, there are much smaller players like, say, Fotosearch Stock Photography and Footage that sound like they would gladly vote for DRM in order to "protect" their products/satiate content owners.
My work here is dung.
just dropped in to say 'hell yeah' to your comments...and express my joy that the W3C is being rightly criticized in this manner
as an internet programmer (ok 'web developer' if you must) I don't trust the W3C's policies and approach to standards...
as to when the W3C 'jumped the shark'...IMHO it was the HTML4 fiasco resulting in WHATWG breaking off and forming HTML5
when Google, Firefox, M$, etc went to HTML5 it was over, in my estimation...
HTML needed to improve and the W3C *couldn't do it*...
Thank you Dave Raggett
absolutely they are...they tried with HTML4.x and were stymied by the WHATWG and HTML5
do you know what the WHATWG is?
everything about their existence and the standardization of HTML5 in the face of W3C's obstruction proves your statement wrong...
start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHATWG
Thank you Dave Raggett
Microsoft tried to DRM-ize the web (Windows 98). It was called MSN. It didn't work. AOL tried the same. CompuServe tried. History is rife with companies that tried re-implementing the web according to their own standards (Microsoft), DRM-ing it (Macromedia/Adobe) and many companies attempted locking up their content in containers (Flash, ActiveX, Shockwave). It has failed every single time. Programmers can't program against a broken non-standard and users can't keep up with the increased hassle to get to what they want so they'll find it elsewhere.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
It was handed out to promote the arts. You are not entitled to a never-ending copyright at the expense of consumer's rights. Unfortunately that's what happened and that's what your promoting. If you don't want me to access it don't publish it. Your DRM solutions are just going to ensure I don't pay for it. I have ever right to access content because my rights were violated the day copyright was extended beyond a reasonable length of time. 7 years was already probably excessive. Way more than what was needed to recoup costs and profit off most works.
What the W3C should demand in exchange for doing this is that all it does is prevent copying. Content can't "phone home". Content can't keep you from skipping the commercials. All this mechanism should do is restrict a container of content to one or more specified devices. It should not be used as a technical means to give content powers beyond those established by copyright law.
The real issue is to understand why people like to be locked in, shackled and then anally fist fucked by DRM. It's because they like it and, realistically as long as it's shiney, they don't care being bitches. Of course, what is critical is not to use any of the core features of DRM to quickly so that they actually start to wonder why people who know about DRM, don't like it and are forced to educate the targets about why it's bad. Generally people will respond with "I quite like being fist fucked - whats your problem".
It's only when they start to get uncomfortable with the situation that they start to care about how much and how regularly they are being fist fucked (why am I paying for ads), unfortunately by then they have no choice but to submit to the fist fucking (why am I forced to watch ads) when the reality of the situation and the tightness of the shackles is really felt.
I know this is a highly graphic description of DRM, but if you look at the history as Palladium, NGSCB and all the other acronyms it has changed from there is a carefully orchestrated plan to get DRM out there is a way that users actually look forward to having it on their computers. I see how it's being sold. It's been going on for years. As a developer of software and a producer of music, I don't want it because my users are part of my lively hood so looking after them in the long term is important to me. The question is when will the day come when the cameras on your screen detect when you are not watching ads and pause them until you do.
Of course, some people actually enjoy being fist fucked, butt, on the hole, most people don't.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The abuse of DRM by corporations, governments and people more interested in restricting information, far out weighs any benefit given to the average consumer. I, for one, am totally in disbelief that the W3C caved in on this.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
That also means no more view source in browsers if the page owner wishes so. curl, wget and telnet 80 won't help.
What's being developed is an encryption API. The W3C does a whole lot more than just deal with "browser display", they define databases, query languages, multimedia formats, encryption containers, and scripting APIs. EME happens to fall into the latter two categories. And no where does it actually discuss DRM, or require that a Web browser lock down content from developers or users.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Yes, they absolutely can survive without *your* money. Because the vast majority of consumers doesn't consider DRM on their movies some inherent moral issue - in fact the vast majority doesn't even know what we are talking about.
But seriously, if you don't want to watch a movie, DON'T. Don't pirate it, don't buy it, and don't fucking whine about it. If you think they are all crap you obviously are not a significant consumer, making you even less relevant/influential than even you seem to think you are. But apparently you are not the average consumer, since Hollywood is having their best year ever in 2013 revenue-wise...
For a small cut of the bribe.
I really don't understand all the f-ing fuzz about DRM being added to the standard, as a developer/company you DON'T have to use the DRM on your site, you CAN use it without having to resort to external components which are not available on many platforms.. Well, if you object to having DRM in the standard, then you should also have to object to anything in the standard that replaces stuff like silverlight and flash..
People who are against putting DRM into the standard are just a bunch of morons.. If DRM works correctly as a user you won't have any problems (you can view/read/listen to the content without any problems), DRM mostly becomes a problem if you want to consume some content without willing to pay..
Go make your own content if you don't want to pay for content, see how long you can keep up with spending money but not getting any back..
the W3c is comprised of these guys
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List
theyre major corporations like Microsoft, Sony BT, Cox, Square Enix Comcast and at&t. these guys either have direct pressure to, or direct interest in pushing DRM whether you like it or not. they outnumber individual members and can basically determine the course as they see fit by lobbying and intimidating other members into concensus. in short, asking the W3C is functionally incapable of representing the interests of anything more than a collection of large corporations. Sort of like the US Government.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Pretty much every game I play, every video I watch, and every song I listen to is available on torrent web sites already, and yet I still pay for them. DRM does nothing to stop the availability of pirated versions, but it does impact me when it means that I can't play them. I have a FreeBSD machine connected to my projector and surround sound system at home. It plays BBC iPlayer and DVDs fine. It won't play Netflix. Who loses? Netflix, because they're trying to sell a service that I would happily pay money for (I already pay more than the cost of a Netflix subscription to a different company for DVD rentals), but can't use because they choose not to support the platform I'm using.
Who else loses? Consumers, because while we have a large number of competing providers of MP3 players and TVs, we have a very restricted set of providers of who can create Netflix streaming devices. They all have to either build their systems on Windows and license Silverlight form Microsoft or directly negotiate with Netflix.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
One of the things that doesn't ring true with TBL's analysis is that he says he wants to pursue this to avoid fragmentation in the Web. Currently in order to implement DRM you have to use a Flash plugin or somesuch. However what he's glossing over is that the DRM binary blob is exactly the same as that Flash plugin.
The reason the Web can work is because everything needed to make it work is basically declarative. If I have some unheard-of platform (a new kind of RISC chip, for instance) then to make it Web-enabled all I have to do is implement an HTML parser and a JavaScript interpreter and a bit of network protocol and bingo, I have a browser on my system.
However what I don't have is the DRM executable in my browser, because I don't know how to implement it. And the DRM author doesn't even know about my system and doesn't care anyway. They're not going to distribute their executable for any but the most profitable platforms, everything else is just cut out of the loop.
This is totally disastrous for the Web ecosystem as we know it. The ability to make a device Web-enabled is taken away from the people who know and/or use the device, who have a strong interest in the device being Web-enabled, and given to people who have no particular interest in anything except revenue. You can see where this is going.
In a nutshell, introducing DRM into Web standards is absolutely promoting fragmentation, because the smaller the player, the less interest the DRM providers have in providing for their platform.
Okay, where is the DRM'd video available today that I can play back on every device that I own that has sufficient processing power and display capabilities for video playback? Where is the DRM'd audio that I can play back on every device that I own with speakers and enough processing power to decode compressed audio?
Today, I can view any standards-compliant web site on any computer (desktop, laptop, tablet) that I own. I don't need the content providers to invest in my platform of choice, as long as enough people (or people with enough money) want to use it, they are free to support the standards independent of who is providing the content. If I want to create and sell some appliance to view the web, I can do so without being locked in to a single vendor for any of the required code. With DRM, none of this is true.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
nothing should restrict the reader
That's hyperbole, what about finances (price of the work), what if the author makes each reader sign a non-distribution contract, what if the author decides not to publish at all?
Stallman's Right to Read is a reminder that copyright is an attempt to balance artistic transactions. In a healthy society neither the creators nor the consumers should have all the power (i.e. no restrictions).
What do we get for this DRM in HTML5? Well if "we" are web developers, we get to be slightly more browser agnostic when writing web pages that use DRM. If "we" are end-content consumers, we get a slightly better chance that a web service will work on our device. Really this strengthens the W3C politically. To remain relevant they have to appeal to both contend providers and content consumers, otherwise they'll ultimately sit there churning out ideal standards that no one follows.
That said, it wouldn't displease me if they rejected this and made it that little bit more expensive to implement DRM.
There are thirty million Netflix subscribers in the states or about ten percent of the adult population.
The web user is middle class --- someone with the disposable income needed to support the purchase of broadband and mobile data services, computers, smartphones, tablets, video game consoles and so on.
Protected content, retail sales and subscription services are not a burden to him --- quite the contrary --- if they are not available through the browser he will go elsewhere and he won't be looking back. The success of the "walled gardens" of Apple and iTunes, the Kindle and Amazon Prime makes that perfectly clear.
W3C doesn't exist to pacify the geek.
It exists to insure the continued relevance of the general purpose web browser,
trust an organization more specifically the people working one. They (the people) in any organization will sell out, they will screw those they state they oversee, protect, guard, etc. The people in the W3C (Mr. Lee specifically) is a dilettante lacking any regard for the freedom of speech and the expression of ideas. He has let his achievements of the past inflate his ego and it has blinded him.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Fork it
Perhaps we should ask for their charter to be withdrawn, on the basis of malfeasance? W3c exists through an agreement between MIT, CERN, and these days ERCIM, Keio University and Beihang University. If one or more of them formally asked for their legal organization to be shut down fr cause, it might cause some careful reconsideration. If it happened, their non-profit or not-for-profit status would be lost, at least in the country in question.
davecb@spamcop.net
Couldn't we fork the W3C?
Asking what we're getting in exchange for the acceptance of DRM means one's priorities are misplaced—this question is entirely misplaced because nothing should restrict the reader. Trying to bargain for better terms after accepting a deal signals profound ignorance of how to get what readers need: the right to read.
Well done, you always get lots of up mods just for posting a 20 year old essay by someone who believes that all information should be free. The problem that Stallman did not realise when he wrote that and maybe has never realised is that money makes the world go around so most people need a way of making it.
He has some very interesting ideas and has given a lot to the computing community but large parts of life have simply passed him by, notably he has no children or dependants. For the majority of us who do decide to have kids we have a problem of having to make sure we have a steady income stream for the rest of our lives and any fluctuations in that stream can ruin your dependants lives or at the very least leave them suffering far more hardship and worry than you would like to see.
That leaves may of us in a position where we actually agree with the spirit of the right to read but have long since realised that our best hope of providing or our own family is in selling our services as software developers because it is one of the few things we are any good at. Unfortunately the people who want to pay us though often dictate that the code we produce belongs to them, not us.
I am sure I could eek out a living by trying to only write open source modules for stuff like drupal and doing software as service type jobs but I would be deny myself a way of making money from one of best assets which is my ability to sit down with a problem and invest a large amount of time in it, eventually coming up with a solution that nobody else has. If I instantly give that solution away to everyone then they can use it without recompensing me for the huge amount of time I invested in figuring out that solution I eventually get to was even possible.
Sharing all information freely might be better for society, but it is designed to be incredibly detrimental to us as individuals in the capitalist society we live in. In light of this I actually think that Stallman's entire movement is a completely misguided adventure. Instead of just taking aim at a few poxy restrictions on software he should have realised that the only thing that allowed the sharing of code he wanted was the academic nature of his environment at the time.
He often said that authors should be allowed to charge money for writing software, but you have two choices if you do this. One is that you sell the source code such that if the buyer needs a future modification they can do it themselves of hire someone cheaper than you. Second is that you only give them the end product so for any modifications they HAVE to come back to you so you have a closed market and can charge more. People who choose the latter are simply bad at capitalism and the world we live in punishes you remorselessly for that, even if it would be better for society.
I dont read
"If the content producer hasn't given you permission to consume their content, then you have no right to seek it elsewhere. If I cannot watch a movie through legal channels then I don't watch the movie. Same thing with TV shows and music. I don't consider respecting other peoples' rights to be very onerous, and I don't think I'm missing out on much."
Copyright is a fairly recent concept in the history of human culture. It's not like concepts of liberty, free speech or the right to life which people more ancient than the Greeks have argued and argued against.
The closest analog we have to copyright is the arcana hoarded by some mystical groups or the way the common people were prevented from reading the Bible. Most people were happy to tell and retell each other their stories, stories that became the basis of each country, each civilization's culture.
It's this culture that forms the foundation of every copyrighted work ever produced. So I have to ask, when even they are clearly freeloading off our common culture, what gives "content producers" the right to deny others from enjoying and sharing this new addition to our cultural heritage?
I'm not saying writers, artists, etc, should just let big commercial entities like Walt Disney "steal" their work. All I'm saying is that we should get rid of the monopolistic "all rights reserved" provision, which in today's networked world can only be enforced through NSA-like surveillance, and focus simply on the commercial exploitation aspect.
Rid of Flash and Silverlight? Netflix working properly on non-Windows systems?
The alternative was never "no more DRM on the web", it is (and would continue to be) "DRM that brings along its own bloated, proprietary, buggy application runtime along".
0 1 - just my two bits
If it's in a standard, you're not fully standard-compliant until you implement it.
And then what? What if every company says, "Can we fully DRM our website?". Sounds like a good idea, more security, people can't read your JS code, whatever. What happens if the default position becomes everything DRM'd and locked down. That isn't the internet we grew up with.
And to those who say "I won't use those browsers or visit those websites", right ... so if everything is DRM'd by default you're going to not have much choice if you want to read news or visit your bank or whatever.
The answer behind all this is quite simple. Big media bribing Tim to use DRM and it looks like he accepted the bribe. Pure and simple.
Reminder to sign the FSF-sponsored petition against DRM in HTML 5 if this bothers you. Link
you are not the customer, you are the product
How about end-to-end, strong crypto by default? How about AES-256 built in to Ethernet adapters?
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Okay, where is the DRM'd video available today that I can play back on every device that I own that has sufficient processing power and display capabilities for video playback?
There is none because it's NOT PART OF THE STANDARD.
What you are asking for will become true once it is.
And that is why the standard is better, even if you don't like DRM. It serves more people, and those with less common devices.
Which is the reason why some who hate DRM oppose it being part of the standard, because it will inevitably increase use of DRM... but it will also mean, as I said, that more people get access to more video content.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I totally agree with you.
Which means you agree with my point - that DRM increases availability of everything to everyone.
A standard for such protection means more people will put up content they would not have before.
So what is the problem? We all know the DRM will be cracked, so it's not like technical people will be unable to retain whatever is supposedly protected.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And just like today, DRM will be a bastard and suck down CPU cycles
Wrong. That happens because so much DRM is served out of CPU hogging things like Flash and Silverlight.
As part of a standard browser makers can make DRM far more efficient. There's no reason why DRM has to consume significant amounts of power or bandwidth - playback of iTunes video doesn't, for example.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Simon St. Laurent asks 'What do we get for that DRM?'"
Content.
Because it is work that they have produced. It's theirs and they should be allowed to share it with whomever they like. You have no right to content I produce and neither do I have a right to content you produce. To claim that they are denying us access to "culture" is absurd. Culture is not something that was created 20 minutes ago, it's intergenerational.
And clearly you're trying to trick me into accessing your creation here, whereupon you'll claim some sort of damages!
Look out, it's a trap!!
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
As Richard Stallman has been pointing out for at least 2 years now in his talks; proprietors have not given up on DRM. Spotify (audio) has digital restrictions management (DRM) in it. The FSF's Defective by Design campaign reminds us of many examples where DRM is up and running: "In 2009, Amazon remotely deleted copies of George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984, that were distributed through the Kindle store. This chilling example of potentially malicious behavior would have never been possible without DRM.". Netflix uses DRM and Netflix is a proponent of HTML5's Encrypted Media Extensions, the name for the mechanism by which DRM is standardized through the W3C. Steam won't let users sell their games or share games with a friend after playing them and if one tries to do so anyhow, Steam will disable one's account, thus taking all of that user's Steam games away.
I would hesitate to call this "[winning] the DRM wars" and I would not want to know what losing looks like. This state of affairs is why Defective by Design campaigns to educate users on what DRM is, how DRM hurts users, and to politically organize to fight DRM.
Digital Citizen
The "morally superior" that would control the content is Hollywood studios.
You might want to reconsider your hope.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You are right in the way that most of their customers don't care about DRM as an inherently "evil" thing. They just want to watch their movies, that's it. And as long as that's possible, they will accept DRM.
But, and that's the problem studios are running into with DRM, people have a pretty good idea what they expect from the content they "buy". Allow me to illustrate.
I have a friend who enjoys movies. She is one of those people who follows the various releases from certain stars, who has all those various magazines that explain what movies are coming out when and where, who has her apartment decorated with all sorts of movie posters, you get the idea. Of course she also owns a pretty impressive collection of DVDs and BluRays. In other words, she's exactly the target audience for content providers. Lately, though, she started complaining (to me, because "you know that stuff, that computer and movie CD stuff, right?") about various things that irk her.
Like those intros, promo videos and various other pesky little things you cannot skip. It was a revelation to me what people have to put up when watching DVDs. I was under the (naive, I know) impression that you'd slip the disc in and then maybe push a button or two on your remote and there comes the movie. Ohhh no. It really is a "cinema experience", complete with half a billion movie trailers before you finally get to see what you came here for. I guess the only thing missing is that you get to buy overpriced, flat soda and taste free popcorn. Apparently Disney is especially guilty of such practices (something I'd consider double despicable considering their main target audience is kids, and I guess anyone who ever had to deal with kids knows how easily kids sit there and wait for something they want...).
So now she has every movie twice. Once the original, and once a version to watch without trailers of movies nobody wanted to see. Honestly I cannot really understand why content providers do that. Why would I bore and probably annoy my customer with a trailer for a movie that is probably already anything BUT new when the user watches it. I can see it in a movie theater where it IS fresh when the trailer is presented, but in a DVD release? Or worse, what if the movie you promote stank? Imagine you're watching The Bodyguard, and by the time it gets out on DVD Waterworld is about to appear in the theaters and they press a promo for that on the DVD. Forever enshrining that turd, unavoidably forcing the watcher to remember that despite Bodyguard being a great movie, Costner later produced mostly bombs.
I somehow don't think that's really very good for the sales in general...
The point is that this whole thing only started to make her look into the possibility to "strip" and "rip" DVDs. She wouldn't have cared at all about it, she could buy it and watch it, that's all she wanted. But they decided to get on her nerves so she started to look for a solution to that "defect" (and yes, DRM by definition means introducing a defect to the item, it devalues the item in the eyes of the customer). So she now knows that DVDs can be "ripped". And it usually isn't a big step from "Hey, I can make a copy" to "hell, why bother buying it first when I can get a copy online?"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.