FSF Activists Want You To Call Tim Berners-Lee About DRM (boingboing.net)

"The Free Software Foundation is calling on netizens to make calls to the W3C demanding they not include DRM in Web standards," an anonymous reader writes. Cory Doctorow reports: There's only two weeks left until members of the World Wide Web Consortium vote on whether the web's premier open standards organization will add DRM to the toolkit available to web developers, without effecting any protections for people who discover security vulnerabilities that affect billions of web users, let alone people who adapt web tools for those with disabilities and people who create legitimate, innovative new technologies to improve web video.
Tim Berners-Lee has final say over this change, according to the article, which directs callers to urge him to "keep the web free and open, rather than rescuing DRM from its slow collapse due to the complexity of fielding and supporting it without standards like those the W3C makes."

Comments

Re:Chrome

[drinkypoo]

As far as anyone knows, Chrome only sends search data home on a regular basis. I think it's still worth being concerned about the platform's capabilities but I wouldn't be paranoid about it.

99.9% of paying customers don't know DRM

[raymorris]

> if consumers gave them a choice: release DRM free, or go out of business

If I had four hooves and a horn, I'd be a unicorn. 99.9% of Hollywood's paying customers (the people they care about) don't know what DRM *is*.

Of the maybe one in a thousand customers who even know what DRM is, maybe half of those will take it unlawfully *regardless*, they aren't going to pay $5 for the movie (their share of the production costs) *no matter what*. So you're left with maybe 0.05% of customers who know and care about DRM, and who will maybe pay for a non-DRM copy. The studios aren't going to make such important decisions based on less than one tenth of one percent of the market.