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

Posted by EditorDavid on from the phone-calls-for-freedom dept.

"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."

7 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. What can Berners-Lee do here, really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seriously, he's not a god. He can't stop Google and so on pushing DRM if they want to (which they did, regardless of whether he accepted that he was powerless in this case).

    I really don't understand the FSF anymore. "Let's go after the symptoms instead of the disease! Let's divide our own supporters! Let's act like if we just pretend that if DRM isn't an official web-spec, it won't still be a de-facto web-spec!" What difference will any of that make, really? It's a pathetic waste of everyone's time and donation money.

    1. Re:What can Berners-Lee do here, really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      This. Tim Berners-Lee is not an influence on the development of the internet anymore, and has not been for a long long time. Google and Facebook call the shots. It pains early adopters and self-styled "pioneers" like me, who had to download the earliest browsers via FTP on dial-up connections, to say that but the war is lost. Our numbers dwindle, we're outnumbered and outgunned, on the prairies we used to roam they've built cities. We're barely tolerated guests. It's not going to get any better.

    2. Re:What can Berners-Lee do here, really? by John+Allsup · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Not making DRM a W3C standard will turn it into another Flash/Silverlight type thing. Look at how hard it is for them to die. If DRM is going to be done, and it is going to be done, a W3C standard is better than nothing. As for where effort is expended, it must be in cultivating DRM-free content platforms, and DRM-free content.

      --
      John_Chalisque
  2. Re:Ugly legal implications of "circumventing DRM" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Agreed - that is part of the desired outcome of the normalization of DRM technology on the web.

    It is intolerable to certain parties that owners of personal computers got to control what those computers did - which might include blocking their advertising and tracking of every single thing you do. There has been a continual legal and technical assault on that front for decades now, and everyone buying devices that moved control out of their hands are complicit.

    The open internet was a very short duration thing - a few decades at most, and we're at the end of it now. It could never survive the post Eternal September world.

  3. 20 years web development - always DRM by raymorris · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've been in web development for 20 years. I've dealt with DRM implemented with Active X (limiting sites to Internet Explorer only), Java, Flash, Silverlight, and others. Mostly the effect of this is that users who chose anything but Windows couldn't access the media. For example, for years Linux users couldn't access Netflix - until HTML5 IME came along. (IME is the "drm" that this article complains about). Of course the blessed platforms are now often Apple iOS and Android, rather than Windows.

    Columbia and MGM aren't about to release their movies as unprotected mpeg4 files, no matter how much we would like them to do that. The actual effect of IME (aka html5 drm) has been to open up content, such as Netflix, to more people. Hollywood isn't going DRM-free. Our actual options are a) Silverlight DRM or other platform-locked, non-standard DRM, or b) platform neutral, standardized streaming such as we have with HTML5 IME. Given the realistic choices, I prefer (b). I'd prefer Netflix be platform-independent than not.

    1. Re:20 years web development - always DRM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Columbia and MGM aren't about to release their movies as unprotected mpeg4 files, no matter how much we would like them to do that.

      Of course they would. if consumers gave them a choice: release DRM free, or go out of business, they will release DRM free. They need us more than we need them.

      As it sits there are other companies releasing DRM free films and games, and those are the only ones i will buy from.

  4. Re:here's where the road goes... by grumbel · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The loss of control over personal computing and web browsing especially is completely self inflicted in the name of ease-of-use. If Mozilla wanted, they could have build a Freedom browser, but instead they build a crappy Chrome clone and to get a little bit of freedom back you have to install all kinds of third party addons (e.g. even basic things like saving video). It's mind boggling how featureless modern browsers are by default.

    As for the DRM, it's tricky. If there is no standard, you either get no video or you get a proprietary plugin. The lack of a standard doesn't make DRM go away and companies have to problem breaking standards to squeeze DRM in there. I don't like DRM being a standard, but I don't think it will make things worse than they already are. On the plus side, if there is a standard it might be easier to crack.