Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."
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.
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.
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.