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

What can Berners-Lee do here, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What can Berners-Lee do here, really?

[AmiMoJo]

The real problem is that Firefox is on the decline. Microsoft and Apple will implement whatever DRM Chrome has because they want streaming services like Netflix to work as well as possible in their browsers. Without the DRM, no 4k support, for example.

Mozilla was the only major browser vendor willing to stand up to this stuff, but market share has fallen so far that Firefox is no longer a strong enough force to make bad technologies die. Consider this: if Firefox had announced Flash support was ending in 2016, do you think that would have been as powerful as Google announcing it? Would sites have moved away from Flash because of it?

Re:What can Berners-Lee do here, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What can Berners-Lee do here, really?

[knorthern knight]

> I really don't understand the FSF anymore. "Let's go after the symptoms instead of the disease!

DRM *IS THE DISEASE*. That's what people are so mad about.

> 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?

Thanks to Chrome and Windowa 10, snooping, privacy-invading browser and OS are "de-facto specs". Do you want everyone to fall in line? Do you want Firefox, Pale Moon, and linux in general to start snooping on you? "But Mom, all the other kids are doing it".

Re:What can Berners-Lee do here, really?

[John Allsup]

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.

Re:What can Berners-Lee do here, really?

[John Allsup]

DRM is not the disease. Greed, selfishness and neoliberal delusions that giving human greed a free reign will magically make the world better: those are the disease. It is those that took a mechanism which, in its original form, was essential to avoiding a disastrous free-for-all in the nascent publishing industry of a few centuries ago and, via systematic strategic lobbying, twisted it into modern copyright laws. Remove DRM and the disease remains.

Re:What can Berners-Lee do here, really?

[WaffleMonster]

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).

He can say no.

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.

Suppose a few member states of the UN would like to get together and discuss how they can best coordinate the commission of human rights abuses to benefit themselves.

Since the UN is powerless to do anything about such meetings conducted outside the UN they should allow working group meetings to take place within the UN to facilitate that coordination beeccaause...ummm.... it's.... going to happen anyway.

Re:What can Berners-Lee do here, really?

[phantomfive]

If anyone is wondering what the Mozilla Paris office looks like, here it is. I can't comment on what the costs of such an office would be. Maybe not much.

here's where the road goes...

[Anonymous Coward]

It starts out with media only.

Then the behavioral tracking companies and advertisers throw hissy fits like the media companies are, to restrict people's ability to locally modify web pages, such as with uMatrix or other tracker blocking technologies. It gets extended to cover the basic presentation of all web page content, not just video, and end users lose control of how they view the web, just as that control is being lost in the mobile space, but worse.

We've seen a constant slow erosion of our own control over personal computing and a transfer of that control to large corporations, who were never happy about this whole "internet" thing. They want a more TV-like model, where THEY control the presentation, as well as the tracking, and the end user has no control.

Make no mistake. You let the DRM camel's nose into the official standard's tent, and that IS what we will end up with. You like your ability to block trackers? To control fonts and colors and other local presentation? Your adblockers? Your ability to locally stop scripts from blocking right mouse clicks or cut&paste? If DRM continues to make inroads, you will lose all of that, and more. It will be nothing less than the end of the open web as we knew it.

Captch: "product".

Re:here's where the road goes...

[grumbel]

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.

How to destroy DRM in the W3C

[Gravis Zero]

I've posted this before but...

If you wish to cause the current system of DRM to implode it's actually really easy, you just need to know how to play by their rules. All you need to do is simulate the CDM plugin environment of Microsoft's Edge browser and package it as a single program that can write the output to an unprotected file. It doesn't even have to output an optimized video file, a raw capture will do. They will be contractually obligated to stop using CDMs because they can no longer meet the standard of the "robustness rules".

With any other browser, it would mean only that specific browser would be unable to use CDMs but Microsoft isn't about to be left out of the game they helped fix.

Ugly legal implications of "circumventing DRM"

[knorthern knight]

Anti DRM-circumvention laws were originally enacted to penalize copying of audio and video from physical platforms like CDs and DVDs. When audio and video streaming came to the web, those laws still applied.

A video store can legally sell a legal copy of a Hollywood movie full of sex and profanity. But if they pay for the copy, edit out the sex and violence, and sell the edited copy, that's illegal. See https://freedom-to-tinker.com/...

Now let's apply this to the web. A website puts weak HTML-DRM on its entire webpage, including ads. If you block ads, pupups, autoplaying garbage, etc, to get a cleaned-up webpage, you're subject to prosecution, just like the outfit that sold cleaned-up DVDs. If the web doesn't have built-in DRM, that becomes a lot less likely.

Re:Ugly legal implications of "circumventing DRM"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

20 years web development - always DRM

[raymorris]

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.

Re:20 years web development - always DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:Chrome

[WaffleMonster]

I ask this question every time Chrome and spying are brought up but no one can ever answer. Can anyone provide packet logs of Chrome supposedly spying? We all have definite proof of Windows 10 but people clam up when I ask for proof of Chrome.

Wireshark is free. Max out all Chrome privacy settings, run Chrome and see for yourself what it does.

I've been there and found it's impossible to make it stop calling home. You can't even launch Chrome with a default blank page and have it sit there doing absolutely nothing without calling home.

The most in your face aspect of Chrome was realizing even after blocking various Chrome related hosts via DNS was the use of Google's primary search engine URL itself seemingly used as an application data collection channel.

If you really like Chrome your better off with Chromium.

It all goes back to XHTML2

[Anonymous Coward]

July 2, 2009 was the day that Tim Berners-Lee abandoned a free and open web.

https://www.cnet.com/news/an-epitaph-for-the-web-standard-xhtml-2

That was the day that he announced the termination of his XHTML2 standard, and allowed Apple, Google, and others to dictate the HTML5 "standard". (And I place "standard" in scare quotes because it isn't really a standard. In fact, they acknowledge this fact, and prefer to use the deliberately deceptive term living standard .)

The fight against DRM in the HTML standard is already lost. Tim Berners-Lee gave up 8 years ago, it's just that most people didn't notice until now.

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.

Standards only extend to those who adopt them

[Archfeld]

Just don't adopt or support the new web standards. It won't prevent large companies from doing what they want, the only thing it does provide is a guideline to interoperability. If no one enacts web sites to the new standard it has no effect, but having a published standard guides companies towards smooth interoperability and helps prevent wholesale fracturing of the web.
If everyone's DRM follows a standard, when that is cracked, and it will be, the whole market will fall apart. If every entity arrives at its' own method you will need a hodgepodge of solutions to just navigate and use resources, which leads to a huge effort to maintain and secure from the user side.