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An Open Letter on DRM To the Inventor of the Web, From the Inventor of Net Neutrality (boingboing.net)
Tim Wu, a law professor at the Colombia University, and best known for coining the term "net neutrality," has published an open letter to Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In the letter, Wu has asked Berners-Lee to "seriously consider extending a protective covenant to legitimate circumventers who have cause to bypass EME, should it emerge as a W3C standard." Cory Doctorow, writes for BoingBoing: But Wu goes on to draw a connection between the problems of DRM and the problems of network discrimination: DRM is wrapped up in a layer of legal entanglements (notably section 1201 of America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act), which allow similar kinds of anticompetitive and ugly practices that make net neutrality so important. This is a live issue, too, because the W3C just held the most contentious vote in its decades-long history, on whether to publish a DRM standard for the web without any of the proposed legal protections for companies that create the kinds of competing products and services that the law permits, except when DRM is involved. As Wu points out, this sets up a situation where the incumbents get to create monopolies that produce the same problems for the open web that network neutrality advocates -- like Berners-Lee -- worry about.
These are legit concerns, but they will never win the argument. Yes the example given is the problem with DRM, but it is so specific that there will be no mass uprising to protect it. And having DRM built in does scare me. Imagine not being able to take a screenshot of something on a webpage, or being prevented from copying text from an article. All of this could be done with DRM.
That being said I am hoping we have enough of an open browser system now to avoid the chokepoint issue. There are several open rendering engines that browsers can use, so there will always be an alternative to the IE problem. Those browsers can support DRM while still insuring the rest of the web stays open. In a way I think the market will show that DRM taking over the web won't work. It's tolerated on videos because everyone came to the same conclusion as Tim.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a difficult battle. - Plato
It is possible to move away from Chrome, it is harder to do so from W3C.