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EFF Officially Appeals Tim Berners-Lee Decision On DRM In HTML (techdirt.com)
Last week, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) decided to officially recommend the use of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) for protecting copyrighted video on the internet. This will enable web surfers to watch media in a browser that requires Digital Rights Management copy protection without the need for browser-based plugins. "It moves the responsibility for interaction from plugins to the browser," the consortium states at the time. "As such, EME offers a better user experience, bringing greater interoperability, privacy, security, and accessibility to viewing encrypted video on the web." TechDirt shares an update: It's been a foregone conclusion that EME was going to get approved, but there was a smaller fight about whether or not W3C would back a covenant not to sue security and privacy researchers who would be investigating (and sometimes breaking) that encryption. Due to massive pushback from the likes of the MPAA and (unfortunately) Netflix, Tim Berners-Lee rejected this covenant proposal. In response, W3C member EFF has now filed a notice of appeal on the decision. The crux of the appeal is the claimed benefits of EME that Berners-Lee put forth won't actually be benefits without the freedom of security researchers to audit the technology -- and that the wider W3C membership should have been able to vote on the issue. This appeals process has never been used before at the W3C, even though it's officially part of its charter -- so no one's entirely sure what happens next.
it makes open source browsers impossible.
without a eme plugin i suppose.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Other way around: pirates will continue to do what pirates do because EME will add nothing that Flash et al don't already do.
Users will, after initially losing Flash, go back to Flash-like plugins except with the added overhead that the video rendering will be done via an HTML5 layer. Flash may have been horrible, but it was at least efficient. Here's a breakdown for the inevitable idiot who doesn't read the entire comment and thinks EME is a DRM scheme rather than a plug-in platform:
Efficient? Flash: Yes. HTML5+EME: OMG.
Secure? Flash: No. HTML5+EME: No.
Platform independent? Flash: Bad. HTML5+EME: OMG, it actually makes Flash look platform independent.
(EME requires one plugin to be written for every single browser+operating system combination. Flash at least existed at a time when most browsers, IE excepted, implemented NSAPI for whatever operating system they ran on.)
HTML5 was one step forward. EME is two steps back.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.