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EFF Resigns From Web Consortium In Wake of EME DRM Standardization (eff.org)
New submitter Frobnicator writes: Four years ago, the W3C began standardizing Encrypted Media Extensions, or EME. Several organizations, including the EFF, have argued against DRM within web browsers. Earlier this year, after the W3C leadership officially recommended EME despite failing to reach consensus, the EFF filed the first-ever official appeal that the decision be formally polled for consensus. That appeal has been denied, and for the first time the W3C is endorsing a standard against the consensus of its members.
In response, the EFF published their resignation from the body: "The W3C is a body that ostensibly operates on consensus. Nevertheless, as the coalition in support of a DRM compromise grew and grew -- and the large corporate members continued to reject any meaningful compromise -- the W3C leadership persisted in treating EME as topic that could be decided by one side of the debate. [...] Today, the W3C bequeaths an legally unauditable attack-surface to browsers used by billions of people. Effective today, EFF is resigning from the W3C." Jeff Jaffe, CEO of W3C said: "I know from my conversations that many people are not satisfied with the result. EME proponents wanted a faster decision with less drama. EME critics want a protective covenant. And there is reason to respect those who want a better result. But my personal reflection is that we took the appropriate time to have a respectful debate about a complex set of issues and provide a result that will improve the web for its users. My main hope, though, is that whatever point-of-view people have on the EME covenant issue, that they recognize the value of the W3C community and process in arriving at a decision for an inherently contentious issue. We are in our best light when we are facilitating the debate on important issues that face the web."
In response, the EFF published their resignation from the body: "The W3C is a body that ostensibly operates on consensus. Nevertheless, as the coalition in support of a DRM compromise grew and grew -- and the large corporate members continued to reject any meaningful compromise -- the W3C leadership persisted in treating EME as topic that could be decided by one side of the debate. [...] Today, the W3C bequeaths an legally unauditable attack-surface to browsers used by billions of people. Effective today, EFF is resigning from the W3C." Jeff Jaffe, CEO of W3C said: "I know from my conversations that many people are not satisfied with the result. EME proponents wanted a faster decision with less drama. EME critics want a protective covenant. And there is reason to respect those who want a better result. But my personal reflection is that we took the appropriate time to have a respectful debate about a complex set of issues and provide a result that will improve the web for its users. My main hope, though, is that whatever point-of-view people have on the EME covenant issue, that they recognize the value of the W3C community and process in arriving at a decision for an inherently contentious issue. We are in our best light when we are facilitating the debate on important issues that face the web."
W3C sells out, leaves its somewhat democratic origins, succumbs to the payola, jumps the shark. Carry on, EFF. Someone has to.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Spicer could take notes.
are killing the www
In this day and age only webkit really matters when it comes to standards. Why don't we focus on that as W3C is irrelevant at this point and has been for a very long time now
http://saveie6.com/
See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h94ZKGVg-B8
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Na4XsqIg2A
My main hope, though, is that whatever point-of-view people have on the EME covenant issue, that they recognize the value of the W3C community and process in arriving at a decision for an inherently contentious issue.
Sorry there bubs. Any respect I had for the "value of the W3C community and process in arriving at blah fucking blah" has now gone out the window.
Respect is earned, not demanded. This is going to be the undoing of the open internet, more than any other single thing in its history.
The link that says that the W3C is endorsing a standard against the consensus of its members goes to an article that says
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the industry body that oversees development of HTML and related Web standards, has today published the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) specification as a Recommendation, marking its final blessing as an official Web standard. Final approval came after the W3C's members voted 58.4 percent to approve the spec, 30.8 percent to oppose
So if almost 60% approve, isn't that about as much consensus as you ever get on a standard?
I might have been confused at the first mention of EFF resigning from W3C consortium because of the DRM standardization.
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
Tim Berners-Lee has lost his way. I remember when he came to Wellington NZ and he was doing public talks about appstores and how people were using apps more than the web. He sounded scared that they would make the web irrelevant. If I were to guess why he kept supporting DRM it was because of this.
Obviously over the years W3C has drifted between relevance, with HTML5 being done in the WhatWG and then copypasted to the W3C for no good reason (except for standards wonks trying to push specs to the ISO etc).
So from my perspective it's the W3C continuing irrelevance, and it's the browsers' choice that matters more. Firefox have a fairly good EME approach that at least sandboxes the DRM, but who knows how long they'll hold out with that approach if a major site adopts more intrusive DRM.
I suspect that appstores will fade in relevance sure to PWAs more than the web adopting DRM.
Now for the first time we have tacit acceptance of DRM and patents in W3C standards. Sure EME is just an API but it only exists to facilitate DRM all of which is patent encumbered, so practically it's no different in terms of limiting user rights and what browsers can do, and accessibility. Now to make a browser we need to accept Hollywoods terms. Before we had pressure that they would get more eyeballs in the web without DRM but no longer. Wait to see how youtube reacts... (No I don't mean the fine Bros)
Without a standards organization that can actually make portable standards (see lack of CDM documentation), it's time that we must construct a new standards body that isn't afraid to do what it claims it will do rather than what they must in order to appease their corporate masters.
The W3C has lost it's credibility. The time has come to form a new standards body for the web.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The EFF Resigning because they lost the vote on that particular issue, seems a bit extreme. Web Standards are still evolving and changing, without the EFF who will try to make sure future features which may step on our rights will not get implemented.
DRM isn't an extreme feature, while it is against the ideas of Open Source and Freedom of information. In short DRM is the only reason why we have legal media streaming, and other services, which otherwise would be blocked, and any attempts to spread it will be attacked by an army of lawyers.
Now other than getting up an leaving in a huff because they didn't get their way, they should be asking themselves, what other alternatives to DRM is there that can address the concerns of the 58% who approved of it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
[Jeff Jaffe, CEO of W3C] speaking for the W3C:
The the people in the W3C are not in any kind of a "best light" when the organization is obviously and outrageously fluffing corporate behemoths over the needs of everyone else, though.
The degree of pro-corporate spin in Jaffe's remarks is appalling.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Why does the EFF feel that personal property rights of users (privacy) are more important than the persona property rights of people participating in the commercial sphere (copyright holders)?
Is it because there are big "evil" corporations on the other side? Is it because anyone that makes money off of property rights is evil?
honest questions...
what happens now? how does this actually manifest into something? do browser makers now have to have certain features to be W3C certified or something?
is this at all similar to Chrome's recent decisions to not allow credentials from certain places, etc? I may not be remembering this stuff correctly but it seems like just another entity's decisions to do something they feel 'right' about
do they have that much power to affect the web?
help me out, pls
DRM schemes aren't going away and having standards around them seems like the best path forward. Without DRM, you can't have content rental systems. It's been said many times that information wants to be free, but the content creators need to eat and the studio executives need to fuel a lavish lifestyle. Without some form of DRM you wouldn't be able to have subscription services like HBO Go or Amazon Prime. It's a fair criticism that when you "purchase" a movie or TV show using Amazon Prime or Apple TV or similar that it's really a long-term rental. There was a time when a DRM-free purchase seemed like a great idea. But that was when we wanted to do things like download an entire movie and play on various devices. Now everything is streaming and you don't even notice the DRM. New standards will make it even less intrusive. Yes part of Stallman's "Right to Read" is coming true in that you can't lend your DRM purchases very well and sharing your password isn't a great idea. But also the prices have come down so much that there's no *need* for this. Everybody can have their own access for a very affordable price so the doom and gloom predictions are not materializing. I'm glad EFF resigned because I'd like to see them focus their attention on more important issues.
Your fallacy is Middle Ground, Jaffe. Maybe after he's done driving web standards into the ground, he can go work for CNN.
"The Democratic candidate for governor wants to push old blind ladies down the stairs, while his Republican opponent wants to push them down the stairs and then set them on fire. Why can't they compromise somewhere in the middle?!?"
Jeff Jaffe, W3C just lost any credibility it had left.
This is shameful.
The W3C was doing what it was designed to do—membership is only available to those who pay, and that means its membership is almost entirely businesses. Calling this selling out misses the point of how the W3C's structure virtually guarantees predictable pro-DRM business outcomes such as this. As DefectiveByDesign.org pointed out long ago, "Companies can impose DRM without the W3C; but we should make them do it on their own, so it is seen for what it is—a subversion of the Web's principles—rather than normalize it or give it endorsement.".
Digital Citizen
This was not a fight about whether DRM was good or bad, it wasn't about whether it should be used or not either - It already exists and is being used. It wasn't even a debate about whether it should be standardized, you really can't stop a group of people from agreeing to agree on how to do things. The only possible debate was whether the DRM standard would be part of W3C.
Now the W3C could decided they hate DRM and not put it in their standard but then the web browsers are going to standardize it on their own outside of the W3C. This definitely weakens the W3C but it also goes against what W3C stands for. They are supposed to be the place for people to put web standards together. Just because the EFF doesn't agree with DRM, shouldn't allow them to stop the web browser makers from agreeing to the standard and making it a W3C standard.
Start fresh, throw them out, build new standards with DRM strictly forbidden in the charter.
Fuck the W3C, and their wallets now bursting with bribes. The greedy fucktards just sold us out.
Once upon a time, a family argued over what program they should watch on their TV. The father looked at the argumentative bunch and decided to weigh in with a bit of wisdom. "Let's resolve this democratically" he said. "Junior and Sissy should get one vote each for the show that they wish to watch, Mother should get two votes as her position allows for more power. As for me, I should get five votes as I'm the Pater Familias." At that point, the rich elitist bastard who lived in a mansion on a hill that had been in his rich elitist family for generations, used his master key and walked into the living room and declared: "You'll watch what I want you to watch. You don't get any votes. Fuck you!"
The family stopped their argument and sat down. "What do you want to watch, Uncle Fred?" They asked.
Consensus is not always possible for contentious issues. It's a nice ideal to strive for, but there are some issues where consensus cannot be practically reached. Compromise is likewise not always possible either. Those are the times when strong leadership is called for to make a decision, over the well-reasoned objections of some of the members of the body.
As this post nicely describes, DRM is already here, isn't going away, and this whole debate wasn't about whether or not we should have DRM at all. It was about whether or not to standardize something on the web, which is even more of a primary goal of the W3C than reaching consensus.
as half the w3c and likely more outside disagreed, can the consortium be forked?
It is time to replace the W3C. Clearly DRM is not in the interest of users, so there must be corruption in the standardisation process that is representing financial interests over those of users. Hopefully browser developers will reject implementation of any technology forged under these circumstances, and some corrective action can be taken to either replace or re-structure the W3C.
EME defines how a browser talks to a multimedia decoder. If the multimedia is Ogg / Theora / Vorbis / Flac / WebM, then obviously the decoder can be open source.
H.264 is patented, so you'd think that if the video is h.264 the decoder couldn't be open source, but it can be because Cisco has paid the patent license fees for OpenH264.
If the video is encrypted with a patented DRM, THEN you'd need a binary blob to decrypt it.
In other words, regarding open source vs proprietary it's just exactly the same as the existing situation, in which DRM content requires a proprietary browser plug-in such as Flash.
"This streaming content works only on the certified Google products." "This streaming content is available only on Apple devices." "This streaming content works only on our Windows Store App, which you can purchase right here." "Sorry, your device doesn't fulfill all the requirements of Amazon Trusted(tm) ecosystem. Error 0x00345a: Missing TPM 2 module."
Most W3C standards get a higher level of consensus, but they're just discussing the technical details of how to do something.
The EFF strongly argued that media decoders shouldn't be standardized at all. There is a big political / philosophical argument behind this one, as well as the normal technical discussions of how to do it.
Given the political / philosophical debate, I don't imagine they could have gotten much better than the 60% for, 30% opposed that they ended up with. In the end, all the main browsers had already implemented EME anyway, so the decision before W3C was whether or not to write down exactly what the browsers were already doing, in order to aid compatibility.
Don't let the door slam on your tails on the way out. :)
EME doesn't talk to ogg, it talks to a decryptor and then passes the information to that decryptor which then produces a bitstream to be passed on to another module to enact it. Nominally a video codec, but there's nothing that limits it to that.
And guess what? If you have a decryptor that is open source, you can take that decryptor and use it to pass that bitstream out to disk so you can use it externally. And guess what that breaks? That's right, DRM.
You have a browser - whose first job is just to work. S is for STANDARD and standards work across diverse multiple platforms with backwards compatibility where security patches do not break things - but hey, they interpreted consensus has he who has the gold.
Throw in DRM
Runs hardware inspection in superman mode before playing
Paywall pop-ups- subscribe or no deal
Wont play to Republican supporters (Fake news, or Trump hated reporter)
Won't show the news (in China)
Won't play in Australia (GOT saga)
Not available for any price (Georestrictions)
Secret telemetry or rummage of client device
No secret vaulting of keys nor remote key accesses
So a reasonable trade off must be
1) Runs in a sandbox
2) unconditionally plays if there is a key/certificate in a set location
3) No unconstitutional searches / fishing expeditions on host
3.5) No conditional filters / timeouts. streaming ads inserted
4) Nothing else
My bet is it compiles down to download binary blob and run it in superman mode, and it might work depending on (anything else but a simple key)
Well, if everyone tom have a binary blob for each phone and operating system, 32 or 64 bit, XP to Win13, depreciated hardware like old iPhones - then it is NO standard.
Now a compromise might be all binary blobs must be open source, and use a published key system , If not there is no interoperability.
Conclusion: They sold their soul for money.
What do they think this will accomplish? DRM is not going away and W3C did not decide on standardization, the media industry would have forced their will through by having big players like Microsoft include it in Edge. We have seen now and again that public opinion cares about the "free and open internet" way less than it cares about watching Netflix in the browser. EFF's behavior is childish. They can forget my support from now on.
https://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl
https://www.w3.org/TR/soap
{...} only webkit really matters when it comes to standards. Why don't we focus on that {... ?}
Because of Gecko / Servo powering Firefox on most non-iOS platforms including desktop and android (and a few less known, like the Mer-derived SailfishOS by Jolla, like the web engine replacing Microsoft Edge when running Wine, etc.)
Because of Microsoft Edge that the more clueless users still run on their Windows laptops ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Someone should create an online petition requesting Jeff Jaffe to step down as CEO of W3C for not following his own documented core values, which specifically states they would follow the consensus of their members.
Then what's all this talk about HEVC? I know it takes alot more time to encode and isn't YMMV another standard for webcams. I assumed Apple invented it to sell more Macs. It is silly people are buing 16 core AMD Threadrippers and Xeons to encode 4K
http://saveie6.com/
I read MoarSauce123's comment to imply that promotional perks from record labels cover the royalties payable to songwriters through BMI and the like. This can go as far as buying a 4-minute ad spot during "non-stop drive hour" to play a new single that the label wants to push. This is fine as long as the sponsorship is disclosed. The notice
Until two or three versions from now, when [the "Enable DRM" checkbox] is removed from Preferences and can only be toggled via about:config, or five or six versions of Firefox later when even that is removed...
At that point, Firefox users can switch to a fork that omits support for proprietary CDMs, such as Waterfox. If Mozilla makes support for proprietary CDMs mandatory, I'd bet money Debian will either revive the Iceweasel brand or package IceCat.
You people just don't get it. It not about coping some stupid movie for free. They are crap propaganda anyway. The real issue is giving them the ability censor content at will. DRM will make China's Great Firewall look like a bastion of free speech.
CDMs can do any of the following:
a) Decryption only, enabling playback using the normal media pipeline, for example via a element.
b) Decryption and *decoding*, passing video frames to the browser for rendering.
c) Decryption and decoding, rendering directly in the hardware (for example, the GPU).
Option B and C have the CDM decoding (as ogg does).
EME implementations are required to support one option, clear key - which breaks DRM. In other words, a browser MUST support EME that's not secure DRM, one can also install DRM modules for it to talk to. EME doesn't specify anything about what the modules DO, just that the browser can send data to an external module, and the external module can send data back.
Thanks Jeff Jaffe for a master class on the use of the passive voice!
Fuck you.
The battle for online privacy is lost because, children and terrorism. The battle against online censorship is lost because, fake news and Russia. DRM is actually the least of out worries because one could simply not use an EME-enabled browser and confine oneself to non-corporate sites (what few are going to remain). But Sunde is right: we lost the internet. How could we let slip from our hands the most powerful weapon for individual freedom and let it be turned into the most powerful tool for surveillance and oppression is simply unbelievable. What were we thinking? Why didn't we fight and push the offensive while Big Government and Big Money were still trying to get their wits about? We knew what kind of power they wielded and we let them brought it to bear. The future generations - if ever they will be allowed to know what happened - will curse us forever.
I have always disabled DRM content in Firefox but hear now the option to disable will go away.
Now that it become enabled by default everywhere, wont it become a very interesting target for malware writers?
Any application can implement DRM and use this channel to unhindered sending remote commands or no?
I as well as the majority of the world are located in countries not covered by DMCA regulations.
From the list of companies voting in favor of the standard, mostly all companies are American. (Microsoft, Google, Apple, ... )
- I would assume researchers from countries not covered by DMCA are can thus legally keep researching DRM content for malware and so on?
- Could it be even Google, Apple, Microsoft, and so on, can simply ignore DMCA by paying workers abroad not covered by DMCA to do the research they need?
- Does this regulation somewhat impact me and everyone else not covered by DMCA regulations anyway?