• Latest
  • All
  • How To
Defend the Open Web: Keep DRM Out of W3C Standards

Defend the Open Web: Keep DRM Out of W3C Standards

March 21, 2013
kenya-parliament

Parliament Invites Public Feedback on Virtual Asset Bill 2025

May 30, 2025
ConnectedAfrica2025(Day4)-meta-foondamate

Connected Africa 2025 Day 4: FoondaMate and Meta Team Up to Bring AI to Classrooms

May 29, 2025
google-veo-3

Actors and Film Crews Are Worried About Veo 3 Taking Their Jobs

May 29, 2025
iOS 26

Apple Plans Big Rename for iOS and macOS at WWDC 2025

May 29, 2025
DHgate Tablet Cases deals
University student fined for defamatory Facebook posts

University Student Fined KES 7.5 Million for Defamatory Facebook Posts

May 29, 2025
AI Africa policies database

New Platform Brings All African AI Policies Under One Database

May 28, 2025
POATE 2025

Kenya’s Tourism Sector Grows as Travel Gets Easier Across East Africa

May 28, 2025
sodium-ion battery

Researchers Develop Sodium-Ion Battery That Charges to 80% in 6 Minutes

May 27, 2025
TV Gambling Ads

Regulator Fines Stations Using Religious Shows to Push Gambling

May 27, 2025
Connected Africa Summit 2025

Connected Africa 2025 Day 2: Focus on Digital Inclusion & Cybersecurity

May 27, 2025
whatsapp chatbots

iPad Users May Finally Get a Native WhatsApp App

May 28, 2025
Connected Africa Summit

Connected Africa Summit Calls for Unified Tech Vision

May 28, 2025
Techweez | Tech News, Reviews, Deals, Tips and How To
  • News
  • Entertainment
  • Reviews
  • Features
  • Editorial
No Result
View All Result
Techweez | Tech News, Reviews, Deals, Tips and How To
  • News
  • Entertainment
  • Reviews
  • Features
  • Editorial
No Result
View All Result
Techweez | Tech News, Reviews, Deals, Tips and How To
No Result
View All Result

Defend the Open Web: Keep DRM Out of W3C Standards

Carlos Ageng'o by Carlos Ageng'o
March 21, 2013
in News
Reading Time: 5 mins read
258
0

There’s a new front in the battle against digital rights management (DRM) technologies. These technologies, which supposedly exist to enforce copyright, have never done anything to get creative people paid. Instead, by design or by accident, their real effect is to interfere with innovation, fair use, competition, interoperability, and our right to own things.

That’s why we were appalled to learn that there is a proposal currently before the World Wide Web Consortium‘s HTML5 Working Group to build DRM into the next generation of core Web standards. The proposal is called Encrypted Media Extensions, or EME. Its adoption would be a calamitous development, and must be stopped.

In the past two decades, there has been an ongoing struggle between two views of how Internet technology should work. One philosophy has been that the Web needs to be a universal ecosystem that is based on open standards and fully implementable on equal terms by anyone, anywhere, without permission or negotiation. This is the technological tradition that gave us HTML and HTTP in the first place, and epoch-defining innovations like wikis, search engines, blogs, webmail, applications written in JavaScript, repurposable online maps, and a hundred million specific websites that this paragraph is too short to list.

The other view has been represented by corporations that have tried to seize control of the Web with their own proprietary extensions. It has been represented by technologies like Adobe’s Flash, Microsoft’s Silverlight, and pushes by Apple, phone companies, and others toward highly restrictive new platforms. These technologies are intended to be available from a single source or to require permission for new implementations. Whenever these technologies have become popular, they have inflicted damage on the open ecosystems around them. Websites that depend on Flash or Silverlight typically can’t be linked to properly, can’t be indexed, can’t be translated by machine, can’t be accessed by users with disabilities, don’t work on all devices, and pose security and privacy risks to their users. Platforms and devices that restrict their users inevitably prevent important innovations and hamper marketplace competition.

The EME proposal suffers from many of these problems because it explicitly abdicates responsibilty on compatibility issues and let web sites require specific proprietary third-party software or even special hardware and particular operating systems (all referred to under the generic name “content decryption modules”, or CDMs, and none of them specified by EME). EME’s authors keep saying that what CDMs are, and do, and where they come from is totally outside of the scope of EME, and that EME itself can’t be thought of as DRM because not all CDMs are DRM systems. Yet if the client can’t prove it’s running the particular proprietary thing the site demands, and hence doesn’t have an approved CDM, it can’t render the site’s content. Perversely, this is exactly the reverse of the reason that the World Wide Web Consortium exists in the first place. W3C is there to create comprehensible, publicly-implementable standards that will guarantee interoperability, not to facilitate an explosion of new mutually-incompatible software and of sites and services that can only be accessed by particular devices or applications. But EME is a proposal to bring exactly that dysfunctional dynamic into HTML5, even risking a return to the “bad old days, before the Web” of deliberately limited interoperability.

Because it’s clear that the open standards community is extremely suspicious of DRM and its interoperability consequences, the proposal from Google, Microsoft and Netflix claims that “[n]o ‘DRM’ is added to the HTML5 specification” by EME. This is like saying, “we’re not vampires, but we are going to invite them into your house”.

Proponents also seem to claim that EME is not itself a DRM scheme. But specification author Mark Watson admitted that “Certainly, our interest is in [use] cases that most people would call DRM” and that implementations would inherently require secrets outside the specification’s scope. It’s hard to maintain a pretense that EME is about anything but DRM.

The DRM proposals at the W3C exist for a simple reason: they are an attempt to appease Hollywood, which has been angry about the Internet for almost as long as the Web has existed, and has always demanded that it be given elaborate technical infrastructure to control how its audience’s computers function. The perception is that Hollywood will never allow movies onto the Web if it can’t encumber them with DRM restrictions. But the threat that Hollywood could take its toys and go home is illusory. Every film that Hollywood releases is already available for those who really want to pirate a copy. Huge volumes of music are sold by iTunes, Amazon, Magnatune and dozens of other sites without the need for DRM. Streaming services like Netflix and Spotify have succeeded because they are more convenient than piratical alternatives, not because DRM does anything to enhance their economics. The only logically coherent reason for Hollywood to demand DRM is that the movie studios want veto controls over how mainstream technolgies are designed. Movie studios have used DRM to enforce arbitrary restrictions on products, including preventing fast-forwarding and imposing regional playback controls, and created complicated and expensive “compliance” regimes for compliant technology companies that give small consortiums of media and big tech companies a veto right on innovation.

All too often, technology companies have raced against each other to build restrictive tangleware that suits Hollywood’s whims, selling out their users in the process. But open Web standads are an antidote to that dynamic, and it would be a terrible mistake for the Web community to leave the door open for Hollywood’s gangrenous anti-technology culture to infect W3C standards. It would undermine the very purposes for which HTML5 exists: to build an open-ecosystem alternatives to all the functionality that is missing in previous web standards, without the problems of device limitations, platform incompatibility, and non-transparency that were created by platforms like Flash. HTML5 was supposed to be better than Flash, and excluding DRM is exactly what would make it better.

From EFF

SendShare146Tweet92
Carlos Ageng'o

Carlos Ageng'o

Bringing you news on information systems, business intelligence and IT innovations. Contact me on @aKhadiemik and c [dot] agengo [at] techweez [dot] com

Related Posts

kenya-parliament

Parliament Invites Public Feedback on Virtual Asset Bill 2025

May 30, 2025
ConnectedAfrica2025(Day4)-meta-foondamate

Connected Africa 2025 Day 4: FoondaMate and Meta Team Up to Bring AI to Classrooms

May 29, 2025
google-veo-3

Actors and Film Crews Are Worried About Veo 3 Taking Their Jobs

May 29, 2025
iOS 26

Apple Plans Big Rename for iOS and macOS at WWDC 2025

May 29, 2025
University student fined for defamatory Facebook posts

University Student Fined KES 7.5 Million for Defamatory Facebook Posts

May 29, 2025
AI Africa policies database

New Platform Brings All African AI Policies Under One Database

May 28, 2025

Latest

kenya-parliament

Parliament Invites Public Feedback on Virtual Asset Bill 2025

May 30, 2025
ConnectedAfrica2025(Day4)-meta-foondamate

Connected Africa 2025 Day 4: FoondaMate and Meta Team Up to Bring AI to Classrooms

May 29, 2025
google-veo-3

Actors and Film Crews Are Worried About Veo 3 Taking Their Jobs

May 29, 2025
iOS 26

Apple Plans Big Rename for iOS and macOS at WWDC 2025

May 29, 2025
University student fined for defamatory Facebook posts

University Student Fined KES 7.5 Million for Defamatory Facebook Posts

May 29, 2025
AI Africa policies database

New Platform Brings All African AI Policies Under One Database

May 28, 2025

Best devices

budget smartwatches 2025

Best Budget Smartwatches To Buy in Kenya 2025

February 13, 2025

Best Infinix Smartphones To Buy in Kenya 2024

February 13, 2025

Best Laptops for Battery Life in 2024

August 21, 2024

Best “Battery Warrior” Smartphones To Buy in 2024

August 22, 2024

Parliament Invites Public Feedback on Virtual Asset Bill 2025

May 30, 2025

Connected Africa 2025 Day 4: FoondaMate and Meta Team Up to Bring AI to Classrooms

May 29, 2025

Techweez is a fast growing influential source of technology news, reviews and analysis by leading tech geeks in the industry.

Follow Us

Editorials

Actors and Film Crews Are Worried About Veo 3 Taking Their Jobs

Samsung QLED TVs Now Officially Certified for Real Quantum Dot Technology

Trump’s Tariffs Will Be the End of Affordable Tech

5 Ways to Prep Your Tech for Resale

The Weaponization of PDFs: How Cybercriminals Are Exploiting a Trusted Format

Introducing A Brainbox Quiz: Techweez’s Monthly Trivia Night!

More News

Kenya’s Tourism Sector Grows as Travel Gets Easier Across East Africa

Researchers Develop Sodium-Ion Battery That Charges to 80% in 6 Minutes

Regulator Fines Stations Using Religious Shows to Push Gambling

Connected Africa 2025 Day 2: Focus on Digital Inclusion & Cybersecurity

iPad Users May Finally Get a Native WhatsApp App

Connected Africa Summit Calls for Unified Tech Vision

  • Terms Of Use
  • Techweez Brand
  • Privacy & Policy
  • Contact Us

© 2024 Techweez - Palahala Media Group may earn a commission when you buy through links on our sites.
A Palahala Media Group Brand. All rights reserved.
.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In

Add New Playlist

Techweez | Tech News, Reviews, Deals, Tips and How To
Crunchy Cookies 🍪 Ahead!

Hey there! Just a heads-up: we're big fans of cookies - both the digital and edible kind! 🍪 We use our cookies and some from third parties to ensure your browsing experience on our site is smooth sailing and secure.

 

But wait, there's more! We also use cookies to gather stats and insights on how you navigate our site. It's like getting a behind-the-scenes peek at your digital adventures!

 

Don't worry, you're in control. You can adjust your cookie settings anytime to suit your preferences. Feeling curious? Dive into our Privacy Policy for all the juicy details. Happy browsing! 🚀

Functional Always active
Listen, this legal stuff is about as exciting as watching paint dry. But it basically says we only use your stuff for what you asked us to do, and nobody else gets to peek!
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
It's those sneaky cookie crumbs websites leave behind to count visitors, like counting ants at a picnic! Totally harmless, just for fun facts. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
Hey there! Just letting you know we use some fancy gizmos to remember your preferences. This way, we can show you ads that are, well, not completely bananas.
Manage options Manage services Manage {vendor_count} vendors Read more about these purposes
Make cookies
{title} {title} {title}
Techweez | Tech News, Reviews, Deals, Tips and How To
Crunchy Cookies 🍪 Ahead!
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
Listen, this legal stuff is about as exciting as watching paint dry. But it basically says we only use your stuff for what you asked us to do, and nobody else gets to peek!
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
It's those sneaky cookie crumbs websites leave behind to count visitors, like counting ants at a picnic! Totally harmless, just for fun facts. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
Hey there! Just letting you know we use some fancy gizmos to remember your preferences. This way, we can show you ads that are, well, not completely bananas.
Manage options Manage services Manage {vendor_count} vendors Read more about these purposes
Make cookies
{title} {title} {title}
No Result
View All Result
  • News
  • Reviews
  • Features
  • Editorial
  • Automotive
  • Entertainment

© 2024 Techweez - Palahala Media Group may earn a commission when you buy through links on our sites.
A Palahala Media Group Brand. All rights reserved.
.