<story><title>EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5</title><url>https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-makes-formal-objection-drm-html5</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alipang</author><text>DRM allows you to volontarily give up whatever control of your machine you&apos;re talking about.&lt;p&gt;As painful as it is, one part of living in a capitalist society is to exercise your right/power as a consumer. Don&apos;t like it? Don&apos;t use it.&lt;p&gt;To me, DRM is not something that infringes on your freedom, though I&apos;m very glad we have the EFF when they spend their time combatting things like surveillance, that are not opt-in.</text></item><item><author>duncan_bayne</author><text>I&apos;ve made this point already on the W3C CEO&apos;s blog, but it bears repeating here:&lt;p&gt;DRM removes control of certain aspects of a device that I own, and places it in the hands of another. It does so in a manner that could not be less trustworthy: most DRM solutions are proprietary, closed-source applications.&lt;p&gt;This means that I can&apos;t rely on others to audit it for me (as with FOSS) and I can&apos;t audit it myself.&lt;p&gt;Some DRM implementations in the past have been so aggressive in their usurpation of control that they have qualified as malware; the Sony rootkit is a particularly egregious example of this.&lt;p&gt;DRM actively reduces the trustworthiness and security of all machines on which it is installed. It has to by design: its stated purpose is to restrict the capabilities of a general purpose computer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>duncan_bayne</author><text>&amp;#62; As painful as it is, one part of living in a capitalist&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62; society is to exercise your right/power as a consumer.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62; Don&apos;t like it? Don&apos;t use it.&lt;p&gt;I agree, but there&apos;s more to it than that.  From the W3C site:&lt;p&gt;&quot;The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web.&quot;&lt;p&gt;... and ...&lt;p&gt;&quot;One of W3C&apos;s primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Therefore it&apos;s perfectly reasonable, in the context of a capitalist society, to lobby the W3C to refuse the addition of EME.  It is inimical to their own stated goals (there are other conflicts too; see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission.html&lt;/a&gt; for details).&lt;p&gt;To be clear, I&apos;m not arguing for the initiation of force.  Companies should be free to build their own DRM systems, and others to use or not use them as they choose.&lt;p&gt;But the W3C should have no part of that, and the HTML5 standard should not be crippled by the inclusion of DRM.&lt;p&gt;Another angle to consider is our cultural heritage.  More and more of that is moving to the Web; if we tie it up with DRM, bitrot will mean that in a generation or two most of it will be inaccessible.</text></comment>
<story><title>EFF Makes Formal Objection to DRM in HTML5</title><url>https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-makes-formal-objection-drm-html5</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alipang</author><text>DRM allows you to volontarily give up whatever control of your machine you&apos;re talking about.&lt;p&gt;As painful as it is, one part of living in a capitalist society is to exercise your right/power as a consumer. Don&apos;t like it? Don&apos;t use it.&lt;p&gt;To me, DRM is not something that infringes on your freedom, though I&apos;m very glad we have the EFF when they spend their time combatting things like surveillance, that are not opt-in.</text></item><item><author>duncan_bayne</author><text>I&apos;ve made this point already on the W3C CEO&apos;s blog, but it bears repeating here:&lt;p&gt;DRM removes control of certain aspects of a device that I own, and places it in the hands of another. It does so in a manner that could not be less trustworthy: most DRM solutions are proprietary, closed-source applications.&lt;p&gt;This means that I can&apos;t rely on others to audit it for me (as with FOSS) and I can&apos;t audit it myself.&lt;p&gt;Some DRM implementations in the past have been so aggressive in their usurpation of control that they have qualified as malware; the Sony rootkit is a particularly egregious example of this.&lt;p&gt;DRM actively reduces the trustworthiness and security of all machines on which it is installed. It has to by design: its stated purpose is to restrict the capabilities of a general purpose computer.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>duncan_bayne</author><text>&amp;#62; I don&apos;t see how DRM is incompatible with their goals.&lt;p&gt;From my post on their blog (I&apos;d link there, but their anchors are broken):&lt;p&gt;DRM is software that is designed to restrict a user from playing content on certain devices, in certain ways, and in certain locations. I think that is the very definition of a walled garden. I genuinely do not understand how you believe that supporting DRM will elminate walled gardens.&lt;p&gt;In the best case we will have moved from an ad-hoc collection of walled gardens, to an ad-hoc collection of walled gardens with the support and moral endorsement of the W3C.&lt;p&gt;If your concern is genuinely to eliminate the need for apps, and the enclosue of content in walled gardens, why not use your considerable influence in opposition of DRM altogether?&lt;p&gt;&quot;Frankly, I don&apos;t understand the question about insisting that compliant implementation respect geographic location. As a general rule, we don&apos;t provide conformance testing and have no way of insisting what people implement.&quot;&lt;p&gt;That was my point :). The W3Cs mission states that:&lt;p&gt;&quot;One of W3C&apos;s primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability.&quot;&lt;p&gt;Breaking down that list, we see that DRM is inimical to several goals:&lt;p&gt;* hardware: DRM implementations are known for being hardware-locked; Netflix is the most prominent recent example, re. the ARM-based Chromebook&lt;p&gt;* software: existing DRM implementations are tied to specific browsers and operating systems&lt;p&gt;* geographical location: many (most?) DRM implementations implement geographical segregation (a.k.a. region encoding)&lt;p&gt;That is, by lending support to DRM, the W3C is helping to ensure that at least some web content is restricted by hardware, software, and geopgraphical location. This is in direct opposition to several of your stated goals.</text></comment>