Web DRM moves to next phase, Defective by Design to continue opposition

There must be people who find this style of writing persuasive, but for me it has the opposite effect.<p>The tone is so aggressive and slanderous that even though I should nominally be on the side of the author, I find myself thinking &quot;surely there is another side to this story&quot; and come away with the feeling that I should step back and consider that maybe the other side is in fact in the right.<p>It&#x27;s like reading angry anti-nuclear activists and (either side of) the climate change debate. Whoever wrote that angry irrational rant is surely not somebody I want to be on the same side of any issue with. Maybe I&#x27;ll check out the other opinion to see if they have anybody sensible to articulate it.

I thought the general consensus amongst people, including the general HN crowd was that it was better to allow the w3c to specify a &quot;black box&quot; with well defined inputs and outputs. Allowing vendors to slot in their own (probably closed source) implementation than it was to slam the door in their faces whilst screaming &quot;SCREW YOU, USE SILVERLIGHT OR FLASH&quot;.<p>Defective by design seems to be misinterpreting the &quot;build the web for the users first&quot; quote here, because the alternative to this proposal is not &quot;no DRM&quot;, the alternative is a worse UX from a plethora of more hostile, wider reaching proprietary DRM implementations.<p>There&#x27;s a time and a place to fight about DRM vs. no-DRM , but it&#x27;s not here, this is the fight about <i>how</i> the DRM we will inevitably get works and interoperates.

Actually. I realized that any party that would want to put their content behind this kind of obstruction does not really have anything interesting to show anyway. So better of without that particular content anyway! Same with sites that block you when using Privacy Badger. Good riddance.<p>The danger will be in it becoming normal for everyone to use EME, or that the most used audio&#x2F;video devices and tools will by default enable this and make it hard&#x2F;impossible to disable it. So if you shoot a video of police violence with your phone and decide to publish it that it can be blocked by e.g. government. Of course, pushing for integrating this with your video camera will be done to protect the children.

W3C did this move because its biggest sponsors are the DRM makers (Google, Microsoft).<p>To make it acceptable they made it optional. But in practice all major browsers implemented it.<p>The right answer is now to standardized the W3C CDM black box by standardizing DRMs as ETSI has started (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.w3.org&#x2F;Archives&#x2F;Public&#x2F;public-html-media&#x2F;2014Feb&#x2F;0025.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.w3.org&#x2F;Archives&#x2F;Public&#x2F;public-html-media&#x2F;2014F...</a>). W3C should contribute to this effort.<p>Useful link on EME: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;EME-factsheet.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;2016&#x2F;03&#x2F;EME-factsheet.html</a>

The tracking of users enabled by EME is surely enough reason to reject the standard:-<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;w3c.github.io&#x2F;encrypted-media&#x2F;#user-tracking" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;w3c.github.io&#x2F;encrypted-media&#x2F;#user-tracking</a>

I&#x27;d like it if this happened. if the web has some standard way to ensure DRM that means it will be possible to sell media (and hopefully possibly software) on the web without requiring people to be online at all times. It would be even better if the entire thing was managed by the w3c, not just the endpoints. that way everyone could make use of it. I do not think everything should be free although it&#x27;s good if there is an option to give things away. but in general, developers and content creators have to eat.

Web developers can always ignore this. I personally wont implement it at all cost. It&#x27;s a reason for me to quit my job and show the finger to the DRM supporters.

Imagine if the Rosetta Stone was DRM crippled, or if Michelangelo had used DRM to &#x27;protect&#x27; his work that was tied to a long since lost keyserver.

You must remember that also before EME, Netflix &amp; co. were using DRM.<p>EME makes it possible to view the DRM&#x27;d content (that is there with or without EME) without installing horrible and unaccessible generic binary add ons (Silverlight, Flash) and thus gives more freedom to users. Now a Netflix heavy user can choose to consume the content on Linux, too.

I am not sure how this is going to effect me. While I use FSF Icecat (their Firefox version) and should be OK with that, I do use Chrome for Netflix, Google, FB, and Twitter.<p>Will DRM black box plugin threaten the security of my laptop? Will many mainstream sites stop working with IceCat?

Will Youtube use it for cat videos? Coursera for lectures? Bandcamp for indie projects? Probably not. Consumers of Hollywood junk on various netflixes deserve malware. They eat shit already, now they&#x27;ll eat it with tasty DRM sauce.

We already have YouTube, Netflix and many other similar services, commercial or ad based. They work pretty well and serve the needs of many people.<p>Would anybody mind remembering me what we&#x27;re going to gain on top of them thanks to DRM in the browser?

Why can&#x27;t Tim Berners-Lee be fired?<p>We build the web, not corporations. We control the web, not corporations. Let&#x27;s just take the power away from them and put their egos in check.