W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web's standards

The EFF has strong words about where this is taking the open web [1]:<p>&quot;A Web where you cannot cut and paste text; where your browser can&#x27;t &quot;Save As...&quot; an image; where the &quot;allowed&quot; uses of saved files are monitored beyond the browser; where JavaScript is sealed away in opaque tombs; and maybe even where we can no longer effectively &quot;View Source&quot; on some sites, is a very different Web from the one we have today. It&#x27;s a Web where user agents—browsers—must navigate a nest of enforced duties every time they visit a page. It&#x27;s a place where the next Tim Berners-Lee or Mozilla, if they were building a new browser from scratch, couldn&#x27;t just look up the details of all the &quot;Web&quot; technologies. They&#x27;d have to negotiate and sign compliance agreements with a raft of DRM providers just to be fully standards-compliant and interoperable.&quot;<p>They suggest the W3C may be digging itself into another hole like the one that led to the formation of WHATWG. A good read.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/lowering-your-standards" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2013&#x2F;10&#x2F;lowering-your-standard...</a>

Funny how some of the largest sites on the internet can base their entire business model on stolen pictorial content - completely with stripping off the identifying information of the original artists - and nobody at the W3C bats an eye.<p>But the moment the MPAA muscles their way into the debate, suddenly we&#x27;re all about DRM.<p>If you want DRM, you use a plug-in or a separate application. There&#x27;s no reason that an app like Netflix or whatever can&#x27;t use pure-HTML for everything <i>but</i> the video-stream and use a plug-in based object for the stream.<p>Keep HTML free.

The W3C hasn&#x27;t been a good &quot;guardian&quot; of HTML for a very long time. This is pretty much why they&#x27;re not even the only guardian around - there&#x27;s also WHATWG.<p>For example, 12 years ago W3C attempting to push &quot;RAND&quot; patent licensing into HTML:<p><a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-patentpolicy-comment/2001Sep/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lists.w3.org&#x2F;Archives&#x2F;Public&#x2F;www-patentpolicy-comment...</a><p>This was 100% against the concept of a free, open web, and it took a huge effort to stop it happening. It&#x27;s crazy that it even got that far.<p>So it&#x27;s no surprise that they&#x27;re pushing industry interests again today. I lost all confidence in that group safeguarding HTML a long time ago, and it looks like the they haven&#x27;t changed.

Here&#x27;s the membership list of the W3C: <a href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Member/List" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;Consortium&#x2F;Member&#x2F;List</a><p>It would be great if anyone opposed to this would contact an organization on this list, ask them why they&#x27;re endorsing and funding DRM and the end of the free Web, and if not, when they will be resigning from the W3C.<p>Every name you can get stricken from the list is up to around $70,000 per year defunded from what is now most effective driver of DRM in the world. [1] Getting some public statements from the membership would be educational, if nothing else.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.w3.org/Consortium/fees?countryCode=US&amp;quarter=10-01&amp;year=2013#results" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.w3.org&#x2F;Consortium&#x2F;fees?countryCode=US&amp;quarter=10-...</a>

Ok, it sounds to me like this is way, way, over blown. First, the DRM is NOT going to be built into the browser it self. It&#x27;s basically a new name for a plug in system, nothing more. So, to everyone who thinks they can roll their own browser and avoid the DRM, no you will not be able to.<p>It&#x27;s not bad or good for consumers, at best, it&#x27;s about the same. It&#x27;s very simple, studios will not allow you to rent their movies without DRM. Netflix will not be able to function without DRM. Neither can steam. It&#x27;s not up to them, it&#x27;s up to the content providers, not companies like Netflix.<p>Is it stupid? Yes. My high school teacher, with no technical knowledge what so ever had a way to brake almost any video DRM. He would play the video on his TV, and record the image with his HD Cam. Stupid? Yes. Effective? Also yes.<p>The point is, as long as its a plugin type of architecture, not part of the browser binary, what&#x27;s the big deal. How is it different from Flash or Silverlight?<p>Oh, and to everyone that proclaims that DRM is bad. Many of you are developers for startups. Is your startup all open source? Why not? Isn&#x27;t compiling code or running it only on your servers just another type of DRM? Ask your self, would you have a job if your company was forced to share all the code you write? All of it, even the stuff that you write from scratch and only run on your servers.<p>I think many people hate DRM because of how bad it&#x27;s implemented, not because of the fact that its there in the first place. Well implemented DRM should be completely transparent to the end user who paid for the content. Steam and Netflix do a pretty good job of it.

I don&#x27;t understand why everyone is up in arms about this. Some content cannot go anywhere without DRM. That&#x27;s not going to change. Do you think the Universal is just 6 months away from streaming the latest blockbuster with VP8 in a video tag?<p>Right now we have Flash and Silverlight everywhere and it&#x27;s a PITA. How open are those two? This adds the option of moving this stuff out of plugins. If you want to live in some everything-is-free utopia, just never visit netflix.com.

How will this work with open-source browsers like Firefox? After all, what&#x27;s to stop somebody from publishing an extension or even a modified version of the browser itself? DRM seems fundamentally unenforceable, after all.<p>Are the people pushing for this hoping it&#x27;s just too much hassle?<p>These questions aren&#x27;t rhetorical: I&#x27;m interested in what exactly the DRM people are pushing and how they expect it to work. Just not interested enough to read about it myself :D. (Also, I think this makes for a great conversation topic.)

Can someone PLEASE explain to me the following: If my computer is playing the video and playing the audio. How on God&#x27;s green earth can they stop me from capturing that? ... It&#x27;s playing right in front of me... I can hear and see it. It&#x27;s not hidden or secret. Look.<p>If you ask me, the only reason DRM has worked up to now, is because code&#x2F;file formats&#x2F;protocols were secret. People didn&#x27;t have access to the source. But now they do, in the open source browsers.<p>But PLEASE enlighten me. I wants to know.

This is poison and against everything the W3C is set to do according to their own mission statement.<p>Everything we&#x27;ve spent the last 20 years building and standardising. Now ruined. Tainted.<p>They have now lost all legitimacy among anyone who calls themselves a proponent of the open web. We need a new leadership as the old one can&#x27;t be trusted. We need an open web action group to start over.<p>Thanks for fragmenting the web, W3C. Thanks for nothing, assholes.

I think that many people are drastically underestimating the effect this may have on the open web. The response &quot;oh, well we&#x27;ll just build a browser that will avoid the DRM&quot; isn&#x27;t going to work quite as well as one might hope. It&#x27;s not such a stretch of the imagination that content providers will detect such browsers and refuse to supply any content at all. This would be similar to what many sites do now for users of IE6-8, where a message is displayed prompting them to upgrade. Except in this case a message would be displayed telling you to download an effectively locked-down browser. Ugh.

This could have really huge and ugly long term consequences for search engines.<p>OTOH, with a little help from the OS to guard the path through to the HDMI spigot (which is probably already in place) I may be able to see all my Amazon Instant Prime content via my browser in HD. :-)<p>There&#x27;s an upside to the downside. Some things will be closed by this and some things will be opened. The impact on the non-pirating media consumer will mostly be positive.<p>The impact on the cable companies and other parasitic channels through which content must now pass will, to our benefit, be negative since content producers will need them for nothing to maximize the returns on their investment. Many hands that dip into the revenue stream between the producer and the consumer to merely protect the stream can be easily eliminated. The same is true of all the various music channels from the labels through iTunes to Spotify.<p>I like this because artists and producers will be able to negotiate with us directly which will lower the cost and the motivation to pirate. I&#x27;m all for artists and producers making money on their work, but not all the various middle men this can remove from the picture.<p>I&#x27;m very concerned, however, about the possibly negative effect on things other than media content like the general flow of news and information. Any item of information can now easily carry a price for internet access independent of the channels through which it moves.<p>Verdict: mixed bag.

I don&#x27;t get it. If they want a plugin, they should build a plugin. Why would any sane person (1) create redundant infrastructure for DRM plugins (2) get all the same security problems and more just because some hipsters at Netflix get a hardon when they can&#x27;t use HTML5 video tags and have to embed a plugin? We certainly shouldn&#x27;t offload Netflixs woes with content producers onto every browser maker in existence.<p>What a bizarre discussion. Should have been laughed out from the first proposal.

What happened to the concept of the User Agent being a representative of the user, not the content provider?

This is a clear sign that the W3C now is hostage of the big corporations.. say goodbye to the dream and vision created by the founders of the Web, and what the WWW was meant to be for us all: a democratic place of freedom, education and shareing to all the world.. a world without frontiers, without borders.. infinite as it could be..<p>All i see now is the corporate internet.. people may not remember this but AOL and the like tried to create privates corporate internet&#x27;s and lose in the long term.. the world was too big to be contained.. to be controlled..<p>This is the beginning of the end of what internet was supposed to be?

I don&#x27;t mean this as a defense of EME, but I think this is more rabble-rousing and fear mongering than anything else. What the EFF and this article are saying is that EME opens the door for this kind of stuff to make its way to the spec. EME on its own does absolutely none of this.<p>EME is <i>not</i> DRM. It&#x27;s a standard spec for plugins that provide DRM. Essentially it means that someone like Netflix could still use the HTML5 video element for playback while interacting with a browser plugin just to handle the DRM aspect of things.

I don&#x27;t see it taking too long for someone to make an open source DRM-free browser that just ignores the HTML 5 DRM functionality.

Actually, they are green-lighting EME, not DRM. EME can be used as part of a DRM system, but it has other possible uses. For instance, one could build a nice system around it to allow a group of friends or family to share private encrypted movies or images.

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-in-the-door_technique" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Foot-in-the-door_technique</a>

I&#x27;m just curious about what all of you opposed to this would offer as an alternative to companies like Netflix or other streaming sites. No DRM? That&#x27;s simply not going to fly.<p>If you really want to undermine DRM in an honest and ethical manner, you should leave those DRM&#x27;d properties to their owners and support non-DRM media.<p>How many of you listen to itunes media and are raging about this...

Just have a label in Firefox that says:<p>CLOSED SOURCE<p>icon<p>on top so that we know we are about to visit a site where we can&#x27;t see the source of the javascript that is being run on our computer.<p>The idea is to develop a culture for people to prefer OPEN SOURCED site vs a CLOSED SOURCED one.

Look! The prison&#x27;s so big you can&#x27;t even see the walls! How nice.

Wow. This isn&#x27;t just adapting DRM, they&#x27;re literally saying that they can change the HTML5 standard at a whim and we&#x27;ll only have access to the CC0 licensed spec.<p>Time to fork HTML5.

Isn&#x27;t this good news for video distributors who haven&#x27;t converted over to HTML5 (native video support) because of lack of support for DRM?

Let them. I&#x27;ll build my own browser and it won&#x27;t respect this shit in the slightest.<p>We&#x27;ll make a new W3C. One that can&#x27;t be bought so easily.

I wish a browser vendor would step up and say no to this. As in &quot;we won&#x27;t support a DRM future in the browser&quot;. Firefox, Chrome?

HTML5 DRM video makes sense, and it might force content producers to modernise their distribution methods. This would be nice for consumers, many of who are forced to pirate simply because content isn&#x27;t available in their country or don&#x27;t have cable subscriptions.<p>It won&#x27;t stop piracy, even if it means holding a camera up to the screen to capture the data.<p>However locking down the browser itself is simply ridiculous. it reminds me of snopes.com disabling right click.

All of this is just the symptom of not providing a goddamn good service. If these media companies would provide a good service DRM wouldn&#x27;t make sense even in their minds. But no, they&#x27;re stuck in the dark ages, with their heads up their asses.<p>I mean, look at what Steam has done to the video game industry; or iOS&#x2F;Android app stores. When it&#x27;s easier to buy the copy pretty much nobody is going to bother stealing it.

Fuck the greed, the amount of work that will be wasted from both sides of people trying to implement DRM and others who are trying to bypass DRM should be spent on something more useful like agreeing for once at already implemented standards and making them work cross browser, or implementing new better solutions, but no, it&#x27;s important to protect Miley Cyrus&#x27; songs or the universe will collapse.

Maybe I missed the point here, but firstly, browsers are free to choose to implement some parts of the W3C recommandations right ? and secondly, if the browser you use is implementing the DRM constraint, it&#x27;s just a browser level restriction right? That mean you can either use a plugin that will fetch the blocked content or use an other browser to do it ?<p>This is doomed before being born (or I missed something).

New coined term: DRM-HTML.<p>&#x27;By contrast, W3C has now put its weight behind a restrictive future: let&#x27;s call it &quot;DRM-HTML&quot;.&#x27;

Let them spend their money and time there.<p>That&#x27;s money and time they will not spend doing something useful for their interests.

I refuse to engage in blind trust, either that content will remain available (including that of historical or functional significance) or that -- encased in an opaque block -- it will be safely and fairly delivered.<p>DRM is a non-starter, for me. Keep your shit out of my peanut butter.

While DRM is generally annoying, if the technology exists, it might be interesting to use it for ERM -- being able to prevent copying of documents which are editable in-browser would be potentially a better way to work than the VDI or dedicated hardware used now.

So implemented DRM will still need to be supported on different platforms and browsers, and after the H264 crap what are the chances of that happening?<p>They would be better off having some sort of plugin archetecture that allows this kind of development for specific platforms...

W3C - Ruining HTML since... often...

How does allowing a proprietary tech into the browser do anything more than harm the system?. Didn&#x27;t this just open up the browser to possible secure channels for botnets? Do DRM concerns trump security?.

If you have to distribute the key to the client (dvd player, browser, etc) isnt it just a matter of time before the key is discovered and the content can decrypted at will?<p>How does this standard prevent that?

isnt this the equivalent of greying out the &quot;view source&quot; menu item or removing the developer menu item?<p>You can still get the entire page, it comes in over the wire. If they do this, I would assume we can just capture the raw data, and new apps that decode that raw data and give the same tools as the browser developer tools offer.<p>If not, hopefully there are browsers who refuse to implement, and hopefully it takes less time than it took Adobe to learn their lesson.

Oh, hi Minitel (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Minitel</a>), long time no see.

W3C is on HAL&#x27;s side... <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYqkU1y0AYc" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=yYqkU1y0AYc</a>

If this means companies like Netflix use HTML5 rather than Silverlight to stream films it will ultimately make the world a better place.

Does anyone know if this EME Plugins would be able to access browser data or what kind of data would be available to this plugins ?

They got perfectly subverted. I hope they revoke it, can somebody open a petition? I&#x27;ll sign it!!!

&gt; W3C green-lights adding DRM to the Web&#x27;s standards<p>I think I threw up a little in my mouth when I read that.

The WC3 has sucked for ages. I can&#x27;t wrap my mind around why anyone follows there lead anymore. Everything that comes out there is overly complicated and totally misses the larger picture. Sound like they&#x27;ve also sold out on top of that now. I say frail them.

One should think twice before supporting Netflix in any way after this.

As someone that learned a lot using view source. this is just upsetting

&quot;So long, and thanks for all the GIFs.&quot;

Good. Roll on W4C!

Aaaaaaand the W3C is now officially irrelevant.

Web is all about hollywood now, it seems!

the hell? What were they thinking when they decided this would be a good idea ??

OMFG!