

The W3C's Soul at Stake - jrepin
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/w3c-soul-at-stake

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Scaevolus
Making this as a battle is silly. For contractual reasons, companies need to
distribute content with DRM. They _want_ to use a more open method than Flash
or Silverlight.

The choice is between proprietary plugins with drm bundled, or a standard way
of encrypting video streams.

Not letting it into HTML5 won't make content owners give up on DRM-- those
deciding whether their content must be protected are almost certainly ignorant
of the technical implementations.

Is it a battle if the other side doesn't even notice your action?

~~~
pasbesoin
My concern is not (just) with respect to video streams. Introducing DRM in
turn introduces an avenue for locking up content wholesale.

And, akin to mandated security backdoors, once a feature is introduced, it
tends to be used not just as planned or anticipated but in every fashion
someone can conceive.

For many concerned about the Web and the Internet, the malicious abuser in
this case becomes private entities using such DRM channels to balkanize and
privatize the Internet on a wholesale level.

[Aside: In writing the previous sentence, I experienced an interesting typo:
"wholescale". I didn't immediately notice it, in part because it at a term
makes a certain amount of sense, itself.]

Let's return to the video stream paradigm. Anecdotally, my streaming Netflix
experience has, rather than becoming better with time and presumed
advancement, instead become increasingly crap as content providers have
declined to renew contracts in favor of their own separate distribution
channels. As the consumer, I'm looking at 3,4, 5, and more separate accounts
(each at at least circa $10/month, and sometimes significantly more) now in
order to stream the same content.

I fear that with "ubiquitous DRM", combined with other changes happening in
surveillance, legal prosecution, et al., we may be looking at the
privatization of the public communication that has, to this point, made the
Web and the Internet what they are.

TL;DR: I fear that integrated DRM gives entrenched parties too large of a
stick to use in insisting: My way, or not at all.

