
Amid Unprecedented Controversy, W3C Greenlights DRM for the Web - cdvonstinkpot
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/amid-unprecedented-controversy-w3c-greenlights-drm-web
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Paul-ish
> It's great to say that if you know where all the strobe effects are in
> 10,000,000 hours of videos, you could add warnings to the timelines of those
> videos to help people with photosensitive epilepsy. But unless you have an
> unimaginable army of people who can watch all that video, the practical way
> to find all those strobes is to feed the video to a computer, after
> bypassing the DRM. Otherwise, most video will never, ever be made safe for
> people with photosensitive epilepsy.

I wonder if there is a case to be made here under the ADA in the US. By making
it impossible for someone to use their own assistive measures, and by not
providing their own assistive technologies, companies that employ DRM are
essentially closing their services off to a significant portion of the
disabled population.

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theandrewbailey
I remember a similar argument made about locked down e-books that could not be
read by blind people.

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GhotiFish
That sounds silly, but that's when they killed the audio reader functionality
so as to not compete with the audiobook industry right?

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calafrax
In reality it is Google, Apple, and Microsoft who decide what web technologies
will be implemented and users who decide what browsers to use.

Pretending like the W3C could actually change anything by not ratifying this
is ignoring the reality of the marketplace.

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Zekio
How does this affect any modern browser?

don't they all follow [https://whatwg.org/](https://whatwg.org/) over W3C
after W3C wanted to lock in HTML5 rather than a living web standard that
evolves with the web

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metajack
Every major browser ships this already. In Firefox you can choose not to
download it, but in the rest it is always there I believe.

The reason it was implemented is that Microsoft and Google both also make and
sell the DRM systems that EME requires, so they of course shipped it first.
It's hard to compete against a browser that works with Netflix when yours
doesn't, so everyone else shipped it too.

