The web doesn't need DRM any more than broadcast TV needed the broadcast flag. Content producers said that the broadcast flag was necessary, and that without it they wouldn't allow their content to be broadcast.
In that case, there was a bunch of push-back against the broadcast flag, the proposal died, and now all kinds of stuff gets broadcast in the clear. When push came to shove, the content producers didn't actually need the broadcast flag, and their business models still work without it just as well as they did before.
The same needs to happen with the EME proposal; people who care about this kind of thing need to push back and kill it just like with the broadcast flag.
And then the content producers will just demand Flash or Silverlight to stream their content, which is the status-quo. It's not really a similar situation.
Both flash and silverlight are deprecated by their makers. The question is whether they'll go away, it's what will replace them and what specifically it will do.
Flash and silverlight lost to an open, interoperably-implementable standard (html). This EME proposal just standardizes an interface to something that's not standard or open (the CDMs).
Some people like to say that content producers will never let up on their demands for DRM. But that's happened already in music and with the broadcast flag, and it's starting to happen in book publishing as well. We should keep fighting for it to happen in web video.
Everything is available pirated already, but people still pay for netflix & friends because they're convenient and most people are honest. If DRM doesn't make it into HTML, there will still be a viable business model streaming video to paying customers without DRM.
In that case, there was a bunch of push-back against the broadcast flag, the proposal died, and now all kinds of stuff gets broadcast in the clear. When push came to shove, the content producers didn't actually need the broadcast flag, and their business models still work without it just as well as they did before.
The same needs to happen with the EME proposal; people who care about this kind of thing need to push back and kill it just like with the broadcast flag.