> As painful as it is, one part of living in a capitalist
> society is to exercise your right/power as a consumer.
> Don't like it? Don't use it.
I agree, but there's more to it than that. From the W3C site:
"The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web."
... and ...
"One of W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability."
Therefore it's perfectly reasonable, in the context of a capitalist society, to lobby the W3C to refuse the addition of EME. It is inimical to their own stated goals (there are other conflicts too; see http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission.html for details).
To be clear, I'm not arguing for the initiation of force. Companies should be free to build their own DRM systems, and others to use or not use them as they choose.
But the W3C should have no part of that, and the HTML5 standard should not be crippled by the inclusion of DRM.
Another angle to consider is our cultural heritage. More and more of that is moving to the Web; if we tie it up with DRM, bitrot will mean that in a generation or two most of it will be inaccessible.
I don't see how DRM is incompatible with their goals. Of course one might argue that DRM might be platform specific. However, I very much doubt this standard will make DRM more platform specific than it already is.
> Of course one might argue that DRM might be platform specific. However, I very much doubt this standard will make DRM more platform specific than it already is.
It is in fact quite possible that it will. DRM, right now, is mainly Flash. For all its faults, Flash runs on all browsers and OSes. However, EME CDM modules may only work in Chrome and Internet Explorer - the two browser vendors pushing the EME spec, and that have their own DRM solutions that they are building as CDMs.
Why would Google or Microsoft create CDMs that work in browsers or OSes that they do not own? If not them, then who would create a CDM that works on all browsers and OSes? Possibly no one.
> However, I very much doubt this standard will make DRM more platform specific than it already is.
Of course not! In fact, due to the nature of the web, it will make DRM in general less platform-specific! The problem is that HTML will become more platform-specific.
> Of course not! In fact, due to the nature of the web, it
> will make DRM in general less platform-specific!
Why do you think the inclusion of an EME standard in HTML5 will induce CDM producers to support operating systems that they wouldn't have supported without EME?
I suspect most DRM today exists for Windows only. Thanks to Android, there are now a ton of consumer devices powered by Linux that can browse the web. If publishers started using EME, they would probably be encouraged to compile Windows and Linux blobs for this reason.
There's already a Linux-based HTML5 EME decryption module that's used for Netflix on Chromebooks. In practice, it's actually less useful to Linux users than the current, nominally Windows-only options. It's locked to Google-approved hardware that is locked down to prevent you running your own software; if you enable developer mode it won't run. Meanwhile the traditional Netflix DRM can apparently run under Wine.
I disagree. The CEO of the W3C thinks this unlikely, and there's already the example of Netflix. They are one of the primary agitators behind EME, and they refuse to make their system available on Linux.
> So you want to demand that Netflix provide at their expense a solution for every possible OS out there?
>
> Don't like it, don't partake. I can't understand this mentality...
What mentality? Perhaps you should read my other posts. To summarise, my position is:
- if Netflix wants to build their own DRM system, fine
- if they don't want to include my chosen operating system, that's their perogative, they just lose out on my money
- what is _not_ okay is for Netflix to lobby the W3C to include DRM in HTML5
The point I'm trying to make is that having a DRM standard in HTML5 does not mean that Netflix will suddenly start to support Linux. Several posters have expressed this idea, and it's just plain incorrect.
>So you want to demand that Netflix provide at their expense a solution for every possible OS out there?
Who says it has to be made by Netflix or at their expense? I'm sure there are open source developers (e.g. Mozilla) who would be happy to create a multiplatform open source Netflix client. Netflix are the ones who make that impossible, and having done that their remaining alternatives are a) provide the client themselves, or b) incur the wrath of angry users. They've decided to go with (b), so here we are.
> society is to exercise your right/power as a consumer.
> Don't like it? Don't use it.
I agree, but there's more to it than that. From the W3C site:
"The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web."
... and ...
"One of W3C's primary goals is to make these benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability."
Therefore it's perfectly reasonable, in the context of a capitalist society, to lobby the W3C to refuse the addition of EME. It is inimical to their own stated goals (there are other conflicts too; see http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission.html for details).
To be clear, I'm not arguing for the initiation of force. Companies should be free to build their own DRM systems, and others to use or not use them as they choose.
But the W3C should have no part of that, and the HTML5 standard should not be crippled by the inclusion of DRM.
Another angle to consider is our cultural heritage. More and more of that is moving to the Web; if we tie it up with DRM, bitrot will mean that in a generation or two most of it will be inaccessible.