Web DRM moves to next phase, Defective by Design to continue opposition

2) The portmanteaus are in-jokes for the people who already agree with the author. This makes me think that the author is so focused on their own social bubble that they haven't seriously wrestled with a well-written argument by the other side. If that is the case, then I can't trust the author to not have massively overlooked some important counter argument, so I have to go look for it myself.

3) The same as above, but also: life involves judgement calls and intuitive evaluations of situations. Sometimes, you see interpret another person's words in a way that is wildly detached from what they said. This makes you trust others interpretations less unless you can either see the primary sources yourself, or see them wrestling seriously with the other side's argument.

It would be nice if we judged all arguments just on their facts, but time is limited and so we have to make judgements like these.

I personally don't agree with this, and get the feeling that there's a very heavy corporate hand in place threatening to move consumers (e.g. Netflix saying people just want to watch video damnit) away from the open web by using alternative technologies. We're better off with EME than Flash and Silverlight, essentially.

I'm obviously grossly over simplifying things, but what I'm trying to say is that I think you're right, it's not as black/white as the parent article tries to make it. I'm not trying to pretend I'm some sort of expert on this topic – far from it – and certainly recommend anyone interested in this to spend some time and actually read the reasoning of both sides.

But your perspective is important.

I encourage you to write to campaigns@fsf.org; I know personally that Zak and others will value your input.

Firstly, I think you make a very good point. I experience a similar feeling when I read things that appear one-sided, and I try in my writing to communicate the fact that both sides of the issue have been considered, even if I think one is completely absurd. I'll take your criticism into account with future writing about EME.

FWIW, here's the other side of the argument as I understand it:

"DRM is already happening on the Web, so we might as well do it at the W3C, with the vague hope that we will win some kind of concession from the DRM companies. Also, maybe if we don't, they will take their content off the Web and into some other system (subtext -- we care more about Netflix being on the Web as defined by W3C than we do about the Web as defined by W3C being free and open.

> because the alternative to this proposal is not "no DRM", the alternative is a worse UX from a plethora of more hostile, wider reaching proprietary DRM implementations.

Good. Everything which makes DRM easier to implement, more reliable/stable/cross-platform/interoperable/etc., more streamlined and simpler to use, just skews the cost/benefit in the wrong direction. Everyone should be Free to make whatever DRM system they like, but such anti-social behaviour shouldn't be encouraged, and I certainly don't want to see organisations (FSF, Mozilla, W3C, etc.) making that activity any easier.

Plus, the harder it is to obtain and set up a working DRM system, the easier it will be for me to avoid it. For example, online tracking is very easy to accomplish, and is supported by many Free Software browsers, which means I have to spend time maintaining black/whitelists, selectively enabling JS in NoScript, deobfuscating and reading through JS source, etc. to avoid it. In comparison, Silverlight and Flash can be avoided very easily by not installing them.

Consider an analogy to proprietary software. It still exists, everyone is Free to make it, and many say it has a better UX. That doesn't stop me from running pure Free Software systems. If, say, the FSF had caved in years ago, and accepted some proprietary software, then my choice to avoid proprietary software would have been much harder since I'd have to disentangle such blobs myself.

The point of the GPL is to make Free Software easier to write, without benefitting proprietary software.

> There's a time and a place to fight about DRM vs. no-DRM , but it's not here, this is the fight about how the DRM we will inevitably get works and interoperates.

If you've given up that's fine, but please don't get in the way of those of us still fighting.

The EME stuff is a proprietary plugin by any other name. If evil Corp wants a root kit for you to watch movies evil Corp gets one. There is zero difference between EME and other plugin systems from the pov of the vulnerablility it exposed your system to to the depth it can infect your OS to enforce itself.

But we're going to have a plethora of proprietary DRM implementations, each self-important vendor writing their own plugin targeting the EME API. And end-users will still have to track-down the correct combination of architecture and OS for each plugin, except multipled now for every streaming-media vendor that they use.

For example, look here at the most-deployed DRM plugin currently available:

https://www.widevine.com/supported_platforms.html

Nothing available for *BSD, Sailfish, FirefoxOS... whereas current users of those platforms at least have Flash.

The W3C's argument is that without EME, DRM-protected media will move off the open web into its own app-silos. But that's exactly what will happen with EME, too, except the apps will be hosted within browsers.

Wouldn't this be a good opportunity to draw the line with browsers-for-the-open-web and apps-for-secret-stuff?

Welcome to the new world where depending on the number of users your system has, some websites will work and others won't. If its worth for the company to develop to your platform, you might be worthy the time. If not, well, thought luck, go out and buy a platform which is supported.

Games has had this wonderful (sarcasm) idea of platform exclusives. Publishers could not do that with flash, but with unique DRM platforms for each site, its both convenient and easy. Wonder how well Mozilla and Google can compete in that space with Microsoft, an entity well experience in platform exclusive dealings.

The internet does not belong to those people, it belongs to us. It should remain free and open and sane. A monopoly by giant corporate media conglomerates is not inevitable.

But they didn't! EME is a spec for only for inputs, and no outputs.

EME entirely depends on CDMs, and their interface is deliberately left completely undefined (W3C uses that as an excuse to say they didn't—strictly speaking—define a DRM).

Plug-ins at least had an open NPAPI interface that anybody could integrate with. CDMs don't have any public interface. The spec allows them to be anything, including kernel modules or hardware (and in practice they're… plug-ins).

So now it's illegal under DMCA to write your own browser that plays EME-protected video with CDM compatible with Chrome's, Safari's or IE's.

It's a loss of freedom, and no DRM has been removed or even relaxed in the process.

EME doesn't define the critical CDM component required for it to actually work. It's like a spec for `<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash">` tag saying it defines Flash.

So in practice you still have to license CDM integration from Google (for Chrome's CDM only) and Microsoft (for IE's CDM only) and Apple (for Safari's CDM only) and Adobe (for Firefox's CDM only).

The population at large mostly has a say by deciding which browser they use, and as long as people use DRM-friendly browsers, DRM is what they'll get.