Amid Unprecedented Controversy, W3C Greenlights DRM for the Web | Hacker News Reader

Amid Unprecedented Controversy, W3C Greenlights DRM for the Web

eff.org

> 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.

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

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

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.

How does this affect any modern browser?

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

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.

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