You dont' have to support something just because it's happening. You fight it, you don't give into it.
I never said otherwise, and in fact I totally agree. A big part of my annoyance at the outrage over EME is the automatic assumption that you must be pro-DRM if you're not joining the furor.
> It's against everything the W3C stands for.
No, that's you (and everyone on this thread) projecting. The W3C is, and has always been, an engineering interoperability organization developing a data interchange format. It's right in their mission statement: "The W3C mission is to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the Web". Notice what isn't in that sentence. Everything about "freedom", "openness", etc. is other people projecting onto them.
Before EME, web DRM is documented in the various plugin architectures. After EME, web DRM is documented in the HTML5 spec. From an engineering perspective, the difference is practically nil. The emotional overreaction here is just because of a perceived betrayal that isn't even real.
"The social value of the Web is that it enables human communication, commerce, and opportunities to share knowledge. 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."
I don't know mate, that seems pretty clear to me.
> ensure the long-term growth of the Web
Without DRM the web will die? It seems to have been fine so far, would you not agree?
As in it can't be secure? Well it's tied in with trusted computing, see this Widevine document:
https://storage.googleapis.com/wvdocs/Widevine_DRM_Architect...
If all of the decryption takes place in a "trusted zone" on "your" device, then it's pretty secure.
I mean: yes, average users can't crack their Netflix app. Everyone can still grab Stranger Things via torrent as soon as it drops. So does that count as "working?"
It depends on what you mean by "work". See https://plus.google.com/+IanHickson/posts/iPmatxBYuj2 (linked elsewhere in this thread).
Clearly they stand for DRM now.
- Makes archiving unnecessarily difficult/impossible.
- Micromanages legitimate use, including limiting legal usages.
- Reduces or eliminates goodwill towards platforms, content distributors and content producers, e.g., it ain't cool.
- Reduces sales through introducing artificial barriers to social network effects, i.e., torrenting often increases sales and popularity through lower-barrier social network effects.
DRM-free fails if people don't pay for it, but this is rarely the case as the majority of people seek to be honest and support their favorite content producers to keep creating more.
However, if like the RIAA and MPAA going after every single dime like corporate justice warriors, people can and will crack the DRM and share content or simply look elsewhere.