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Comment by DCKing | Hacker News Reader

I agree with most of what you say, except your first sentence.

The FUD here is that the implication is that now text and images will be DRM'ed. EME only allows DRM'ing video and audio. Facts matter, and making stuff up to 'support' the point does not help. His post literally starts with "the fear is..." and then provides no facts to support it.

It may be so that they signed the death of the open web. But it seems to me that if this is your definition of the death of the open web, the open web has been dead since the broad support and use of the <object> or <embed> tags with RealPlayer, Flash and Silverlight - and very dead since broad adoption of EME before the W3C had any standards on it. Signing that death after all this time does not add anything except for some symbolism.

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You can DRM images with EME fairly easily: you just have a single frame video. And you can always take the Twitter approach with text and just render it into an image, which is then just a single frame video.

That said, the text option is not that realistic as long as there are legal obligations as regards accessibility, which will require the accessibility tree to contain a closed captioned version of the media (and that isn't encrypted).

Sure, everything can be hacked into a video on the web. But luckily that makes your web page unusable, unaccessible, and also un-SEO-able. It would also require you to have expensive DRM authoring tools to have you actually create DRM signatures (it's not just a switch you can flip on). Let me rephrase: EME can only be practically applied to actual audio and video.

The point still stands. EME has been commonplace for three years now. If the fear that it would grip beyond audio and video in the real world is based in reality, we would have seen it by now. The W3C decision changes nothing for the people who would use it.

Yep, but that's absolutely what's going to happen. People love to put square pegs in round holes. I'd be surprised if most things weren't DRMed within 5 years.

I don't buy it. People could DRM up the internet - including text and images - much more easily - for years with Flash and Silverlight. People could use the everything-is-a-DRMed-single-frame-video-now hack since 2014. Neither have been a problem. I've never even seen the latter happening, even as a proof of concept (although I suspect someone will point me to one shortly).

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