Hacker News Reader

Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a little hard to blame Tim here, DRM was happening with or without it being part of HTML. Either it could be in proprietary plugins or it could be part of the spec, but as long as movie studios were requiring DRM, DRM was going to happen. If anyone railroaded it through, it would be Google, who owns Widevine, and via Chrome, basically can determine web standards with or without the W3C's support, from a practical sense.

So the W3C has to accept DRM to prevent it being in a proprietary plugin, and Firefox had to also accept the DRM to avoid being "the browser that can't play Netflix", and everyone effectively has to go along with it to ensure they still have a seat at the table on the issue, but it all, at the end, comes back to the MPAA, which isn't going to let you have a license to stream their content unless it is locked with DRM, regardless of how futile DRM actually is.

View on HN

Blame him or not blame him, it was hypocritical to proclaim in all other forums for open web policies and then not vote against DRM when the chips were down. From my very distant viewpoint, it's almost inexplicable.

I couldn't imagine Stallman, Doctorow, or anyone else with as deep a desire for open systems having that divergent a reaction to the one most galling topic in the whole discussion.

Stallman and Doctorow have the convenience of not running organizations which have to work with various corporate needs. They can afford to be religious and uncompromisingly devout. I don't think Tim has that luxury.

The problem with this line of conversation is one side is trashing compromise, and the other side looks like they're defending the indefensible.

We do need the Stallmans of the world to be a counter balance, but we won't be able to have him run the entire world. Consider him kind of Galadriel, if you give him the one ring then the world will despair as they love him.

I think the following quote from Braveheart is awesome. The whole movie seems designed to turn the audience into William Wallace worshipers, except for this line, which causes an attentive viewer to stop and think:

"Admire this man, this William Wallace. Uncompromising men are easy to admire. He has courage, so does a dog. But it is exactly the ability to compromise that makes a man noble."

>... ability to compromise that makes a man noble."

Sir Berners-Lee is such a nobility, should we as digital peasants knee before him? Feudalism of the Web is upon us.

If Google can "basically determine web standards", then I don't see how it's possible for anyone else to "still have a seat on the table". I mean, if they cared enough about it and were actually on the table in the first place...

>Either it could be in proprietary plugins or it could be part of the spec,

Aren't those EME modules basically proprietary plugins?

>Firefox's implementation of EME uses an open-source sandbox to load the proprietary DRM modules, which are treated as plug-ins that are loaded when EME-encrypted content is requested.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypted_Media_Extensions

The W3C doesn't "have to accept" anything, and the fact that they turned their backs on the web is truly disappointing. There is no standards board for the web, which may actually be a better state than having a corrupt, corporatist W3C.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com