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The W3C is the guardian of the world wide web, a system for disseminating information publicly and globally to all those who may benefit from it. By standardizing DRM for video, they are giving legitimacy to a technical kludge that is designed specifically to prevent the dissemination of information. There are legitimate reasons why someone may wish to save a video to their hard drive, just like they can save an image today. There is no reason the web should be built upon mechanisms designed specifically to privilege corporate interests over the interests of those falling under fair use exemptions to copyright laws.

If I had my way we wouldn't have copyright at all. It seems idiotic to me for the same reasons patents are.

But we do, and so just as you say there are "legitimate reasons" why someone may wish to save a video, there are too "legitimate reasons" someone may want to share their work in a protected manner. It's a product. If you don't like it don't buy it.

There is no part of this that forces the user to view only DRM protected websites. As far as I can tell this only increases the rights of copyright holders, which, again, I think is stupid, but seems completely legal and a reasonable thing to do under our existing legal framework. Edit: it also does not seem like it will fundamentally change the user experience of the web since the things that it allows are mostly already doable, just not with an HTML standard.

If some copyright holder wants his stuff DRMed then they are free to implement their own DRM plugin or App. But I don't see why we should support them. Especially when it makes our nice open web depend on proprietary closed source binary blobs.

The idea was that HTML5 gets rid of Flash and similar plugins and not that HTML5 turns into a vehicle for "yet another Flash".

Next thing we are adding a spy module feature because advertisers and the NSA demand it? Well at least the spy module could be free software unlike the proprietary closed source binary blobs needed for Digital Restrictions Management.

    If I had my way we wouldn't have copyright
    at all. It seems idiotic to me for the same
    reasons patents are.

Excellent news! So it's ok if I copy the images, CSS and HTML on your landing page for your employer for my competitor, then?

Edit: I'm obviously not serious.

I wouldn't recommend it: the name and logo are trademarked, and even if you replaced those, if anyone noticed the rest of the copying, you'd be the laughingstock of the internet. Who'd want to buy your product then?

Zynga doesn't particularly seem to care about that kind of thing and they're doing pretty ok...

They are?

The exec$ are doing ju$t fine I'm $ure

Worst. Example. Evar.

Zynga only had one profitable year in 2010. They have lost $600 million since then.

I think you're proposing dire consequences where there aren't likely to be any.

Google copying Yahoo's front page code? Okay, that'll be in the news and everyone will have a good laugh.

Some Joe Schmoe Web Developer lifting CSS/HTML from an unknown client to sell to an unknown client? Eh, not so much. This probably happens often and goes undetected.

It's not my company, and the things I'm saying don't represent the opinions of my employer.

To your question, is it "ok," I couldn't provide the answer as I don't own the copyright.

My statement was that I wish we lived in a world without copyright. The rules would be very different, and thus we would act and compete differently. As is, brand is an important asset for a company. I think you know all this.

I also think your argument is a bit sophomoric and I find it obnoxious that you are calling out my employer's name.

What do brands have to do with copyright law?

Or are you also advocating for changes to trademark law?

You're right, I'm conflating the two. I mean to be saying intellectual property law in general, which I am not a huge fan of.

If you're against "intellectual property" then you shouldn't use that propaganda term. Refer to the specific legal protections at issue, like copyright, patents, or trademarks, because they are all have very different functions and purposes.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

That's an interesting piece, thanks for sharing. I think from the perspective of "what existing pieces of culture can I use to create something new" IP is actually a useful bucket. From the perspective of people who have already created or are consuming that piece of culture, I agree that combining trademark with copyright and patents is not useful.

Copyrights, patents and trademarks all share a single unifying assumption: ideas are things that can be owned. Since I disagree with that assumption, it makes sense to speak about "disagreeing with intellectual property" if IP is just a synonym for "a legal framework that uses violence to support laws that allow ideas to be owned."

It seems counter intuitive and even foolish to suggest that you could increase innovation and creativity by getting rid of copyrights and patents. But there is a great great example of an industry that actually thrives in both sales and innovation, despite not having any copyrights or patents - the fashion industry.

This TED talk explains it quite well : http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashio...

The elephant in the corner of your argument is trademarks, which are vigorously protected by fashion labels.

I wonder how explosive the web's growth would have been if Hyper Text Markup Language was complex, pre-compiled, and invisible to end users.

DRM doesn't "increase the rights" of copyright holders, it just intentionally goes out of its way to stifle everyone else. The fact that it's called "Digital Rights Management" is a bit of doublespeak, which is why the FSF encourages using the more accurate description of "Digital Restrictions Management."

Although it seems the word "copyright" is also a bit of doublespeak these days. In general it doesn't go out of its way to give authors the right to control how publishers distribute copies any more, it's been co-opted as a system for publishers to deny every individual the the ability to make their own copies for any reason. If you ask me they should call it a copy-block instead of a copy-right.

What I don't understand is that if these companies want so desperately to enforce DRM, why are they using the web? A native application is better suited to what they want to do, and they are going to end up writing DRM modules in native code anyway. So why are they targeting the web at all, and why do they insist on getting something that is fundamentally closed (DRM) put into something that was meant to be open (HTML)?

IMO, this is a very dumb approach. This would not be OK anywhere else. Feel free to enforce your copyright, but don't expect me to bear your burden without kicking and screaming.

Content providers want to be on the web, because that's where the audience is. If they're made to feel unwelcome on the web, they certainly will take their content away. This makes the web less useful and harms users.

The web has had copies of that content well before the "content providers" even had a website, and it'll have copies of the content well after they decide to leave.

All they can take away is the sources that actually bring them money.

The "web" has existed in a mature form for over 2 decades.

The web's success has been extraordinary in the same terms of any monumental human achievement -- the discovery of anti-biotics, the moon landing, the Magna Carta.

Why would we cripple that set of features just to make a tiny group of people happy (relative to the world's population, the copyright "special interest" cartel is indeed microscopic.)

And I thought web sites screwing up keyboard shortcuts was annoying..

> The W3C is the guardian of the world wide web

At least they were.

"The W3C is the guardian of the world wide web"...

I completely disagree. You are the guardian. Every one of us is the guardian.

"Guarding the web" isn't in the W3C's mission at all: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission.html They design standards used internationally. That's it.

It matters because of two things:

1 - We'll lose the W3C. We'll have to either create another standards body, or go back to the 90's situation when nobody agreed on anything.

2 - There are a few places where actualy reading the data somebody sent to you is a crime. Despite the drawbacks on those kinds of law, some of those places are still very importantly economically, and we can't just ignore them, at least for now. If you create a code for "don't read this data" to be sent over the web, disobeying it will become a crime there.

1. I don't agree that this is true at all. The W3C is not created to destroy copyright, which seems to be the implication of your statement (ie: we will need a new standards body that does not provide a copyright-compliant standard). I don't agree with copyright law, but it is law. We currently have a web that provides the ability to companies to protect their data via implementation, this simply provides a spec to do it in a different way. It does not fundamentally change the user experience of the web.

2. Yes, like in the United States. Just like receiving stolen goods is a crime. No offense, but when you say things like "If you create a code for "don't read this data" to be sent over the web, disobeying it will become a crime there." I don't think you fully understand how DRM currently works and how it would work using this standard. It is simply a standard people can implement.

Edit: as some of you have pointed out, the phrase "copyright-compliant" is somewhat meaningless. I should've chosen my words more carefully. I meant "copyright-enforcement-enabling."

> The W3C is not created to destroy copyright, which seems to be the implication of your statement (ie: we will need a new standards body that does not provide a copyright-compliant standard).

No, what he means is that, if we stop listening to the W3C because of this, the W3C will no longer matter. So either we won't have a standards body, or we will need a new one.

And why would we stop listening to the W3C because of this?

Exactly. There are countless standards issued by the W3C that are completely ignored by Browser Vendors at large. Yet it's still the most relevant consortium on the matter.

Conversely, there are countless features introduced by Browser Vendors that do not exist in the W3C's specs. (And some of those are even eventually picked up by the W3c.)

I honestly don't think people understand how the Standards Body's work, and how their specs propagate into actual products that people use on a daily basis.

Many companies have cherry-picked what to implement and what not to. This is not new. If anything, it's the norm. Vendors will continue to do this as long as the W3C will exist, and can continue to do so in this case, without destroying the W3C or making it an invalid body.

This particular argument is totally bunk.

It was your own suggestion that spawned this thread.

You wrote:

"I may be totally naive here, but I'm not really sure why this matters. That there is a WC3 standard does not imply that browsers have to adhere to it." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6491428

marcosdumay is responding to that by saying "It matters because ..."

Sorry, fair point. My point that you quoted was that anyone could roll a browser that did not include the DRM standard (or any standard for that matter). And many do already. I don't think this implies that the W3C is dead.

anyone could roll a browser that did not include the DRM standard

And how many people will use it, apart from outliers like people who post here? The vast majority of people use one of the Big Three: Firefox, Internet Exploder [no, that's not a typo ;)], and Chrome.

Furthermore, if the Big Three implement a DRM standard, then web pages that want to "protect their content" will simply use the DRM standard, and it won't matter that Joe's Really Cool Browser doesn't implement it; that browser simply won't be able to view the pages. A few outliers like us will rant and rave; anyone else who tries it will say "Joe's Really Cool Browser Sucks" and go back to using one of the Big Three.

Copyright-compliant standard? How is the existing standard not compliant with copyrights?

This is not about making a copyright-friendly web. This is about attacking the openness of the web.

DRM can not work. Assuming that you don't come up with a plan, which prevents reading data, while allowing the reading of data. So if the W3C starts to write standards which defy the basis of logic, were are forced to abandon their standards, thus destroying the W3C.

There is no sense in which DRM is "copyright-compliant" and a lack of DRM is not "copyright-compliant", and there is no sense in which copyright requires anyone to help industry create or deploy DRM.

Yeah that's true. I chose my words poorly.

> Despite the drawbacks on those kinds of law, some of those places are still very importantly economically, and we can't just ignore them

Browsers have plug-in architectures. DRM systems are inherently proprietary. Leave them to implement proprietary plug-ins.

Oh sure, that's the logical solution.

In reality though these control freak moves only "work" (for them) if everybody is forced to adopt. Another site another plugin type situation will shift a lot of people to non-drm content providers, whether on principle or maybe just plain old apathy. I'm sure browser makers could streamline this process so that it's a minimal hurdle to install a plugin but if it's optional then we have the option to avoid it and that is exactly what those goddamn morons would like to stop.

> 1 - We'll lose the W3C. We'll have to either create another standards body, or go back to the 90's situation when nobody agreed on anything.

We already lost the W3C once for about 10 years. Remember XHTML and XHTML2? Those, and a bunch of special purpose not particularly interesting niche XML standards (P3P? XML-FO?) were pretty much all they worked on for a decade or so. It wasn't until the WHATWG was formed by some browser vendors who wanted to start working on a standard for features that users would actually want, rather than what architecture astronauts thought would be a nice design, and the W3C realized that's what people were actually interested in and so replaced XHTML2 with HTML5 based on the WHATWG spec that they actually became relevant again.

Now, I will have to give credit that there were still a few groups at the W3C doing work relevant to the actual open web, such as SVG and CSS. But given how the WHATWG took over work on the HTML standard and actually did work towards a standard that was useful and relevant to browser vendors when the W3C went off the rails the last time means that I'm not too worried if it goes off the rails again this time, you can always form another standards body if it becomes irrelevant. You just need to be sure to recognize this early on, so you don't waste too much time and effort waiting for the W3C to get its act together again.

> W3C realized that's what people were actually interested in

So, with XHTML, the main thing is that people just wanted their web pages to work like they always had; they didn't want to deal with adding slashes to make their web pages XML and strict parsers and whatnot.

But with P3P, what people want is Netflix and Rdio on all their devices (such as ARM-based Samsung Chromebooks).

Frankly, I prefer the sound of standardized DRM to everyone rolling their own ala the 90s; with any luck it'll mean fewer formats/keys that need to be reverse engineered and whatnot.

First of all, I think you have gotten P3P confused with EME (or whatever the new term is). P3P, the "platform for privacy protection" was just one of my examples of previous useless stuff the W3C has worked on (it was basically a schema for describing a website's privacy policy, with dubious advantages over simply linking to a privacy policy in the footer).

Second, none of the proposals for EME that I've seen actually address the issue of being able to play the same content across devices. They aren't a standardized DRM scheme; they are merely hooks for proprietary DRM schemes, essentially a way to allow proprietary DRM schemes to hook into the HTML5 media player rather than having to use the plugin interface and implement the media player in Flash or Silverlight. It's basically just a plugin API for plugins that provide only DRM, leaving the rest up to the browser.

Don't think that this is meant to actually increase interoperability; a large portion of the "value" of DRM, for those who promote it, it the ability to have various lucrative exclusive contracts with particular cable networks, hardware vendors, and so on. You're just going to see more "Live NFL - a Samsung exclusive!", not actually be able to get Netflix on any device you want.

If it worked across any device, then it would need to work on open devices as well, but of course if the device is open you can bypass the DRM. So it's always going to be based on licenses, that only certain vendors can get if they promise to implement DRM securely and not give users full access to their own devices.

> They aren't a standardized DRM scheme; they are merely hooks for proprietary DRM schemes, essentially a way to allow proprietary DRM schemes to hook into the HTML5 media player rather than having to use the plugin interface and implement the media player in Flash or Silverlight. It's basically just a plugin API for plugins that provide only DRM, leaving the rest up to the browser.

Exactly: its a specification for a constrained plugin API focussed DRM, so that browsers don't have to either maintain a common general purpose plugin API (e.g., NPAPI) or, alternatively, have browser-specific APIs in order to meet content-owners demand for a DRM-supporting delivery channel.

Yes, I typed the acronym wrong; that's what I get for writing HN comments in the middle of the night.

I agree with the rest of what you've said, but I don't think the typical end-user worries about "openness" until it's too late.

> architecture astronauts

That's an awesome term for something I never quite had a word for.

I suspect this may be the article that introduced the term:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html

"> It's a place where the next Tim Berners-Lee or Mozilla, if they were building a new browser from scratch, couldn't just look up the details of all the "Web" technologies. They'd have to negotiate and sign compliance agreements with a raft of DRM providers just to be fully standards-compliant and interoperable."

What the hell are they even talking about here? Since when has ANY browser been "Fully, 100% W3C Compliant"?? Answer: None. Ever. Seriously.

There are rafts of non-compliant features, both legacy and newly introduced, in every single one of the most popular modern web browsers. (Even Opera!!) Certainly, with the last decade of popular support pushing Browser Vendors towards W3C compliance, the web has been more standards-based than ever before.

But this is just a silly argument. I agree with the political aim of the EFF here. But let's not just invent things or misrepresent things. It makes them lose credibility in my eyes.

Sure, not everything is standards-compliant, nor fully interoperable. But part of the transformative effect of open Internet standards has been that anyone can implement them without permission from others (indeed, the IP policy of the W3C is pretty much engineered to make this the case).

If you want to implement a DRM binary blob with EME, you're going to have to negotiate a compliance contract of some kind with the DRM vendor, probably connected to some hook IP. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compliance_and_Robustness )

The problem isn't that browsers do or don't have to implement this "standard"; the problem is that the standard itself isn't enough to actually support the content it claims to support.

It's the equivalent of standardizing the object or embed tags: it's a standard way of getting at non-standard functionality, and sites then depend on specific implementations of that non-standard functionality, the same way they depend on the Flash plugin today in ways that knowing how to implement the object tag doesn't help with.

Standardizing a single fully-specified mechanism for DRM might actually be useful (debatably), but that would break the current model in which DRM is completely unsound and relies on security-through-obscurity. "Standardizing" a means of getting at the myriad non-standard DRM implementations and their non-standard APIs is worse than worthless: it's actively harmful, and it prolongs the death of those technologies.

Right now, content providers have to choose whether to support the open web or DRM. They should continue to have to make that choice, with supporters of the open web reaching a larger audience, until eventually all the holdouts either switch or lose. This is a major step backward for that goal, and the W3C has no business claiming EME has anything to do with the open web.

Say you're a netflix customer. You login to watch a video. But Netflix hasn't updated to support your amazing new device that uses a different OS.

Pretty much like Firefox and IE6 activeX sites, or iPhones / android and flash. DRM simply restricts playback devices.

"From a UX perspective this seems no different from Netflix putting their content behind a login."

That depends on where you think UX ends. That login will work fine from within an open source browser and/or OS you compiled (and possibly wrote or tweaked) yourself.

I haven't read the article, but if that DRM works, it wouldn't run in your browser on your OS, as content providers would not trust them. Chances are that your Chrome, Firefox, or Safari extensions wouldn't even work with the DRM (at best, they would get disabled on protected (from you) pages.)