It's great that Berners-Lee is saying this, but he'd have retained a lot more of his authority to pronounce on the future of the Web had he not thrown his weight behind the W3C's horrible plan to put DRM into HTML.
I hear what you are saying, but there is also reason for drm. Or we will have flash forever. What I am saying, I at least can understand why he did it.
I believe that free and open, given some semblance of equal playing field will always win.
Just to be clear, if they came and say, no drm in html, I would stand behind that as well. I just accept their judgement that this was necessary at the moment for things to work.
I don't think only my view is right, so, I might be wrong here, but this is what I believe.
This is false. Those companies can use the HTML without DRM with the same success. No company ever needs any DRM.
The BBC needs DRM to be able to give us that content.
"The rights owners" are in a market, and if the market simply refused to buy broken products, they would have to either deliver a non-broken product or go bankrupt, there is no way in which they could force people to buy broken products in order to sustain them.
People, the majority of people don't know what DRM is, they don't care, they just want to watch content.
One of the biggest problems in tech and forums like these is that everyone thinks they are so much more significant than they are, they don't realise they are such a tiny minority of the consumer spectrum.
If a company insists on using DRM then they should simply create their own proprietary plugin like Flash. But there is absolutely no reason for us to destroy the open web and make it rely on proprietary binary modules.
You don't combat piracy by locking it down and making a pain to access your content, you compete/combat piracy by making sure its always easier and more convenient to obtain your content legitimately, not punish those that are legit for the few that will go pirate it anyway. As long as I can purchase a song for $1 DRM free and have it in 5 seconds at a high quality from iTunes or Amazon, I won't ever be tempted to find a torrent for it, even if its free.
DRM creates artificial scarcity, and scarcity breeds a black market. Those black markets may always exist, but if you make it hard enough to access your product on the device they want at the time they want, they will have more incentive to go to the black markets.
Just because it's easy for you to circumvent doesn't mean it's easy for the everyday user.
But totally agreed that it doesn't belong in web standards.
Actually Netflix is easier then pirating, which is now why Netflix consumes more traffic than torrents.
All it takes is for one person to circumvent it and the whole system crumbles. Which is the current state of affairs.
If i sound angry, it's because i am.
It... actually is already at this point. I can find any song, any TV show, and any film, available to stream instantly on Youtube of all places. This isn't a shady torrent site, it's a Google-owned property.
In the music sphere, Grooveshark has every song you could think of, and is claimed to fail to comply with the licensing requirements of the copyright owners, and is thus being sued over it.
There is little or no reason that a similar service could not pop up for video, aside from the fact that bandwidth is costly, and I'm sure that could be resolved to an extent through some form of torrent-over-WebRTC system.
Not our problem. They can take the web or leave it. Why should we pander to them and screw up a good thing in the process?
The web is a proprietary app controlled by the w3c, who are mainly Microsoft, Google and Apple.
You can believe it's an open platform, but if that's the case it should be easy for you to block DRM ;) Good luck
The web is not proprietary, not an app, and only to some extend controlled by the w3c, which is much more than Microsoft, Google, and Apple.
Well lets see if DRM makes it into HTML5 then.
Is that the same kind of DRM that enabled businesses to use the printing press, radio broadcasts, TV sets, vinyl records, cassette tapes, audio CDs and MP3s?
It really is astounding, and bears so much emphasis, that the proposed DRM module system is actually worse than Flash.
Standardizing DRM extensions is bullshit. No new browser can ever be standards compliant when being compliant requires having the appropriate binary blob as distributed by the approved parties.
If only a select few can implement it, then why call it a standard?
The standard (that is being proposed) in this case is an interface that the actual DRM modules hook into. Anyone can implement the interface.
In this case, the implementation of the DRM hooks are those proprietary DRM modules.
This "standard" shuts everyone except the select few in the dark. Without have the appropriate plug-in, you cannot access the content.
You cannot credibly argue for "building new architectures for the web where it's decentralised" (especially not with the arguments he uses with regards to corporate and government power) and at the same time endorse leaving the endpoints open to centralized control.
I can understand why some people who do not like it would still support DRM in HTML. I cannot understand why he does.
I'll rather have a reasonably cross-platform plugin with possible open-source implementations than 100% closed plugins with no cross-platform support which cannot be implemented in open-source.
DRM on the open web is all bad. If you compromise on that because you want Netflix in your browser and not an app, that makes you an asshat, and part of the problem.
We need open standards, we need to defend them, and we definitely don't need people undermining them on factually incorrect basis.