Edit: Oh well, that’s that. Looks like the media lobby got their way. I look forward to seeing how this plays out.
The W3C (the consortium that governs web standards) is entertaining a proposal by American corporate interests (in the form of cartels lobby groups like the RIAA and MPAA) to implement DRM in the HTML5 specifications. The web currently runs mostly on HTML4; HTML5 is the new version with added features (this site is coded in HTML5).
Anyhow, the media lobby wants to add ways to encrypt or block content directly in the HTML, the most basic level of a website. The Free Software Foundation is trying to stop them. Why?
Artificial Barriers
DRM at its core is not a way to provide additional content – it’s a way to block built-in features, usually as a way to extract more money from users that have to pay extra to fully access something they’ve already paid for.
This can be seen in music, where audio files have DRM that prevents you from copying them to more than a handful of devices, even though you have already paid for the files. It’s also becoming quite common in video games where you have to pay more (beyond the cost of the game itself) to “unlock” additional features that are already present in the game files on your computer. It’s as if you bought a book where some of the chapters are blank unless you pay extra to “unlock” them.
DRM is, as the above article says, an “anti-feature”. It deliberately cripples a complete product to allow each built-in feature to be sold piecemeal.
Nonstandard Standards
HTML is held to rigorous standards to ensure interoperability on as many devices and platforms as possible. No one holds any kind of copyright over it, no more than anyone “owns” the English language. Allowing corporate interests a foot in the door with DRM breaks that balance.
DRM would allow them to disable content at will for most any reason, whether it’s operating system or the browser you’re using. Are you using an ad-blocking plugin, or a browser that doesn’t support HTML5’s ability to force you to watch “enhanced” pages loaded with more intrusive advertisements? This new specification could prevent you from seeing that website at all. This flies in the face of the web’s mission to be accessible to all.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says it better than I:
Perversely, this is exactly the reverse of the reason that the World Wide Web Consortium exists in the first place. W3C is there to create comprehensible, publicly-implementable standards that will guarantee interoperability, not to facilitate an explosion of new mutually-incompatible software and of sites and services that can only be accessed by particular devices or applications. But EME [The DRM system. -A] is a proposal to bring exactly that dysfunctional dynamic into HTML5, even risking a return to the “bad old days, before the Web” of deliberately limited interoperability.
All too often, technology companies have raced against each other to build restrictive tangleware that suits Hollywood’s whims, selling out their users in the process. But open Web standards are an antidote to that dynamic, and it would be a terrible mistake for the Web community to leave the door open for Hollywood’s gangrenous anti-technology culture to infect W3C standards.
Why should we even care?
Perhaps the most offensive message Hollywood is sending here is that we (and the internet) desperately need them and want them around, and that we will willingly bend over backwards for them. They are too arrogant to realize it’s the other way around. I don’t need to watch their movies or TV shows or play their games – hell, most of the time I don’t even want to.
This is no more than a hollow threat to scare people into compliance. Does anyone really think Hollywood will completely pull out of the internet if they aren’t allowed to sink their claws into it? Of course not. So why make that argument in the first place? Let’s call their bluff.
Sign the petition against DRM in HTML5 at DefectiveByDesign.org