DRM on the Web: lowering your standards

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^rooker
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DRM on the Web: lowering your standards

Post by ^rooker »

It seems that, after much back-and-forth, the W3C have decided that its HTML5 working group should indeed work on standardising an interface for DRM technologies.
I'd like to quote a paragraph from an article by Danny O'Brien on eff.org, titled "Lowering Your Standards: DRM and the Future of the W3C":
A Web where you cannot cut and paste text;
where your browser can't "Save As..." an image;
where the "allowed" uses of saved files are monitored beyond the browser;
where JavaScript is sealed away in opaque tombs;
and maybe even where we can no longer effectively "View Source" on some sites, is a very different Web from the one we have today.

It's a Web where user agents—browsers—must navigate a nest of enforced duties every time they visit a page.
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.
*sigh* :cry:
Jumping out of an airplane is not a basic instinct. Neither is breathing underwater. But put the two together and you're traveling through space!
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