DRM on the Web: lowering your standards
Posted: Thu Oct 03, 2013 1:27 pm
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":
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":
*sigh*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.