Re: Letter on DRM in HTML from the Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus

On Mon, 2013-06-17 at 09:50 -0700, Mark Watson wrote:

> > Could I ask if your group has also considered the likely
> > consequences of the W3C NOT getting involved in this work ?

We did not develop any official statement that would address this
question.

Here is my personal view:

The greater the success of an EME-like system in the marketplace,
the more power will shift in a way that is favorable to DRM using
“copyright industry” interests, at the expense of for example what may
be broadly summarized as “digital consumer rights” (rights that people
have as a matter of law as soon as they have legal access to a digital
good - actually making use of such rights is often prevented by
DRM systems), and at the expense of the freedom to use Free Software
operating system platforms (for which the CDMs are not likely to be
made available) to protect one's privacy etc.

If W3C does NOT contribute to making the specifications better
technically, and to making them more broadly accepted due to W3C
putting its significant credibility behind them, the success of
whatever EME-like systems will nevertheless exist in the marketplace
will probably be smaller, and hence the negative overall impacts that we
are concerned about will consequently also be smaller.


Nikos Roussos <comzeradd@mozilla-community.org>:

> It's safe to say that there is a consensus among those who object to
> EME, that we believe it contradicts with Open Web principles and
> therefore W3C's mission. If EME gets approved the most important thing
> we'll lose is W3C.

Yes... if we lose the integrity of W3C as steward of the set of Open Web
specifications that have true multistakeholder acceptance, who then
is supposed to assure a balanced representation of interests in regard
to web standards? ISO? Some UN agency?

Greetings,
Norbert

Received on Tuesday, 18 June 2013 09:09:14 UTC