Re: What change could we make? (was Re: Letter on DRM in HTML)

On Friday 2013-06-21 02:42 -0400, Tim Berners-Lee wrote:
> On 2013-06 -20, at 23:15, Wendy Seltzer wrote:
> > This is, to me a key question the restrictedmedia group can address:
> > What is the best way for W3C, starting from where we are now, to make
> > the world better for users -- whatever your perspective on "better for
> > users" is.
> > 
> > For those who don't like DRM, recognizing that W3C likely doesn't have
> > the leverage to kill it, should we try to slow it down or open it up?
> > Are there ways we can usefully make the restrictions less onerous
> > without merely driving their proponents elsewhere?
> > 
> > For those who like the business models DRM enables, are there ways to
> > make the encrypted-media content more web-accessible (linkable, privacy
> > protective, accessible) and to shrink the restrictions on open source
> > development, to broaden the base of support for these models?
> 
> Let me broaden that to -- how can we make it better for the planet?
> This includes 'users' and also publishers.   Discussions of DRM often start
> off with a mindset of a a few locked down dominant publishers
> ripping off/being ripped off by individual consumers/citizens/criminals.
> 
> A more enlightened mindset is of everyone being producers and
> consumers.  If DRM is important to a market, can we open it
> up so that anyone can participate.
> 
> Remove the assumption that only one company holds the
> key to DRM playing on your machine.
> 
> Allow a garage band to set up the same provider-based system as Sony
> does? 
> 
> Nikos's statement "... EME [...] contradicts with Open Web principles"
> is rousing but doesn't say which principles those are nor
> how they are necessarily contradicted.
> 
> One principle of the open web is "anyone can publish",
> Can we design an EME system where that is true, and anyone can
> publish content using it?

I think there are other important principles of the open Web that we
should care about, from the implementation perspective, such as:

 * Anybody should be able to build an interoperable implementation
   from the relevant specifications.

 * They should be able to do this without paying licensing fees,
   such as for patents.  (I think this principle underlies much of
   the W3C's patent policy.)

 * They should be able to create an open-source implementation.

Open Web specifications not only allow these things to be true, but
generally they *ensure* that they're true.  (We don't always succeed
at the first, but we do try, by trying to write specifications that
are thorough enough.)

While EME allows for abitrary CDMs, and there *could* exist a CDM
for which these principles hold, EME is far from ensuring that they
are true, and I expect these principles would not hold for the
existing DRM systems that EME is likely to be used with.  (And I'm
talking here about an implementation of EME that is usable for
viewing the Web content that uses the EME specification, not simply
a conformant implementation without useful CDMs.)

I think these principles are important and the W3C shouldn't
sacrifice them lightly.  I also think it's preferable to make an
exception to them for a specific reason than to abandon them
entirely.

-David

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
𝄢   Mozilla                           http://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂

Received on Tuesday, 25 June 2013 17:33:58 UTC