Re: CfC: to publish Encrypted Media Extensions specification as a First Public Working Draft (FPWD)

On Tue, 22 Jan 2013 18:03:25 -0000, Paul Cotton  
<Paul.Cotton@microsoft.com> wrote:

> This is a Call for Consensus (CfC) to publish as a First Public Working  
> Draft (FPWD) the following Encrypted Media Extensions document:
>
> https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-media/encrypted-media-fpwd.html

I oppose publication of this draft.

The spec can enable effective protection of commercial media only when  
it's used in conjunction with deliberately underspecified,  
non-interoperable user-hostile CDMs. The Clear Key scheme is a red  
herring, as it doesn't provide substantial protection over existing  
capabilities of HTTPS and HTTP authentication.

I acknowledge that there is a strong demand from the media industry for a  
DRM "standard" and legitimization of DRM as part of the web, but I think  
that publishing a spec that is a DRM Trojan horse goes against W3C's  
principles of creating interoperable, royalty-free web stack and would  
tarnish W3C's name.

As far as I know the only useful application of this spec by software  
stack without closed/non-RF components is reading of media from CDNs by  
trusted users without disclosing contents of the media to the CDN.  
However, this particular use-case could be satisfied in a less convoluted  
and more generic way (e.g. http+aes[1] or enc[2] schemes).

[1] http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=7011&to=7012
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Jun/0094.html

-- 
regards, Kornel Lesiński

Received on Tuesday, 22 January 2013 20:32:58 UTC