I strongly urge all supporters to reconsider the EME proposal. It is not in your best interests!

DRM simply does not belong on the web, it is contrary to freedom of speech
and it is of zero benefit to the consumers who fuel the web economy. It
will only make browsers and servers more complicated and more error prone,
restrict the ability of people to use the web, and waste CPU cycles
encrypting what is probably already widely available to pirates. As any
technologically competent person is aware, unless you can stream the media
direct to the viewer's brain, there will ALWAYS be ways to circumvent these
methods: A paying subscriber to a channel or buyer of a movie can simply
record their screen and audio output (without any quality loss if they're
smart), freely sharing the result with others.
You cannot beat piracy with technology. Suffice to say pirates have access
to better technology, because they get it free! The only thing that will
slow the continual increase in piracy is better content, content which is
actually worth paying for, and better content developers, content
developers who people actually want to pay.
This proposal will not help anybody, it will only make web standards more
complicated, harder to correctly implement, and less reliable as a result.
I'm really beginning to lose my faith in standards bodies like this to
develop standards which are actually of benefit to humanity, rather than
standards which have been set by investors desperately trying to squeeze
profit from a 20th century business model. This simply does not make any
sense.
Older generations developed the technology, but it was my generation that
made the internet and the web a popular success. Without the freedoms we
had, future generations will simply move towards underground protocols and
networks that protect their freedom, creating a new safe haven for real
criminals. If this proposal is accepted and widely implemented, it will
perhaps mark the beginning of the end for the relevance of web standards,
but certainly not for freedom online.

Again, I strongly urge all involved parties to reconsider their support for
this proposal.
Yours sincerely,
Zak Fenton.

Received on Wednesday, 15 May 2013 14:36:44 UTC