Concerns from the European Parliament

Dear colleagues,

recently I've been in contact with MEP Amelia Andersdotter who is very 
concerned about the W3C making political or legal decisions by adopting 
DRM in HTML5. Here is an excerpt from her address at the European 
Commission's ICT standardization expert group:

<snip>
For the European Union there are legislative reasons as to why DRM in 
HTML does not work out at this time.

Firstly, in practice, DRM sets up restrictions to the rights granted by 
copyright and freedom of expression laws. Thus, the standardization of 
DRM in HTML will pre-empt upcoming revisions to European Union copyright 
law. The Commission has announced its intention to reform the copyright 
legislation over the coming years. And as present efforts like the 
Licenses for Europe platform cannot achieve their targets – parts of it 
have fallen apart – it becomes clear that legislative reforms will be 
necessary.

It would be inappropriate for a standards consortium run by private 
actors to make decisions that could prevent or side-track political 
decisions in this area in the near future, before those decisions are 
made. We believe that democratic representatives need to make political 
decisions, and that these decisions should not be pre-empted by 
technical standards.

Secondly, in the EU, our legislative framework provides an additional 
challenge for the Encrypted Media Extensions as proposed by Netflix and 
Google. Netflix is a streaming company, and is as such interested in 
controlling re-transmissions of streams. However, European jurisprudence 
grants specific rights for users and consumers of broadcasts in 
cross-border trade between member states. These rights are codified in 
for example, the Premier League vs. Murphy cases on the retransmission 
of content. Any technical standard which implements obstacles to 
retransmission at the infrastructural level should at least take these 
rights into account.

When legally consolidated rights of users and consumers are compromised 
by technical standards decisions, it is a political issue. We believe 
that the distinction between the technical and the political is 
important to safe-guard, and we are hoping that you will agree with 
this. If the W3C makes a political decision that is not in line with EU 
law or upcoming reforms in the European Commission and Parliament there 
is the risk that HTML5 cannot be supported in the European Union.
</snip>

I scanned the discussions here and elsewhere and came up with these 
points being relevant for the European Parliament and Commission:

DRM in HTML is cementing closed ecosystems instead of promoting 
competition and innovation. Google, Microsoft, and Apple control the 
hardware, the operating system, the player (i.e. browser), and the app 
stores. They have absolute control over their ecosystems. As content 
distributors they can exert leverage on content suppliers for exclusive 
contracts. Open source developers will be locked out.

Like the EFF said, video and audio content is just the beginning. 
Content includes books, games, 3D content, even web pages. Accepting EME 
could lead to other rightsholders demanding the same privileges as 
Hollywood, leading to a Web where images and pages cannot be saved or 
searched, ads cannot be blocked, innovative new browsers cannot compete 
without permission from big content companies.

DRM is against the principle of the Open Web. It will create a 
fragmented landscape of content that is restricted to certain areas, 
contradicting the principles of a Single European Market.

Property rights of end-users will be violated by installing software on 
their computers that seize control of their personal computers. That 
encrypted black box executable software cannot be accessed or scanned by 
anti-virus programs, leaving strong security and privacy concerns.

DRM constricts fair use of purchased content. It could ignore exceptions 
from copyright for people with vision impairments, schools, and 
libraries. Other features of HTML5 like local storage for reading 
offline could be broken.

Once DRM is implemented, it will be really hard to remove it.

The key issue is not content protection, but how a content owner or 
producer can sell its content online. DRM cannot solve this issue. 
Political decisions should be made by democratic, political bodies, not 
by standardization organizations.

Regards,
   Martin

(Invited Expert at the HTML WG)

Received on Thursday, 13 June 2013 09:23:20 UTC