- From: Martin Kliehm <w3c@kliehm.com>
- Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2013 11:22:56 +0200
- To: W3C DRM/EME Mailing List <public-restrictedmedia@w3.org>
- CC: Amelia Andersdotter <amelia.andersdotter@europarl.europa.eu>, Ulf Pettersson <ulf.pettersson@europarl.europa.eu>
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