Re: Letter on DRM in HTML from the Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus

On Tuesday, June 18, 2013, Norbert Bollow wrote:

> On Mon, 2013-06-17 at 09:50 -0700, Mark Watson wrote:
>
> > > Could I ask if your group has also considered the likely
> > > consequences of the W3C NOT getting involved in this work ?
>
> We did not develop any official statement that would address this
> question.
>

Could I encourage you to do so ? It seems peculiar to recommend a course of
action without evaluating the alternatives, or at least without explaining
the groups evaluation of the alternatives.


>
> Here is my personal view:
>
> The greater the success of an EME-like system in the marketplace,
> the more power will shift in a way that is favorable to DRM using
> “copyright industry” interests, at the expense of for example what may
> be broadly summarized as “digital consumer rights” (rights that people
> have as a matter of law as soon as they have legal access to a digital
> good - actually making use of such rights is often prevented by
> DRM systems), and at the expense of the freedom to use Free Software
> operating system platforms (for which the CDMs are not likely to be
> made available) to protect one's privacy etc.


> If W3C does NOT contribute to making the specifications better
> technically, and to making them more broadly accepted due to W3C
> putting its significant credibility behind them, the success of
> whatever EME-like systems will nevertheless exist in the marketplace
> will probably be smaller, and hence the negative overall impacts that we
> are concerned about will consequently also be smaller.
>

I think it's unlikely there will be a significant effect of this nature
(W3C work on EME will make use of DRM more widespread). Protecting content
with DRM involves ongoing licensing fees and operational complexity which
do not depend much on what W3C does. The decision to use it or not is more
likely to turn on those issues (if it is not already a given because of 3rd
party content license terms).

It's possible that a content provider would view the limited platform reach
of a fragmented DRM ecosystem as a reason not to use DRM. But that same
provider is unlikely to start using DRM just because EME work improved the
range of platforms supported because the other issues above are likely to
outweigh this one. Even if not, what I think you are saying is that the
certain user pain (fragmented ecosystem) is worth the uncertain gain from
some small amount of content being unprotected which would otherwise be
protected ?

In any case, what you are referring to is a balance between the public
interest in the practical effectiveness of the limitations on copyright and
the public interest in the practical effectiveness of copyright. This is
properly a subject of public policy debate where at the moment public
policy clearly allows the use of DRM techniques. Whilst that debate is
ongoing and without taking a position on that the W3C as a developer of
technical standards is in a good position to provide practical technical
solutions which address the real-world security, privacy, interoperability
and accessibility issues associated with this topic. It would arguably be
remiss _not_ to address those things.

Regarding the freedom to use Free Software operating systems, aside from
the obvious fact that EME has no impact on that*, the likelihood of
solutions being provided for such operating systems is *improved* by W3C
working on EME, even if it remains uncertain.

(* you can argue that the decision by content providers to require DRM has
an impact on the *ability* of users of Free Software to view that content.
Alternatively, you can say the decision of Free Software users to require
every component of their system to be user-modifiable has an impact on
their ability to view that same content. But neither decision has an impact
on the freedom to use Free Software operating systems).

...Mark


>
> Nikos Roussos <comzeradd@mozilla-community.org <javascript:;>>:
>
> > It's safe to say that there is a consensus among those who object to
> > EME, that we believe it contradicts with Open Web principles and
> > therefore W3C's mission. If EME gets approved the most important thing
> > we'll lose is W3C.
>
> Yes... if we lose the integrity of W3C as steward of the set of Open Web
> specifications that have true multistakeholder acceptance, who then
> is supposed to assure a balanced representation of interests in regard
> to web standards? ISO? Some UN agency?
>
> Greetings,
> Norbert
>