Re: The subject line is irrelevant these days

Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 22, 2013, at 3:28 AM, Emmanuel Revah <stsil@manurevah.com> wrote:

> On 2013/10/22 04:30, Duncan Bayne wrote:
> [...]
>>> Continuing to state that it is "inimical to the W3Cs mission & goals"
>>> repeatedly doesn't seem to be changing the answer any. Do you have
>>> anything new to add, or will you just continue proving to us that you
>>> like writing "inimical"?
>
>
> JF, I don't understand why such a remark. Some of us learned a new word.
>
> (on a side note, it's really too bad your MUA breaks threading (at least for me), all your replies appear to me as new threads. Imagine the deception this morning).
>
>
> [...]
>> Re. this thread, I was trying to make the point that, for the purposes
>> of deciding whether to treat DRM as in-scope, it doesn't matter whether
>> or not the movie industry wants it or not.
>
>
> This exactly. Though this has been said over and over (and over) again... .. sometimes with better wording than others. Too many times the conversation gets steered off topic. Piracy and business models, those shouldn't be the concern in this place.
>
>
> A problem is that some EME proponents don't want to acknowledge the issue with a possible degradation of the W3C's credibility. It's almost 'the' issue, yet many proponents on this list dismiss it entirely. This is part of why the discussion goes nowhere, credibility is at stake and it's not a non-issue as some may pretend it is.

I've addressed it a few times. Perhaps I need to be more direct.

If you believe that the purpose of the W3C is to act as a campaigning
champion for a web _exclusively_ based on copyleft and Free Software
principles, then yes, working on EME would be inimical to that goal.

If, on the other hand, you believe the purpose of the W3C is to bring
the whole of the web - as it exists in the real world - inclusive of
both copyleft and copyright content - to it's full potential and to
champion the interests of users of the whole web, then EME is simply a
refactoring of existing functionality that improves on the situation
for users in the ways I've repeatedly described towards the stated
goals in the W3C mission.

I think, in practice, W3C has been something between these two
extremes , or a version of the latter that has chosen to use the 'Open
Web' - with attendant definitional ambiguity - as a tool to those
ends.

It's clear that DRM itself - whether in <object> plugins or CDMs - is
outside the 'Open Web'.

So, it's not clear that there should be any mainstream 'credibility'
issue that flows from EME as compared to <object>, which is
essentially only used for DRM anyway (or soon will be). But of course,
damage has already been done by mis-representation of the situation as
'W3C adds DRM to HTML5' which is simply untrue in several ways. I
appreciate that the alternative headline 'W3C tweaks APIs towards
eliminating plugins - except for DRM - Adds constraints for DRM' is
not as catchy.


>
>
> Maybe another way to look at the question:
> If EME within the W3C creates a divided web, would it be worth it ?

What division does EME "create" ? That is, what division does not
exist today that would exist if EME is approved by W3C ?

...Mark
>
>
>
> --
> Emmanuel Revah
> http://manurevah.com
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 22 October 2013 14:42:18 UTC