RE: Campaign for position of chair and mandate to close this community group

> From: dhgbayne@fastmail.fm
> To: public-restrictedmedia@w3.org
> Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2014 21:34:48 -0800
> Subject: Re: Campaign for position of chair and mandate to close this      community    group
> 
> > Unfortunately the EME
> > proponents are just not interested - for now they are pushing to
> > integrate tightly with the web.  If the W3C were to remove content
> > protection from the charter and shutdown the work on the EME tomorrow
> > then the EME proponents could just roll over to this solution and still
> > solve their use case - we would have a much better outcome for security
> > and privacy, and keep the web discussion open and free of mis-features.  
> >  What do people opposed to DRM in this group think?   This still promotes
> > DRM, but not on the web, and solves some significant issues.  Am I still
> > misunderstanding some important points?
> 
> In fact, my understanding is that the solution you describe (individual
> apps, silo'd in their respective ecosystems / app-stores) is exactly the
> situation that people are trying to fix with EME.

I would like to understand and be able to articulate this problem.  It's clearly not the problem of designing systems for the delivery of protected content as this is already solved.  I suggest that the problem being solved is the political problem of redefining the open web as being compatible with user agent restrictions on the use of content.  In this light, attempts by the proponents of this position to redirect people to this community group to design a better system can be seen as nothing but a redirection, and this supports my appeal to close this group.
 
> Of course, the solution of EME + closed source, proprietary, hardware-
> and OS-tied CDM is technologically and socially identical to having
> playback apps.  But not everyone agrees.

There seem to be some real differences.  It is not necessary to add 'support of playback of protected content' to the HTML WG charter in order to add a mechanism to redirect some content to other apps or devices, and modification to the mechanism would not be circumvention of a copyright protection system.    Where as the EME on it's own, with just a copy-through CDM, could be deemed as an effective technological mechanism and requires adding 'support of playback of protected content' to the HTML WG charter.   Thus they are not equivalent, the difference is in the compromising of the principles of the web, and I suggest that this is the real problem that the proponents are addressing, and Tim and the W3C have already endorsed the change to the charter - don't be fooled by their claims about solving technical problems.

cheers
Fred