RE: European Commission considers mandatory digital rights management

My apologies to this list for this late response but I wanted to say I
could not agree more with Renato's view. If W3C only wishes to move in
areas where consensus is (supposedly) already reached it has indeed
become a "stamping" organization. I sincerely hope (and expect) Rigo's
note was not a W3C viewpoint, and possibly put out of context as well...

I see DRM standards currently starting to move to the next level, from
industry groups to cross-industry organizations, as indicated by the
recent creation of the OASIS Rights Language Technical Committee. I
would argue W3C should not be standing at the side-line. Acceptance and
pick-up of DRM by W3C would also be one way of educating the public
there are benefits to both consumers and producers of content.

Cheers,

Vincent Buller
BackStream(r)
BackStream: content management - multi-channel distribution
www.backstream.com

--On 04/03/2002 18:10 +0100 Rigo Wenning wrote:

> As long as we have so little consensus on what we want to achieve, I 
> don't think, as a consensus based organization, we have a role in 
> there. But this might change, if the game cool's down a bit.

Rigo, I thought that the role of a "consensus based organization" was to
_form_ consensus. Not say that "there is no consensus" therefore we
cannot do anything. I think that you will also be surprised about how
much consensus there actually is out there on dealing with DRM. W3C even
had a brief glimpse of such consensus at our DRM Workshop in Jan 2001.

As David Parrott says, DRM won't go away, so you either do nothing and
have no say in the architecture of DRM or you do something and make sure
it works.


Cheers...Renato                       <http://purl.net/renato>
Chief Scientist, IPR Systems Pty Ltd  <http://iprsystems.com>
Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL)   <http://odrl.net>

Received on Wednesday, 27 March 2002 03:21:28 UTC