[Gnugeneration-discuss] [Fwd: [FC-discuss] Don ’t let the myths fool you: the W3C’s plan for DRM in HTML5 is a betrayal to all web users.]

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http://freeculture.org/blog/2013/04/23/dont-let-the-myths-fool-you-the-w3cs-plan-for-drm-in-html5-is-a-betrayal-to-all-web-users/

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-------- Forwarded Message --------
> From: Free Culture Foundation <address@hidden>
> Reply-to: Discussion of Free Culture in general and this organization
> in particular <address@hidden>
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: [FC-discuss] Don’t let the myths fool you: the W3C’s plan for
> DRM in HTML5 is a betrayal to all web users.
> Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2013 23:15:04 -0000
> 
> A handful of myths have become common defenses of the W3C's plan for
> "Encrypted Media Extensions" (EME), a [Digital Restrictions
> Management][1] (DRM) scheme for HTML5, the next version of the markup
> language upon which the Web is built.
> 
> These arguments obscure the threat this poses to a free and open web and
> why we must [send a strong and clear message to the W3C and its member
> organizations][2], that **DRM in HTML5 is a betrayal to all Web users
> and undermines the W3C's self-stated [mission][3] to make the benefits
> of the Web "available to all people, whatever their hardware, software,
> network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location,
> or physical or mental ability." The W3C exists to bring the vision of
> ****an undivided 'One Web' to its full potential, and DRM is
> antithetical to that goal. **
> 
> [![][4]][2]
> 
> Among the most popular claims are:
> 
>   1. that DRM doesn't work; that it exists to protect creators, but
> since it is easily cracked and can be worked around, it is largely
> ineffective and irrelevant
> 
>   2. that DRM in HTML5 is a necessary compromise to finally bring an end
> to the proliferation of proprietary browser plugins such as Adobe Flash
> Player and Micrisoft Silverlight
> 
>   3. that the web needs DRM in HTML5 in order for Hollywood and other
> media giants to finally start giving the Web priority over delivering
> media over traditional means
> 
> All of these myths depend on dangerous misconceptions of how the planned
> Encrypted Media Extensions work, why Hollywood's threat of boycott is
> completely empty, who DRM is actually built for, and what the purpose of
> free and open Web standards is. Implementing the EME proposal would
> simultaneously legitimize DRM through the HTML5 standard and needlessly
> concede the very purpose of Web standards. This is not a compromise for
> the advancement of the Web, it's a complete concession of the principles
> of the W3C.
> 
> The next time any of those myths come up, you can use the following to
> respond:
> 
> **1. DRM is not about protecting copyright. That is a straw man. DRM is
> about limiting the functionality of devices and selling features back in
> the form of services.**
> 
> Public perception of DRM is that it exists to prevent unauthorized
> copying, but that it's inherently ineffective because it's impossible to
> simultaneously show someone something and keep it hidden from them. This
> is a grave mistake that hides the actual function of DRM, which is
> overwhelmingly successful: to prevent completely legal uses of
> technology so that media companies can charge over and over for services
> which provide functionality that should never have been removed to begin
> with.
> 
> Copyright already provides leverage against media distributors, but DRM
> provides leverage against technological innovations which have given
> users the capability to do much more with media than ever before. Free
> of technologically imposed limits, anyone can view their media whenever
> they want, wherever they want, on whichever devices they want, and
> however they want. By imposing digital restrictions, media giants can
> prevent users from skipping advertisements or viewing media on multiple
> devices, and then charging for the relief from those antifeatures. This
> gives media companies total control over how people use their technology
> and creates a huge market out of artificially produced scarcity. This
> exploitative practice targets the vast majority of users who acquire
> their media legally, and it's already stunted the growth of the Web
> enough.
> 
> Ian Hickson, the author and maintainer of the HTML5 specification, is
> not only overseeing the HTML5 standard at the W3C but also an engineer
> at Google (ironically, one of the biggest corporate proponents of the
> EME proposal). He blasts the idea that DRM's purpose is to enforce
> copyrights and [explains the distinction thoroughly][5]:
> 
> > Arguing that DRM doesn't work is, it turns out, missing the point. DRM
> is working really well in the video and book space. Sure, the DRM
> systems have all been broken, but that doesn't matter to the DRM
> proponents. Licensed DVD players still enforce the restrictions. Mass
> market providers can't create unlicensed DVD players, so they remain a
> black or gray market curiosity. DRM failed in the music space not
> because DRM is doomed, but because the content providers sold their
> digital content without DRM, and thus enabled all kinds of players they
> didn't expect (such as "MP3″ players). Had CDs been encrypted, iPods
> would not have been able to read their content, because the content
> providers would have been able to use their DRM contracts as leverage to
> prevent it. DRM's purpose is to give content providers control over
> software and hardware providers, and it is satisfying that purpose well.
> 
> **2. DRM in HTML5 doesn't obviate proprietary browser plug-ins, it
> encourages them.**
> 
> The web would certainly be better off without Microsoft Silverlight and
> Adobe Flash Player, but the idea that putting DRM into HTML itself to
> make them obsolete is absurd. New implementations of anti-user
> technology are not preferable to old implementations of anti-user
> technology. While it may eliminate the corporate demands for Silverlight
> and Flash, at least in their current incarnation, the Encrypted Media
> Extensions plan takes what makes those particular technologies terrible
> for users (digital restrictions management, poor cross-platform support,
> etc) and injects it directly into the fabric of the Web.
> 
> Providing a space for a DRM scheme in HTML5 invites the kind of
> incompatibilities that HTML was created to undo. EMEs would require that
> proprietary browsers and operating systems implement more restrictive
> antifeatures to prevent bypassing the DRM, and as the corollary to this,
> EMEs would be able to detect whether the user's software did not have
> such antifeatures (as is the case with free/libre and open source
> software, specifically GNU+Linux operating systems) and refuse to
> deliver the media.
> 
> As [the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) writes][6]:
> 
> > The EME proposal suffers from many of these problems because it
> explicitly abdicates responsibility on compatibility issues and lets Web
> sites require specific proprietary third-party software or even special
> hardware and particular operating systems (all referred to under the
> generic name "content decryption modules", or CDMs, and none of them
> specified by EME). EME's authors keep saying that what CDMs are, and do,
> and where they come from is totally outside of the scope of EME, and
> that EME itself can't be thought of as DRM because not all CDMs are DRM
> systems. Yet if the client can't prove it's running the particular
> proprietary thing the site demands, and hence doesn't have an approved
> CDM, it can't render the site's content. Perversely, this is exactly the
> reverse of the reason that the World Wide Web Consortium exists in the
> first place. W3C is there to create comprehensible, publicly-
> implementable standards that will guarantee interoperability, not to
> facilitate an explosion of new mutually-incompatible software and of
> sites and services that can only be accessed by particular devices or
> applications. But EME is a proposal to bring exactly that dysfunctional
> dynamic into HTML5, even risking a return to the "bad old days, before
> the Web" of deliberately limited interoperability.
> 
> >
> 
> > …
> 
> >
> 
> > All too often, technology companies have raced against each other to
> build restrictive tangleware that suits Hollywood's whims, selling out
> their users in the process. But open Web standards are an antidote to
> that dynamic, and it would be a terrible mistake for the Web community
> to leave the door open for Hollywood's gangrenous anti-technology
> culture to infect W3C standards. It would undermine the very purposes
> for which HTML5 exists: to build an open-ecosystem alternatives to all
> the functionality that is missing in previous Web standards, without the
> problems of device limitations, platform incompatibility, and non-
> transparency that were created by platforms like Flash. HTML5 was
> supposed to be better than Flash, and excluding DRM is exactly what
> would make it better.
> 
> **3. The Web doesn't need big media; big media needs the Web.**
> 
> The idea that Hollywood, the MPAA, RIAA, or any other media giant has
> buying-power over the Web is a farce. The Web is here, it is the nexus
> of media convergence, and it's eating up other industries. Big media
> companies know that they must adapt or go out of business, but they are
> audaciously attempting to convince us that the Web should provide them
> with another, more expansive system of control over online media
> distribution on top of the already far-reaching legal restrictions they
> [abuse][7]. These threats are not new.  During the [Broadcast Flag
> ][8]negotiations to implement DRM for high-definition digital
> television,
> 
> > MPAA's Fritz Attaway said that "high-value content will migrate away"
> from television if the Broadcast Flag wasn't imposed; he told Congress
> that fears of infringement without a Broadcast Flag mandate "will lead
> content creators to cease making their high-value programming available
> for distribution over digital broadcast television [and] the DTV
> transition would be seriously threatened."
> 
> Glynn Moody elaborates on these hollow threats [attacking free software
> and the free and open web][9]:
> 
> > Let's look at the record on threats to boycott non-DRM broadcasting
> from these companies. In 2003, the US Broadcast Protection Discussion
> Group (a committee in the Hollywood-based Copy Protection Technical
> Working Group) went to work on a plan for adding DRM called the
> Broadcast Flag to America's high-def broadcasts. I attended every one of
> these meetings, working on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
> and the free/open TV projects it represented, including MythTV (an open
> video-recorder) and GNU Radio (an open radio/TV receiver).
> 
> >
> 
> > Over and over again, the rightsholders in the room during the
> Broadcast Flag negotiations attempted to create a sense of urgency by
> threatening to boycott American high-def telly if they didn't get DRM.
> They repeated these threats in their submissions to the Federal
> Communications Commission (Ofcom's US counterpart) and in their meetings
> with American lawmakers.
> 
> >
> 
> > And here's how it turned out:
> 
> >
> 
> > So what happened? Did they make good on their threats? Did they go to
> their shareholders and explain that the reason they weren't broadcasting
> anything this year is because the government wouldn't let them control
> TVs?
> 
> >
> 
> > No. They broadcast. They continue to broadcast today, with no DRM.
> 
> The EFF makes this abundantly clear in [their statement][6]:
> 
> > The perception is that Hollywood will never allow movies onto the Web
> if it can't encumber them with DRM restrictions. But the threat that
> Hollywood could take its toys and go home is illusory. Every film that
> Hollywood releases is already available for those who really want to
> pirate a copy. Huge volumes of music are sold by iTunes, Amazon,
> Magnatune and dozens of other sites without the need for DRM. Streaming
> services like Netflix and Spotify have succeeded because they are more
> convenient than piratical alternatives, not because DRM does anything to
> enhance their economics. The only logically coherent reason for
> Hollywood to demand DRM is that the movie studios want veto controls
> over how mainstream technologies are designed. Movie studios have used
> DRM to enforce arbitrary restrictions on products, including preventing
> fast-forwarding and imposing regional playback controls, and created
> complicated and expensive "compliance" regimes for compliant technology
> companies that give small consortia of media and big tech companies a
> veto right on innovation.
> 
> **Protect internet freedom: tell the W3C that DRM has no place in their
> standards.**
> 
> Help [Defective by Design][10], the [Free Software Foundation][11]'s
> campaign against DRM gather 50,000 signatures against DRM in HTML5.
> 
> Sign the petition here:
> 
> [http://www.defectivebydesign.org/no-drm-in-html5][2]
> 
> You can also contact the W3C here:
> 
> [http://www.w3.org/Consortium/contact][12]
> 
>    [1]: http://www.defectivebydesign.org/what_is_drm
> 
>    [2]: http://www.defectivebydesign.org/no-drm-in-html5
> 
>    [3]: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission.html
> 
>    [4]: http://freeculture.org/files/2013/04/hollyweb.jpeg
> 
>    [5]: https://plus.google.com/107429617152575897589/posts/iPmatxBYuj2
> 
>    [6]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/03/defend-open-web-keep-drm-
> out-w3c-standards
> 
>    [7]: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/fifteen-years-dmca-abuse
> 
>    [8]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/06/dtv-era-no-broadcast
> 
>    [9]: http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2013/02/bbc-
> attacks-the-open-web-gnulinux-in-danger/index.htm
> 
>    [10]: http://www.defectivebydesign.org/
> 
>    [11]: https://www.fsf.org/
> 
>    [12]: http://www.w3.org/Consortium/contact
> 
> URL: 
> http://freeculture.org/blog/2013/04/23/dont-let-the-myths-fool-you-the-w3cs-plan-for-drm-in-html5-is-a-betrayal-to-all-web-users/
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