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posted by martyb on Sunday October 09 2016, @08:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the bring-out-your-dead dept.

This week, the chief arbiter of Web standards, Tim Berners-Lee, decided not to exercise his power to extend the development timeline for the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) Web technology standard. The EME standardization effort, sponsored by streaming giants like Google and Netflix, aims to make it cheaper and more efficient to impose Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) systems on Web users. The streaming companies' representatives within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) were unable to finish EME within the time allotted by the W3C, and had asked Berners-Lee for an extension through next year.

Berners-Lee made his surprising decision on Tuesday, as explained in an email announcement by W3C representative Philippe Le Hégaret. Instead of granting a time extension — as he has already done once — Berners-Lee delegated the decision to the W3C's general decision-making body, the Advisory Committee. The Advisory Committee includes diverse entities from universities to companies to nonprofits, and it is divided as to whether EME should be part of Web standards. It is entirely possible that the Advisory Committee will reject the time extension and terminate EME development, marking an important victory for the free Web.

So it's not dead yet, despite Berners-Lee's decision. Let's not celebrate prematurely and keep up the fight to keep DRM out of the web!


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2016, @09:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2016, @09:14AM (#412004)

    Making the world less shitty by having every browser download pure binary plugins that don't work on half the platforms (let's make sure to cement that Intel monopoly in all eternity!), are full of security holes and allow to identify each browser uniquely?
    Maybe you are just ignorant of the real effect of this?
    Also a world without DRM does exist for a lot of people.
    It is called YouTube and torrents.
    Even with DRM, the alternative to standardized (and thus encouraged) DRM is not just proprietary plugins (which won't be an option once plugin support is removed) but special-purpose devices like FireTV for those that believe they cannot do without DRM.
    I.e. make everyone choose: Provide your videos on the web without DRM or provide them with DRM and not on the web.
    If EME becomes standard, an absolute minimum requirement should be that the plugins work on Linux, OSX, Windows, FreeBSD, on x86, x86-64, ARMv7, ARMv8, MIPS, SPARC, PowerPC (LE and BE). Though I am fairly certain that would have the same effect as killing it, as the people behind it aren't willing to support even 2 architectures, and barely willing to support 3 OS. And then want to call it "open".

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