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from the digital-restrictions-managed? dept.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the nonprofit body that maintains the Web's core standards, made a terrible mistake in 2013: they decided to add DRM—the digital locks that train your computer to say "I can't let you do that, Dave"; rather than "Yes, boss"—to the Web's standards.
So the EFF came back with a new proposal: the W3C could have its cake and eat it too. It could adopt a rule that requires members who help make DRM standards to promise not to sue people who report bugs in tools that conform to those standards, nor could they sue people just for making a standards-based tool that connected to theirs. They could make DRM, but only if they made sure that they took steps to stop that DRM from being used to attack the open Web.
The EFF asked the W3C to make this into their policy. The only W3C group presently engaged in DRM standardization is due to have its charter renewed in early 2016. The W3C called a poll over that charter during the Christmas month, ending on December 30th.
Despite the tight timeline and the number of members who were unavailable over the holidays, a global, diverse coalition of commercial firms, nonprofits and educational institutions came together to endorse this proposal. More than three quarters of those who weighed in on the proposal supported it.
This isn't the first collision between proprietary rights and the W3C. In 1999, the W3C had to decide what to do about software patents. These patents were and are hugely controversial, and the W3C was looking for a way to be neutral on the question of whether patents were good or bad, while still protecting the Web's openness to anyone who wanted to develop for it.
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They came up with a brilliant strategy: a patent nonaggression policy—a policy the EFF modeled the DRM proposal on. Under this policy, participation in a W3C group meant that you had to promise your company wouldn't use its patents to sue over anything that group produced. This policy let the W3C take a position on the open Web (the Web is more open when your risk of getting sued for making it better is reduced) without taking a policy on whether patents are good.
The DRM covenant does the same thing. Without taking a position on DRM, it takes the inarguable position that the Web gets more open when the number of people who can sue you for reporting bugs in it or connecting new things to it goes down.
The World Wide Web Consortium is at a crossroads. Much of the "Web" is disappearing into apps and into the big companies' walled gardens. If it is to be relevant in the decades to come, it must do everything it can to keep the Web open as an alternative to those walled gardens. If the W3C executive won't take the lead on keeping the Web open, they must, at a minimum, not impede those who haven't given up the fight.
(Score: 2) by NoMaster on Thursday January 14 2016, @02:16AM
I suggest you consult a dictionary. As a noun, "right" or "rights" means "a moral or legal entitlement to have or to do something"; in the copyright sense it is "the authority to perform, publish, or distribute a work or production'. Depending on the PoV of the observer, that may also be considered a privilege.
Bullshit.
Live free or fuck off and take your naïve Libertarian fantasies with you...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 14 2016, @08:54AM
Copyright in the US is, at best, a privilege. Rights don't end after a certain period of time. I know copyright has gotten out of hand [gnu.org] and seemingly lasts forever, but this is not constitutional anyway.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday January 14 2016, @05:50PM
The idea of "rights" was created by philosophers of "The Enlightenment", esp. John Locke. It is not readily defineable without presuming the religious context in which he created it. Different people extract different characteristics of the "thing" described by Enlightenment philosophers as "rights", and say "That's what it means!", and they are naturally in disagreement because they're looking at different things and presuming that because they use the same word they are looking at the same thing. But the Enlightenment concept of rights was often described as "god given rights", and only actually makes sense if you presume that there is a god who gave them. The attempt at a work-around by saying "inherent rights" doesn't actually work, as the original idea required an enforcer.
So even though the term "rights" is enshrined in law, it's not something that has actual existence. People have desires, capabilities and opportunities, and if one person (or government) violates the "rights" there's nothing that will stop them. As a result the fancy language is used to promote public acceptance of immoral actions. And it works pretty well for that purpose. (Locke, etc. used it to promote actions that the government and populace of that time thought of as immoral, and it worked for them, too. Whether they were noble flim-flam artists, or deluded heretics is, I believe, undecideable.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.